This is the first of a new series for Cannabiz Africa by Lee Hymers, you can follow him on Linked-In here
Port Edward, KZN, South Africa — 2009
“SAPS are coming.” Click. Silence.
The blood drained from my face. My partner, sensing the shift in me, went on alert.
“Cops,” I told her.
Instinct took over. Into the double garage, where the outdoor harvest hung drying. Cut the strings, stuff the flower into storage bins, shove them into the roof space, into the darkest corner. Climb down. A handful of Jack Herer plants still waiting to be cut. A hundred and fifty clones waiting to be planted as a winter crop.
Less than seven minutes since the call.
Kwah! Kwah!
A 9mm, cracking at the gate.
“Shit!” We were out of time.
Hands up, I walked out to meet them.
“Police! Keep your hands where we can see them!” The officer’s weapon was pointed at my chest.
“Easy. I’m unarmed. I need to unlock the gate.”
He nodded. I opened it and found only two officers and a single marked van — smaller than I’d braced for.
“You know why we’re here?”
“I do. But I’m not what you’re looking for.”
“Don’t tell the b@stards a f#cking thing!” A voice I recognised, from the cage on the back of the van. A mate of mine, cuffed, face pressed against the wire mesh.
And then it clicked. They weren’t after us. They were after much bigger fish.
Europe Comes Knocking
A well-known Dutch seed company had been working the area for roughly three years by then, and hadn’t been especially discreet about it. Our normally quiet stretch of the south coast had been buzzing with jet skis, motorbikes, 4x4s, branded merchandise, high-grade European genetics. The KZN hibiscus coast is a small, tight-knit community, more so among growers, so when Franco (Loja) and Arjan (Roskam) first arrived in 2006, the whole valley heard about it the same day.
They’d been sent up by a mutual contact in Cape Town, hoping to bring my brothers-in-law — both excellent growers and breeders — into the project. My brothers declined. We didn’t work on it. But over the next three years we came to know Franco well anyway. We grew weed together. Talked weed. Sold weed. Exchanged genetics. Partied.
One-on-one, away from Green House, he was good company. Charming. Warm. Humorous. He had a good relationship with the people on the ground and a genuine love for the plant. That much is true.
But behind that warmth, Green House Seed Co and the Strain Hunters brand still had a commercial incentive. And across the Mtamvuna river, in EmaMpondweni — the Pondoland region, tucked into the old Transkei, one of the country’s most unspoiled and least protected corners — that incentive had already found exactly what it was looking for.
How the raid ended is a story for another day. This one’s about what happened across the river, and what’s still happening there now.
Fast Forward
The University of Cape Town’s Faculty of Law in autumn does a particular kind of light in the mornings: low and gold through the jacarandas. By 10am on the first day of the 2026 International Cannabis Symposium, I had stopped noticing the weather and started watching the people.
Who sat together. Who spoke plainly. Who dodged. Who listened.
Zainodean (Simmeers), a Khoi-San community leader and traditional leader, opened one of the sessions on behalf of the community in Blue Downs. He wasn’t polished. He thanked the wrong people in the wrong order and started again. Nobody minded. What he was describing didn’t need polish.
Thirty-five jobs, he said, out of a GMP facility his community had partnered with. Kids off the street, into work, learning the language of an industry that had spent decades treating people like them as the problem. They didn’t want special treatment. They wanted fair opportunity, and a chance to bring what they already knew.
Then he spoke about moving from cannabis into poultry, wanting to build something that could outlast one crop and one buyer. The audience warmed to him. He closed with Ubuntu. No more twelve tribes, he said. One nation. Dignity. Mutual respect. May God bless you.
He meant every word of it.
I believed him. I still do.
Tia (Ramfate, chair of the Soweto Cannabis Association) spoke later that day. Younger. Sharper. Less in need of anyone’s permission. Indigenous communities don’t need help, she said. They need investment. Partnership. An equitable transaction. She said the phrase slowly, like she wanted it written down correctly.
She talked about the communities that carried every risk of prohibition: the raids, the records, the years. She asked whether those same communities would be allowed anywhere near the benefit now that the risk had started moving into legal language.
She referenced Pondoland almost in passing. Someone had told her the week before that the biggest problem there wasn’t poverty or geography. It was education. I watched her decide, in real time, to challenge the sentence rather than let it pass.
Africa is Eden, she said. She had watched this happen before, five hundred years before, and she was watching it happen again because it kept being allowed to happen.
