There is a list. Most people have never heard of it.

UNESCO keeps it. It is for the heritage you cannot put a fence around. Not buildings. Songs. Ceremonies. The way a thing is cooked. The way a plant is prepared and by whom and when. The stuff that lives in people and dies when the people are told to stop.

South Africa signed up on 24 January 2025. It started applying to us on 24 April 2025.

Since then we have put nothing on it. Not one thing. Not a song, not a dance, not a plant.

Eighteen months. Nothing.

Barcelona

Last September, UNESCO held its big culture conference in Barcelona. Twenty-sixth of September to the first of October. Two and a half thousand people. A hundred and sixty countries. More than a hundred ministers of culture in one room.

Two papers went in about dagga.

One is called “Cannabis: A Plant Without Borders. Cultural Diagnosis, One Hundred Years After Its Prohibition”. It is about article 49 of the 1961 drug treaty, and I went and read the clause myself because it is the sort of thing people get wrong.

Here is what it does. A country that already allowed people to use the plant could keep allowing it, for a while, if it said so when it signed. Then the clock started. The use had to be discontinued, in the treaty’s own words, “as soon as possible but in any case within twenty-five years from the Convention coming into force”. The growing and the selling had to be “reduced and finally abolished” alongside it.

Not managed. Not licensed. Abolished, by a date.

The treaty came into force in December 1964. So the date was 1989. Opium smoking got fifteen years. Coca chewing and dagga got twenty-five.

Somebody sat in a room and put an expiry date on other people’s customs.

The paper makes two more points and both are good ones. The same treaty let the industrial uses of the same plant carry on. And the cultures survived anyway, in back yards and in clubs, and what survived is heritage.

A South African stood up and spoke. Ami Heysek, from Fields of Green for ALL. She talked about cannabis between Afrikaners and Zulus in a country with more plants in it than almost anywhere.

The final declaration does not mention cannabis. Not once. I am telling you that because somebody else will, and they will say we hid it.

So: two papers, one South African voice, no mention in the document.

Still more than our government has done.

The Other Letter

There is a woman at the United Nations called Alexandra Xanthaki. Her job is cultural rights. This year she asked everybody how you actually measure whether a country is delivering them. Submissions closed on 22 May. Her report goes to the General Assembly next month.

Fields of Green for ALL sent one in. They are allowed to. They hold consultative status at the UN’s Economic and Social Council, which is the pass that gets your paper read instead of binned.

Myrtle Clarke wrote afterwards that they could only answer the first questions. The ones about foundations. Because, she said, data around cannabis use, cultivation and trade is scarce in South Africa.

Read that again.

The UN asked us to describe ourselves and we could not. We do not know how many people smoke. We do not know how many grow. We do not know how many clubs there are. We do not know what any of it is worth. One hundred years of prohibition and the thing it took from us is the ability to say what we are.

That is what it was for.

Who Is Allowed To Ask

Here is the part that closes the door.

A nomination to that UNESCO list is made by a government. Not by an activist. Not by a non-profit. Not by a foreign researcher with a good paper and not by a trade body and not by us.

By the State.

So all of it, Barcelona, Geneva, the papers, the woman standing up to speak, all of it ends at a desk in Pretoria. The Department of Sport, Arts and Culture.

UNESCO keeps a page for every country. Ours says we ratified on 24 January 2025. Under elements inscribed, nothing. Under nominations being processed, nothing. Our first report back to them is due in December 2029.

This year’s round has sixty-four files in it from all over the world. Eswatini is in it. Lesotho is in it. Malawi is in it. Zambia is in it. Angola, Tanzania, South Sudan, Mali, Niger, Cameroon.

Not us.

And it is not that the department does not know how to find these people. It ran a call this year for Living Human Treasures, asking for nominations of knowledge holders, oral historians, traditional healers, master craftsmen and custodians of indigenous knowledge. It closed on 15 May. It is a decent programme and it is exactly the right people.

