The weekend

Earthdance is on the eighteenth. It runs to the twentieth.

Three of them. Same weekend. Johannesburg, a farm in the Western Cape, and a place out on the Garden Route. Not one event with satellites. Three events, each with its own gate, its own line-up and its own mud.

Earthdance started in 1997. Twenty-two places in eighteen countries, all dancing at the same time, for peace, which sounds like a lot until you remember that people have marked the same hour together for most of recorded history and nobody found it embarrassing until quite recently. South Africa runs three of them a year now.

The Cape Town one is at Kromrivier Farm, between Greyton and Riviersonderend. Camping comes with the ticket. There is glamping if your back has opinions, and there is a shuttle from Cape Town at R500 one way or R750 there and back, which tells you something useful, which is that a lot of people are coming who do not want to drive.

At one in the morning on the Sunday they all stop and link up. Every Earthdance in the world at the same moment. The Prayer for Peace. You can be cynical about it. Go and stand in a field at one in the morning with two thousand other people and try.

The Garden Route one is at Karoo 62. The event page there has an accommodation search bolted onto it, which is the organisers telling you plainly that the venue is not going to sleep everybody and they know it.

The Johannesburg one is Johannesburg. The venue is with the organisers.

The gazebo

Here is the part that made us sit up.

Fields of Green for ALL is the nominated charity partner of the Johannesburg event this year. They represent the element of earth. They will have a gazebo, and on their own website they say what will be discussed under it: cannabis, policy, responsible trade and consumption, and the current legal landscape.

Fields of Green for ALL is the outfit Myrtle Clarke and the late Julian Stobbs registered in 2013 to carry the evidence in the Trial of the Plant. They are the oldest reform organisation in this country. They have spent thirteen years in courtrooms and committee rooms being polite to people who were not polite back.

And now somebody has put a tent up for them at a dance festival and said, here, talk.

That is not nothing. Most of what passes for cannabis policy in South Africa happens in rooms with a register at the door and a man taking apologies. This is a gazebo in a field where anybody can walk up. If you have ever wanted to ask someone who actually knows what the law says, and what it does not, and why the whole thing has been sitting still since 2018, that is where they will be, and it costs you nothing extra once you are through the gate.

What is actually legal, said flat

An adult. In private. For himself. That is lawful and has been since the Constitutional Court said so in Prince in 2018.

The Cannabis for Private Purposes Act was signed in May 2024 and has never started. It needs the President to put a proclamation in the Gazette and he has not. The draft regulations went in on 2 February 2026 and sat there. As at this morning they are still on the Justice department’s own invitations page, released 3 February 2026, with no closing date next to them. Seven months and ten days.

Four other consultations from the same department opened in August. All of them have closing dates. Three of them have already closed.

Dealing is still a crime. Nothing on this page tells you otherwise, and nothing on this page tells you that anything is for sale at a festival, because none of that is what this is.

What we want, and the line is here

Now the other half, and we mark it so nobody gets confused about which is which.

Grow as much as you like.

Not five plants. Not fifty. As much as you like, on your own ground, and it is nobody’s business but yours. Weighing what a man has in his shed instead of watching what he does with it is the error, and it is the error sitting in those draft regulations right now, written out in grams as though grams were a moral category.

Treat it like a crop. Potatoes, maize, figs, olives, honey, pumpkins. A woman sells fig konfyt at a farm stall and nobody registers the tree. A man sells honey off the back of a bakkie on a Saturday and nobody counts his hives. Let the grower grow it, let him sell it, tax what he earns, and stop there.

Liquor is licensed at the till. Nobody counts the vines in your yard. Nobody weighs the grapes in your bucket.

We are not asking for a kinder Act. We want it forgotten.

The practical part

Three events. Three parts of the country. Friday to Sunday.

Camping is included at the Overberg one, which is good, and it also means several thousand people are going to be in a field near Greyton and Riviersonderend for three nights, and some fraction of them will decide on the Thursday that three nights in a tent was a young man’s idea. Some of them are coming in a shuttle from Cape Town with no car at the other end. Some of them are driving down from Gauteng and will want a bed on the way.

The Garden Route one has an accommodation search on its own page. That is a room shortage with a widget on it.

So book the bed before you argue about the tent. Small towns near a festival empty out fast and they empty out five days before, not on the day. If you are reading this on the Sunday you have four working days.

And if you have a room, a cottage, a cabin, a flat over the garage, or a flat patch of grass and a tap, your weekend changed while you were not looking. Two of these three are in small-town catchments where there is no hotel to soak up the overflow. A festival fills a town for whoever is easy to find on a phone at eleven at night.

CannaStaySA is an information and advertising directory. Over eighteen only. We do not sell cannabis, supply it, broker it, or help anybody else do any of that. There is nothing on this page that tells you where to get any, and nothing on this page that says you will find any at a festival. What we do is tell you who has a bed, in which town, on which night. You talk to them yourself.

Three fields. One weekend. Somebody has to sleep somewhere.

Go.

Make it before they take it, Selah.