During a Q&A that afternoon, someone else asked about duty of care. Whether words like indigenous, traditional and community-led were commitments or marketing. Nobody on the panel had a clean answer. I wrote the question down and underlined it twice.
By the closing session, Sean (Hocking, ICS 2026 organizer) and Myrtle (Clarke, CEO Fields of Green for All) looked exhausted in the way people do after building something that worked. Sean told us to beware the echo chamber. Myrtle thanked everyone on behalf of what she called our Ubuntu-fold rainbow community. The applause lasted. Outside, the soft wintry noon light was already turning gold again.
Later, a foreign journalist would describe the symposium as collaboration, education, inclusivity and evidence-based African opportunity.
That happened. I was there.
It’s also where the harder question begins.
The screening ran early on Friday, from five until just before seven, in good company. There was an invitation-only event afterward at Alibi, one of the grey-area social clubs that exists in the gap the law hasn’t caught up to yet. I had a deadline sitting over me and gave it a miss.
Hours later, I smoked a joint and sat with the film alone, the way I often sit with thoughts about people I used to know. Late at night. Laptop open. Deadline close. Old memories moving around in the smoke.
Franco and the Film
Cannabis vs Mining: Franco Loja’s Amadiba Story, the poster said.
There was Franco, exactly as I remembered him from the Hibiscus Coast, standing somewhere near Mtentu with the ocean behind him. I recognised the light before I recognised the place. That particular Transkei green in the wet season. I’d forgotten how much I missed it.
The film’s description of itself is tidy.
Franco arrives in 2007, at a moment of real crisis. An Australian mining company is circling twenty-five kilometres of coastline for titanium, a project that would have removed people from land their families had held for generations. Into that crisis comes the seed. Quality genetics, distributed to local farmers, building what the film calls economic independence and resilience. Homes get built. Children get fed. The community finds in cannabis the strength to stand against the mine.
Twenty years later, the film returns to Amadiba to collect testimony from the people who lived it, and calls the whole thing a pioneering chapter in the development of South Africa’s cannabis industry.
The film is accurate about what it chooses to frame. It says far less about what sits just outside that frame.
Franco has been dead since January 2017. Cerebral malaria, contracted on a trip to the Congo where, as the story goes, he’d gone in part to look into whether cannabis could help treat the very disease that killed him. He was forty-two. The footage is older still, stitched together in memory of a man who cannot answer for how the story is told now.
That was the strangest part for me. He doesn’t age past the version I carry in my head. Watching him on screen, fixed in that old light, I could feel both things at once: affection for a man I liked, and discomfort with the story now being built around him.
The film covers the mining fight, and it should. Xolobeni is real. The titanium is real. The Amadiba Crisis Committee fought a dangerous and genuine fight for the right to refuse extraction on their own land. Bazooka Rhadebe paid for that fight with his life in 2016. The film is honest about the mining story, the courage it took, and what was lost.
The seed gets less attention.
Franco arrives as an answer to the mine. A man who loved the plant, saw what the community already had growing along the rivers, and wanted to build something with them. I don’t doubt the wanting.
There is Amadiba Adventures, the tourism project, locals trained as guides. There’s Simon, close to Franco, described more than once as his partner. Strain Hunter. Warm, easy on camera, standing now in light a dead man can no longer stand in. The ending gives us a reunion, though it felt less like a reunion than a staged return to a man who was no longer there.
The seed appears briefly. Hands sorting flower. A mention of genetics moving through the operation. Then the film moves on.
Nobody asks, on camera, what a Green House Seed Co release retailed for in Amsterdam that same year. Nobody asks what a farmer twenty minutes from Mtentu was paid to grow the plant it came from. Nobody asks what happened to that money once it left the valley. Nobody asks whether the eco-tourism project and the seed operation were separate projects, or the same project described differently depending on who was listening.
I made deadline a little after midnight and sat with the laptop closed for a while, in the dark. I was thinking about a man I liked, who died looking for a cure, and a story that was true without being complete.
I never went to Mtentu while any of it was happening.
What I knew, I knew from the valley. From Franco himself, in the years before and around it, talking the way people talk when they have had a few beers and trust the company they are in. From my brothers-in-law, who had been pitched the same plan and turned it down. From growers up and down the coast, because word travels along that coastline faster than the roads suggest, and everyone wanted to know what the Dutch were paying, for what, and whether it was worth the risk.
What I understood, even without exact figures, was the structure of the maths.
A seed grown, tended and harvested by hands that would never see Amsterdam sold in Amsterdam for something close to a Euro. Those same hands were paid a fraction of that. Small enough that nobody I spoke to thought of it as a wage. Good money by the standards of a place with almost none. Still nowhere near what the seed became once it left.
