South Africa’s Cannabis Law Leaves Khoi and San Growers Out

The draft sets personal limits, not a grower framework

The Cannabis for Private Purposes Act was signed by South Africa’s president on 28 May 2024, but signing the law did not immediately provide a complete set of operating rules. The source report says the Act still required supporting regulations, leaving ordinary adults without a fully clear account of what the new private-use framework allowed.

The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development published draft regulations on 2 February 2026. Public comment closed on 5 March. For the first time, the draft supplied specific figures for private possession and home cultivation: up to 750 grams of cannabis and five plants per adult, provided they are cultivated and kept in a private place.

Those limits are important, but they describe only one part of the policy picture. The source report says the draft was built around private adult use and home cultivation, while the more difficult questions about commercial growing, trade and traditional cultivation were left outside the Act’s scope.

A six-year path from the court ruling to draft regulations

The law’s unsettled edges are linked to the way it came into being. According to the source report, the Constitutional Court’s 2018 ruling required Parliament to address the criminalisation of private adult cannabis use and home cultivation. Parliament missed the original deadline, received extensions and ultimately produced the Act six years after the ruling. The sequence reported by Seedtiva is:

That history helps explain why the private-use side has moved further than the commercial and cultural questions. The Act was developed under judicial pressure to address a specific constitutional problem, rather than as a single comprehensive framework for every aspect of cannabis cultivation, commerce and traditional knowledge.

Commercial cultivation and traditional recognition remain outside the Act

The Department of Justice’s position, as reported by Seedtiva, is that commercial cultivation, buying, selling and recognition of traditional growers are outside the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act. Those matters are directed instead towards the Departments of Trade, Agriculture and Health, each with its own priorities, legislative vehicle and timeline. The division can be summarised as follows:

This creates a clear imbalance in the framework described by the source. An individual adult with a private garden is given proposed numerical limits, while a community seeking recognition for longstanding cultivation, healing or plant knowledge is not given a corresponding legal category. The commercial side is also left waiting for a separate process rather than resolved by the private-use regulations.

Khoi and San history predates modern cannabis law

The source report places the recognition question in a much longer history. Cannabis cultivation and trade routes through southern Africa stretch back centuries, with the plant arriving through East African and Indian Ocean trade well before European colonisation reshaped land use and law across the Cape. Cannabis is known locally as dagga.

A history predating modern statutes

Khoi and San communities are identified in the report as among the earliest documented users of the plant on the subcontinent. The source says cannabis was incorporated into daily and ceremonial life before modern legislation existed. That history does not, under the draft as described, translate into recognition as cultivators, healers or knowledge-holders.

A private-use framework is expanding while recognition for traditional cultivators remains deferred.

The gap described in Seedtiva’s report

The issue is therefore not simply whether an adult may keep plants in a private place. It is also whether the people with the deepest historical relationship to the plant are included in the policy architecture that follows. The supplied source does not report a recognised category for that role in the draft regulations.

The recognition question has no date attached

The public-comment period has ended, but the source material supplied for this article does not say that the draft regulations have been finalised. It also gives no date for the separate work on commercial cultivation, buying and selling, or recognition of traditional growers. That absence matters because the private-use rules and the broader policy questions are moving on separate clocks.

What remains unclear

On the facts available, the unresolved questions include:

• When, or through which final process, commercial cultivation will be addressed.
• How buying and selling will be dealt with outside the private-use framework.
• Whether Khoi and San traditional growers will receive a recognised legal category.
• Whether traditional healers and plant knowledge-holders will be recognised in a later framework.
• When the separate departmental work will produce rules that communities and growers can rely on.

The source does not claim that these questions have been settled elsewhere. It says they have been handed to other departments, with no date attached. It is therefore not possible from the supplied facts to say when the gap will close or what form any later recognition might take.

What the gap means for South African readers

For readers of South Africa Social Clubs, the distinction between private use, commercial activity and traditional cultivation is important. The venues listed in this directory are private clubs, not public shops or dispensaries, and they are not open to walk-in customers. Access is a private matter decided by each club. Nothing in the supplied source says that the draft regulations create a right to enter a club, obtain access through a club or treat a private venue as a public retail outlet.

Nor does being in a particular South African city or region create access to a private club. Visitors should not read the draft’s personal limits as a tourist-access rule or as evidence of a commercial channel. The source addresses the proposed boundaries for adults in private places and explicitly leaves commercial questions outside the Act’s scope.

Questions the draft does not answer

The result is a framework with a defined private-use component and an undefined wider pathway. For Khoi and San growers, the historical record described by the source is clear, but the policy response remains incomplete. Until the outstanding departments set out their own processes, the question of recognition remains open.