It just stops at the border. Those names go on a South African list and no further. The announcement does not mention the UNESCO convention at all.

Meanwhile, when our people went to Barcelona with a paper about heritage, the South African contribution to it was the word dagga, sitting in a list of names for the plant in other languages.

That is us. One word, in a list.

Not because there is nothing here. Because nobody went and got it.

What Is Actually Here

Dagga is a Khoi word. The plant came down the trade routes centuries before anybody wrote a law about it. It sits inside religion. It sits inside traditional healing. It sits on hillsides in the Eastern Cape where families have grown it for longer than the law has existed, and it sits in landrace seed that any other country would have registered a trademark over by now.

And it has a criminal record. In 2017/18 the prosecutors got 156 158 drug convictions in this country. All drugs, not just dagga, but you know what most of it was. That is part of the heritage too. What was done to a thing is part of the story of the thing.

A hundred and fifty-six thousand dockets. Somebody’s son in a box with nobody in the gallery.

Put that on a list.

What The Law Is, And Then What We Want

The law first, so nobody can say later that we mixed them up.

An adult may use it in private. Prince, 2018, Constitutional Court. The Cannabis for Private Purposes Act was signed in May 2024 and has never started, because the President has never proclaimed it. The draft regulations went into the Gazette on 2 February 2026. This morning they were still sitting on the Justice department’s own page with no closing date beside them. Two hundred and twenty-three days. Dealing is still a crime and nothing here says otherwise.

Now what we want.

Treat it like a crop. Potatoes, maize, figs, olives, honey. Grow it, use it, sell it to your neighbour, pay tax on what you make, and the State minds its business. We are not asking for a nicer threshold. A threshold is just a reason to go through a man’s pockets.

And one small thing more, which costs nothing.

Put it on the list. A nomination does not legalise a gram. It does not start the Act. It hands nobody a licence. It is one sentence about who we are, filed by the only people allowed to file it.

Eswatini managed it. Lesotho managed it. Malawi managed it.

A government that will not say that sentence is telling you exactly what it thinks of the people who kept the thing alive.

Heritage Day

Thursday the twenty-fourth. A public holiday to celebrate, they say, the cultural wealth of our nation. The whole of September is Heritage Month.

Nine days out, their own Heritage Day page had no theme on it. Nothing. Blank.

Fine. Here is one.

Heritage is not the safe part. It is not the beadwork and the braai and the things that look good in a tourism advert. It is also the parts they were embarrassed by, made illegal, and then prosecuted for a hundred years. Those parts survived in the hands of people nobody asked.

A heritage you are only allowed to celebrate once it has been made respectable is not a heritage. It is a brochure.

Where You Come In

This is the bit we are not shy about.

Culture is not in Geneva. It is not in Barcelona and it is certainly not in Pretoria. It is on a stoep. It is in a kitchen. It is a man on a hill in the Eastern Cape who has grown the same seed his grandmother grew, and a woman in a Karoo town who knows what her people used it for and why, and a host in the Garden Route who will tell you the whole thing over coffee if you ask properly.

You do not meet that on a day trip. You meet it by going where it lives and sleeping there.

That is what CannaStaySA is. A directory. Who has a bed, in which town, on which night, and who they are. Hosts who are over it, who do not flinch, who have house rules and mean them. You book the bed. You talk to the host yourself.

If this country ever does file that nomination, it will not be an official who has to prove the case. It will be the hosts. They are the ones who still have the thing the government has not got round to claiming.

Long weekend coming. Twenty-fourth is a Thursday. Take the Friday.

CannaStaySA is an information and advertising directory. Over eighteen only. We do not sell cannabis, supply it, broker it, or help anyone else do any of that, and there is nothing on this page telling you where to get any. We tell you who has a bed and what the law says before you arrive.

Come and see the heritage while the people who carry it are still here to show you.

Make it before they take it, Selah.