I don’t know what each family did with what they were paid. I don’t know how the books were kept, or whether they were kept in any way a court could later examine. Green House Seed Co. built an international reputation and a substantial catalogue on genetics that trace back to that coastline. The coastline didn’t become wealthy alongside it.
That gap doesn’t need me as a witness. It’s simple maths.
Better was Temporary
For a few years, things were better than they had been. The high-grade genetics fetched a better price on the illegal market than the local landrace ever had. I don’t doubt that some of that money went into homes, children, and the resilience the community used to stand its ground against the mine.
It was better. It was also temporary, and the farmers were never positioned to own the long-term value.
In 2018, the Constitutional Court ruled that adults could grow and use cannabis privately. The bottom fell out of a market that had depended on the plant staying illegal enough to be worth smuggling.
What had been a scarce, high-value crop grown at real risk became something a person could grow in their own yard without breaking the law. The income that had been arriving from that coastline thinned to almost nothing in the space of a judgment. HPLvD, whatever its origin, hastened a decline already underway.
The better years don’t settle the question.
Exploitation often works because it improves things for a while, in the foreground, while the long-term value is already moving elsewhere. A family with a new roof is evidence that something came back. It’s not evidence that the exchange was fair.
What followed is harder to pin down. People I trust say the years after the operation weren’t kind to the region. Law-enforcement attention reached communities with far less capacity to absorb it than I had. The tourism infrastructure didn’t outlast the energy that built it.
I’ve also heard, though I can’t prove it, that the health of plants growing wild in the region changed after the seed operation came and went. A landrace known for generations of resilience started needing intervention. That claim needs investigation, because the gap between lived knowledge and formal evidence is exactly where stories like this get dismissed.
Ninety kilometres inland and a few years later, a different extraction met organised resistance. Mineral Commodities wanted the titanium under Xolobeni. The Amadiba Crisis Committee said no, kept saying no, and in 2018 a court agreed that no mining right could be granted over that land without the full and informed consent of the people living on it.
Bazooka Rhadebe didn’t live to see that judgment. He was killed in 2016 for saying no.
I think about that judgment often. Applied a decade earlier, it might have forced a harder question about the quieter extraction already moving through nearby valleys.
Nobody needed a mining licence to grow cannabis on land they didn’t own. Nobody needed community sign-off to fly seed out of the country in hand luggage. The law that protected Xolobeni from one kind of taking was never built to notice the other kind, especially when that taking was presented as opportunity.
Lingering Patterns
Back at the symposium, in a session I won’t name, I listened to a plan.
The person describing it isn’t the subject here. He spoke publicly, and he clearly believed he was describing forward motion: a GMP facility, capital from outside the country, a team with production experience from other continents, and a for-profit arm sitting beside something described more than once as philanthropic.
The philanthropic side would work with growers in the low country, the old landrace regions, Pondoland among them, sourcing material the world already associates with that coastline.
He mentioned, almost in passing, that some people in those communities already call him something unflattering. He didn’t sound troubled by it. He sounded like a man who had accepted resentment from the people he was building around as the cost of ambition.
I didn’t say anything. I don’t know that anything useful could have been said to him in that moment.
What stayed with me was the pattern. Capital. Genetics. A production team flown in from elsewhere. A community upstream in the value chain and downstream in the money. A philanthropic label doing the same softening work that tourism and eco-lodge language did twenty years earlier.
Nobody used the word extraction. The plan didn’t need a villain. It only needed people with scale, money and momentum who’d never had reason to ask what happened the last time somebody built something in that place without giving the community a real seat where value was decided.
I don’t think he’d heard of Franco. I don’t think he would have changed his pitch if he had.
That concerned me more than anything in the film. The pattern doesn’t need memory to repeat. It doesn’t need bad faith. It needs a community with land and knowledge, no seat at the capital table, and an industry young enough to mistake access to a landrace for a relationship with the people who kept it alive.
I don’t want to end on the man with the plan. He’s not the only thing happening in this industry.
There’s a project I only learned the full name of after the symposium, though I had heard its structure described from the stage without knowing what to call it. Brett Pollack runs it through Harambe Solutions: the Mpondoland Plug Project, connecting small-scale growers on that same coastline directly into city communities, through something closer to relationship than brand.
I won’t pretend to know the operational detail. Brett is a lawyer working in a space the law has not fully caught up to yet, and there are limits to what it would be fair to ask him to spell out publicly. What I can say is what I have heard consistently from people who would know: he’s knowledgeable, genuinely helpful, and serious.
