MFANA, the dagga-growing official who works for the Justice Department, highlights the fact that the police are waging an expensive – but losing – battle against the country’s most tenacious industry.
Since 1928, the cultivation and use of cannabis has been a criminal offence in South Africa. The legislation was toughened in 1971 when the then minister of the interior, Connie Mulder, increased the fines and prison sentences for farmers and dealers.
Although these were relaxed in the later years of apartheid, police continue to see themselves at war with the producing communities.
Every year, military-style operations are conducted by police teams who go into remote areas to destroy the crop. The police commissioner reported in 1988 that, in that year alone, 15 290 people had been arrested for dagga-related offences, 5 892 for possession and 9 398 for dealing.
In the early 1990s, the then police minister Adrian Vlok ran into stiff resistance from the environmental movement when he authorised hi-tech operations to spray crops in remote areas with a herbicide called paraquat from helicopters and crop-spraying planes.
This chemical has since been banned because it causes severe damage to human health and surrounding vegetation. But a new, less damaging herbicide, is now being used in an attempt to save police teams from destroying the crops manually.
One of the reasons for this is that producer communities have been showing increasing signs of militancy.
In a dagga-related trial, a narcotics policeman, Sergeant George Pretorius, testified that growers were becoming more aggressive, overturning police vehicles, pushing them over cliffs and arming themselves with automatic weapons so that they could attack night-time patrols.
In February 1990, a member of the narcotics squad was murdered during a raid on the Bhambayi settlement outside Durban and the rest of the squad was driven off by the residents. There are also reports that the recent murder of policemen in the Inkandla district in the foothills of the Drakensberg was prompted by fears of a police raid.
However, these appear to be the exception, and growers mostly rely on their hard work, wits and the gods to evade the police.
Their primary strategy to avoid arrest is to locate the fields away from individual homesteads.
After they harvest they are forced by fear of arrest to leave sacks and plastic containers filled with dagga in the fields. Thus, unless the police actually catch people while they are working in the field, they are powerless to convict any individual for any anonymous booty they discover.
“Neighbours can come and steal the fruit of endless hard work. The farmers cannot guard their fields, which are far away, all night,” says Mama Xhulu.
“So they sprinkle them with a special medicine that is prepared by the traditional healers to guard against theft. The farmers are very secretive about where they get this medicine from.
“If we see they are doing well one year and ask about this, they simply say `Well I was lucky this time’.”
Although tough police action generates immense hardship and hostility, most growers were vehemently opposed to legalising the industry.
“If that happens then everyone will grow it. People in Inanda and KwaMashu will grown their own stuff,” says Mama Xhulu. “And then who will come here to buy where the people depend on the stuff?”
Zacharia also notes that legalisation would bring down the price of dagga and throw producers into extreme hardship. According to Mfana, the lawman, “the only form of legalisation that would bring us relief will be to allow us to make traditional medicines from the herb”.
These findings were confirmed by the Indicator study which quoted one grower, recently released from a four-year jail term, as saying: “Would I like to see dagga no longer a crime? Hau? You are mad! The only thing that keeps the price of dagga up is the police.
“The police are my friends. They work hard for me. I’d go broke if dagga was legal and every bloody fool would start growing his own.”