The struggle for the liberation of cannabis continues – The Mail & Guardian

The South African Human Rights Commission’s discussions with the Rastafari and cannabis communities raised its concerns about stories of systematic and personal violations. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy

As Africa Month ends, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) wishes to draw attention to a key struggle for African self-determination, remembering and “re-membering”. That struggle is the struggle for the full liberation of cannabis. 

Cannabis is a plant which has been used by indigenous South African people in medicinal and spiritual practices for centuries. The struggle for the right to grow, trade and use cannabis can thus be seen as a decolonial one — to reclaim and re-legitimise indigenous knowledge systems, African religion, spirituality and self-determination. The struggle has continued throughout South Africa’s democratic dispensation.

On 7 March 2025, the minister of health gazetted a new regulation banning cannabis and hemp foodstuffs under the Foodstuffs, Cosmetics and Disinfectants Act 54 of 1972.  After widespread contestation and backlash over the constitutionality of the regulations, the minister withdrew them three weeks later. 

These regulations came unexpectedly, while the Rastafari and cannabis communities were waiting for the draft regulations, which would bring into effect the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act 7 of 2024, from the justice department. 

The regulation by the minister came exactly a 100 years after cannabis was classified as a controlled drug in 1925 at the Geneva Opium Convention. The classification resulted from a proposal by colonial regimes, including South Africa. Prime minister Jan Smuts was a leading sponsor at the League of Nations, placing cannabis in the same category as cocaine. Cannabis communities thus considered the withdrawn regulations as continued disenfranchisement and suppression of cannabis communities.

Less than two weeks prior to the gazetting of the regulation, on 26 February 2025, the SAHRC convened a meeting with other chapter 9 institutions, government departments, civil society and members of the Rastafari community from all nine provinces — the Rights of the Rastafari Roundtable. The Rastafari National Council was also represented.

This provided a space for the Rastafari and other cannabis communities to engage in dialogue, to be heard, to affirm their dignity and to find solutions to the structural challenges they experience. 

The roundtable was precipitated by the SAHRC’s discussions with the Rastafari community throughout 2024 where it was troubled by the stories of the systematic and personal violations experienced by this community. Through these sessions emerged accounts of discrimination, criminalisation and persecution — not only because of their cultivation and use of cannabis but because of the general lack of recognition for Rastafari as a community deserving of respect, protection and equal standing in society. 

The experience of advocate Gareth Prince is one of the better-known examples of the Rastafari struggle. In 1998, the Cape Law Society refused Prince’s application to be admitted as an attorney because of his criminal record for possessing cannabis, thereby stripping him of his right to work and earn a livelihood from his profession. Prince is still unemployed and believes members of the Rastafari community are treated as “third-class citizens” in South Africa. Prince’s experience is a reality for almost all Rastafari. 

At community discussions and the roundtable, Rastafari parents informed the SAHRC of the humiliation at being searched by police officers in front of their children. They believe that their visible Rastafari appearance renders them easy targets for police officials, which amounts to racial and cultural profiling. 

They endure marital discord when they disagree with their partners on the decision to cut their children’s dreadlocks, so that they can be accepted in certain schools, and due to the overt and subtle discrimination against and bullying of Rastafari children. 

They shared stories of living under precarious employment conditions as they endure regular drug testing by employers because of their visible Rastafari identity and appearance. They suffer unlawful searches of their homes, expulsion from schools, medical neglect at health facilities and social stigmatisation.

One Rastafari delegate at the roundtable asked the government stakeholders represented: “… To what extent have your institutions decolonised and transformed? Because, from where I’m sitting, and from your presentations, you are part and parcel of the colonial legacy … because the laws that you are implementing are not the laws that represent us.”

They wondered why other religious communities’ marriage ceremonies were recognised by the state, but theirs were not. They wondered why their religion, with its African origins, was frowned upon by fellow Africans in an African state. They conveyed their sense of voicelessness in South Africa’s democratic culture because they choose not to engage in protest action. They felt “unseen” and “unhuman” and carried a heavy sense of non-belonging — pariahs, even under the new dispensation.

The unfair discrimination against the Rastafari community and their social position as a marginalised group has largely been left out of the popular discourse about equality and transformation in South Africa’s body politic. And yet, the Rastafari community continues to experience some of the worst violations of constitutional rights, including their rights to equality, religion, culture, dignity, health and education. 

The gazetting of the foodstuffs regulations is an example of the exclusion of the Rastafari from the democratic processes of decision-making in matters that affect them, and is a continuation of paternalistic colonial and apartheid attitudes to this community, and the cannabis plant. 

Despite a 2018 constitutional court judgment which decriminalised private cannabis use by adults, as well as and the signing into law of the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act 7 of 2024, the Rastafari continue to be arrested for cannabis-related crimes. Police officials conduct these arrests in violation of an August 2023 South African Police Service directive pausing cannabis-related arrests, issued by the national commissioner of police. 

The Cannabis Act only allows for arrests for dealing in cannabis, where there are reasonable grounds to suspect dealing. Yet, the complaints received by the SAHRC from the Rastafari community suggest that most arrests are still for private possession and use. Because of a lack of regulations from the justice department, which would specify quantities, the definition of “dealing” has been left to the discretion of individual police officials. 

Because of the continuing structural and systemic human rights violations which have left the Rastafari community unrecognised, vulnerable, marginalised and criminalised, the office of commissioner Tshepo Madlingozi, at the SAHRC’s head office, has designated the Rastafari as one of its two priority communities. The office aims to continue being a partner to the Rastafari and other cannabis communities, to help them regain their human rights. 

To bring the Rastafari, and other cannabis communities, into the fold of South African society, the state should be more proactive in recognising them as a legitimate community that requires similar protections and measures of redress to other previously disadvantaged and marginalised communities. 

This includes ceasing all cannabis-related arrests, prohibiting discrimination against children with dreadlocks in private and public schools and expunging all criminal records for persons who have been convicted of cannabis-related crimes. It is imperative that the justice department urgently develops clear and precise regulations on the use and possession of cannabis, including quantities, to guide both cannabis users and the criminal justice cluster.

While having been at the forefront of the fight for the decriminalisation of cannabis, members of the Rastafari community feel excluded from the recent rapid commercialisation of the plant. They report that the licensing process is too bureaucratic and expensive, creating artificial barriers to their participation in the formal cannabis economy. In the meantime, “cannabis shops” are mushrooming in many urban centres, despite their existence in a legal grey area. 

These and other concerns will be taken forward by the SAHRC in partnership with the Rastafari community and other stakeholders. One such initiative was held on 13 March where SAHRC commissioners Sandra Selokela Makoasha and Philile Ntuli hosted a roundtable specifically for Rastafari women, to provide a safe space for expression and discussion of their specific experiences as a result of their multi-fold identity and intersecting social position as Rastafari, women, wives, mothers, caregivers, workers and cannabis producers and traders. 

But all interventions such as these, by state and non-state actors, will be rendered ineffective as long as the broader South African society continues to stigmatise and discriminate against the Rastafari. From Jan Smuts to Gareth Prince, the struggle against state overreach and for the valorisation of indigenous cultures and practices continues. 

Tshepo Madlingozi is a commissioner responsible for anti-racism, education and equality at the South African Human Rights Commission and Naleli Morojele is a research adviser at the commission.