«Strain Hunters» goes to South Africa

Vintage cannabis hunters are back! Led by «cannabis king» Arjan Roskam, the Amsterdam-based cannabis enthusiasts are flying to South Africa.

This destination is not chosen at random. It is a tribute to their former colleague Franco, unfortunately disappeared because of malaria who lived in South Africa. For this new episode, Arjan is accompanied by Dust and Oscar.

The team is based in the Eastern Cape province, in the south-east of the country, one of the poorest in South Africa. Here, the inhabitants live off subsistence farming. And cannabis is very important. As in Border country Lesotho, Africa's green gold pioneer.

The Eastern Cape is home to the Transkei variety, or TK. It's a sativa, inherited from the Rooibard landrace, South Africa's ancestral weed. It can be recognized by its «flowers entirely covered with thick red hairs, with a very sweet, fruity scent for a sativa», noted Franco in a 2006 article. He had spent months searching for the original variety, but had never found it.

Westerners are bored

The cannabis world is in a bad way. Westerners are bored. They come across the same varieties of cannabis over and over again, so much so that they all end up looking the same. «They are mirrors, each variety is a sativa/indica hybrid, with the only difference being the THC level and the flavor.», laughs South African website CannaBuddy.

That's one of the aims of this Strain Hunters trip. One of their colleagues in South Africa calls them to tell them about a variety of «not great to smoke but super medicinal» which could prove useful against «breast cancer development». No sooner said than done, they jumped on a plane in search of this variety.

On the spot, they realize that Exodus Cheese, a variety brought by Franco a few years ago, has taken on considerable importance. One of the villagers explains to Arjan Roskam: «On the negative side, we're losing our landrace varieties. But on the positive side, we're making a good living, without depending on the government.»

But the Transkei region still has some ancestral varieties. The proof is in the video, in which the team visits the land of a young farmer who is growing a variety of the Transkei region's best-known varieties. «interesting, with a nice resin». They take a cutting and send it to the lab. The rest will be revealed in the next episode, on December 22.