NATIONAL NEWS - On a frigid September morning in Mkumbi, a remote village in the Pondoland region of the Eastern Cape, 63-year-old Sizane Nompethu rose at dawn and walked at a brisk pace down a rocky path to work her family’s small plot of land, just as she had every day since she was 15.
“I am old and you can see this is very hard work,” Nompethu told GroundUp as she cut through swathes of tall green marijuana shrubs with a small, curved knife, quickly amassing dense bunches that she cradled in her free arm. “But this is all we have. It’s how we raise our children.”
No one knows with confidence how many small-scale cannabis farmers there are in South Africa, but the number is large: one organisation estimates 900,000. Millions of people probably depend on income from cannabis. Here in Pondoland, these growers have been cultivating the plant for over 200 years, with most of their harvest in more contemporary times bound for Cape Town townships and taxi ranks, as well as other South African cities.
Pondoland is among South Africa’s least economically developed regions, and in Nompethu’s village, as in many of the rural settlements that punctuate this landscape of rugged, verdant mountains and plunging valleys, dagga is the only cash crop in a subsistence economy.
There have been a number of failed efforts to eradicate the plant from the area. Nompethu recalled a period in the 1970s when SAPS officers would ride into the village on horseback (even today, the village is an arduous hour-long trek and a river crossing away from the nearest dirt road) to conduct arrests or confiscate and burn crops.
Around 1990, police drug squads switched tactics to an annual programme of spraying a herbicide called glyphosate from helicopters onto the crops.
As GroundUp previously reported, despite mounting evidence of the severe health risks and environmental damage caused by glyphosate, the spraying continued until as recently as 2016.
But while the Pondoland farmers doggedly resisted these previous attempts to erase their traditional livelihood (with the help of a small group of cannabis activists), many now fear a new threat: legalisation.
In a landmark decision in September 2018, South Africa’s Constitutional Court ruled that “the use, possession and cultivation” of cannabis in “private dwellings” was not illegal. The court gave Parliament 24 months from the date of the judgment to bring the ruling in line with South African laws, with a new bill expected to be released soon.
“I’m worried that now everyone will be able to plant their own dagga in their own homes, so we won’t be able to make money from selling what we are growing here,” said Thuliswa Gumbe, a 43-year-old neighbour of Nompethu’s, as she sat on the floor against the wall of her rondavel picking buds from a large pile of cannabis.
“Even at the end of last year, the buyers were very scarce, so prices were down,” she added.
Like most of the villagers, Gumbe’s family have been cultivating cannabis here for generations.
Many of the local women, including Gumbe, are widows; their husbands often left the village to work in the mines and never returned. With the younger generation increasingly seeking education and employment in nearby towns and cities, the bulk of the growing is therefore left to these women, who are often their family’s primary breadwinners.
Gumbe said that she still suffered from chest problems that she had developed during the years of sustained glyphosate spraying, a common complaint in Mkumbi. With the isolated villagers receiving scant information about the current legal status of cannabis, Gumbe said she still feared that the helicopters might return.
At a recent community meeting in another nearby village called Mantlaneni, scores of growers echoed such fears. They also reaffirmed Gumbe’s assertion that prices had fallen since the 2018 court ruling.