I don’t know enough yet to present it as a model. I know enough to recognise a project that at least appears to ask how value moves back, rather than only how value moves out.
I keep thinking about Zainodean from Blue Downs, his thirty-five jobs, and his poultry. I keep thinking about Tia, young enough that half the symposium could have been her parents, telling people plainly that her communities need investment and equitable transaction. Twenty years ago, when Franco first came up the coast, nobody like her was present where it mattered.
She is now. That changes who gets to watch, question and remember.
There are also tools now that were absent in 2006. A Constitutional Court judgment protects the right of communities like Xolobeni to refuse extraction without full and informed consent. South Africa is party to international benefit-sharing frameworks intended to prevent genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge from being commercialised without proper consent and return.
Those tools arrived because communities like Amadiba were forced to fight for what should have been obvious.
The next person with a plan, a plane ticket and a facility half-built in their head cannot claim nobody warned them. The frameworks exist. The people are present. Whether that becomes real protection or another line in a symposium programme depends on what happens after the applause.
Pondoland is the Test of Time
Ben (Ras Ramon ‘Brother Ben’ Adams) and I have known each other a long time. Long enough that I trust him to hear this plainly.
He once told me the cannabis movement has spent decades promising hope to Indigenous communities like Amadiba, and that the only fair way to judge any of it is by what remains after the promise leaves.
Hope photographs well. It sounds right in a documentary, a keynote, a closing speech about Ubuntu and nobody being left behind. Sincerity is not delivery. Hope that cannot survive a market shift, a court judgment, or a change in the law becomes marketing with better manners.
I include myself in this. The people who built this industry don’t get to keep calling ourselves the good guys because we didn’t personally fly the seeds out. We contributed to the conditions that allowed this pattern to keep happening. The least we can do now is make sure the next generation inherits something better than a script to repeat.
That means inclusion before the market hardens around a shape that leaves people out. Benefit-sharing that survives inconvenience. A landrace treated as something a community is owed a stake in, not a resource waiting to be discovered by whoever arrives first with a passport and a production budget.
The test is Pondoland. Whether the next chapter looks different from the last one, or whether it just gets a better film made about it.
Outsiders arrived with capital, mobility, genetics, branding, cameras, international market access and myth-making capacity. Local growers provided land, labour, risk, cultural legitimacy, production knowledge and geographic authenticity. The outsiders left with story, seed value, strain capital and brand aura. The community was left with law-enforcement exposure, broken infrastructure, contaminated genetics, unstable income and fading memory.
The people who carried the risk must finally share in the reward.
The symposium called it collaboration, education and inclusivity.
Good. Now let’s test those words against Pondoland.
Lee Hymers, Professional Misfit, Investigative Writer, Pattern Recognition Specialist: About Myself:
I spend a lot of time looking at how systems evolve; particularly where regulation, capital, and culture begin to collide.
Most of that perspective comes from three decades working around cannabis cultivation, post-harvest systems, and regulatory frameworks. Watching a counterculture transition into a tightly regulated industry has been a front-row seat to how incentives discretely reshape markets.
These days my interest sits less in the surface debates and more in the layers beneath them – policy architecture, compliance thresholds, and the economic incentives that end up determining who participates and who doesn’t.
The process is fairly straightforward: look for patterns, trace the mechanisms behind them, and try to explain them clearly enough that people outside the specialist bubble can follow.
My background touches a few different areas along the way – plant physiology, biotechnology systems, sustainable agriculture, regulatory architecture, and applied human biology.
Alongside consulting and advisory work, I write and explore a few ongoing projects:
Professional Misfit – analysis of how policy design, compliance frameworks, and institutional incentives reshape emerging industries. The accompanying newsletter explores the structural forces sitting beneath modern cannabis reform, regulation, and market development.
The Misfit’s Lens – a broader analytical framework focused on systems thinking, media narratives, power structures, and pattern recognition across culture, policy, and geopolitics.
The Misfit’s Guide to Narrative Forensics – an ongoing educational series examining framing, sequencing, omission, contradiction, and the mechanics through which narratives are constructed and reinforced.
Framing Matters – examining how language and media framing influence the public understanding of complex events.
QuillWorkx – helping founders and organisations express complicated ideas with clarity and intent.
Forge_50+ – an ongoing exploration of strength, resilience, and human capability later in life.
Mostly just curious about how systems work, and how the stories around them get told.
Always open to thoughtful conversations.
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