The History of Rooibos

Rooibos has a long past as a wild plant and a short one as a documented drink. The shrub Aspalathus linearis grows only in the Cederberg and a narrow band of surrounding mountains in South Africa's Western and Northern Cape, where Khoi-descended people are its earliest documented drinkers. The written record of that use is thin and begins only in the late nineteenth century; the trade in it is younger still, dating to 1904. This is the documented history of the red bush, from wild stand to a name now protected on two continents, and the record has real gaps that stay visible here rather than smoothed over.

What "rooibos" means, and what survives in the record

The word is plain Afrikaans: rooi bos, "red bush." It names the colour the green needles turn once the cut plant is bruised, fermented, and dried. No Khoi or San vernacular name for the species was ever written down, which is the first and largest gap in the record.

A tidy origin story is often repeated: that the Swedish botanist Carl Thunberg recorded local people brewing rooibos in 1772. The record does not support it. Thunberg noted country people near Paarl making a tea from a wild bush in July 1772, but the plant he named was Borbonia cordata (now Aspalathus cordata), a different member of the same genus, not Aspalathus linearis. The botanists Ben-Erik van Wyk and Boris Gorelik, reviewing the ethnobotany of Cape herbal teas¹, note that the anecdote is "sometimes uncritically cited and erroneously associated with rooibos tea." They find no earlier record of rooibos itself and no Khoi or San vernacular name ever written down for the species, and confirm rooibos as a drink of Khoi-descended people of the Cederberg (and, the same sources note, the district's "poor whites") no further back than the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Gorelik's own later, dedicated study of the traditional knowledge behind rooibos² went looking for firmer ground and did not find it: it concludes there is no record able to say which community, Khoi, San, or colonial, first thought of the plant as a drink, or how far back that goes.

Benjamin Ginsberg and the start of the trade, 1904

The drink became a business through one merchant. Benjamin Ginsberg, a young immigrant from the Russian Empire who came from a family in the tea trade³, settled in the valley in the years after the South African War and married into the Clanwilliam district in 1912. He is credited with being the first trader to promote rooibos consistently outside its home valleys, in Cape Town and the wider colony, and he created the oldest surviving packed-rooibos brand, Eleven o'Clock. The conventional date for the start of the commercial trade is 1904¹⁰. The scholarly record is careful here: Boris Gorelik, who researched the industry's origins for the South African Rooibos Council², notes that rooibos was already being bought and sold locally by then, so Ginsberg's exact role is better described as opening the wider market than inventing the trade.

For its first decades the entire supply was wild-harvested, cut by hand from bushes wherever they grew. That sufficed only while demand stayed small. When it grew, the wild stands could not keep pace, and the bush proved stubbornly hard to plant on purpose.

Pieter Nortier and the move to cultivation, 1930

The cultivation problem was solved by Pieter le Fras Nortier, a district surgeon at Clanwilliam and a keen naturalist. From 1930 he ran cultivation experiments on farmland lent by two fellow farmers, William Riordan's Klein Kliphuis and Oloff Bergh's Varkfontein, with Ginsberg's encouragement, and cracked the two things that had kept the bush wild: how to break the stubbornly hard seed coat so the seed would germinate, and how to gather that seed in quantity, in part by raiding the underground stores of seed-hoarding ants. That story, the ants, the seed coat, and the first plantings, is told in full in how rooibos became a crop. The stock Nortier selected became the cultivated crop the industry still grows, and in 1948 the University of Stellenbosch awarded him an honorary doctorate for the work. From the 1930s on, rooibos could be farmed rather than only foraged, and the region gained a cash crop it has kept since.

The fight over the name "rooibos"

A plant worth money becomes a name worth contesting, and the contests were largely over the word itself. A US trademark on the plain word "rooibos," registered in 1994 by a South African skincare entrepreneur and sold in 2001 to an American company, Burke International, was used from 2001 to charge others for the right to use it⁵, until a court struck the mark down in 2005 and the holder surrendered it⁴. South Africa drew the opposite lesson and moved to lock the name down at home, issuing rules in 2013 under the Merchandise Marks Act⁶ that reserved "rooibos," "red bush," "rooibostee," and related terms for leaf of Aspalathus linearis grown in the defined region. The full account of that fight, and the legal shields built after it, is told separately.

The European protected designation, 2021

In May 2021 the European Union granted rooibos a protected designation of origin, the first African food product to receive the status⁸. Anything sold as "rooibos" or "red bush" in the EU must now be pure Aspalathus linearis grown in the designated municipalities of the Western and Northern Cape⁷, putting the legal status of the name in line with where the plant actually grows: the Cederberg and its immediate surroundings, the only ground where the wild species has ever been found.

The Khoi and San benefit-sharing agreement

The most recent chapter returns to the gap at the start. South Africa is a party to the Nagoya Protocol, the international agreement under the Convention on Biological Diversity that requires fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the use of indigenous biological resources and the traditional knowledge attached to them. After several years of negotiation, the rooibos industry and the Khoi and San peoples concluded a benefit-sharing agreement, with a levy of 1.5 percent of the farm-gate price flowing to the two communities, effective from 1 January 2019. The South African Rooibos Council, which negotiated the agreement, calls it the first of its kind in the world in its interpretation and application of the Nagoya Protocol⁹, because it covers all commercial rooibos through one process rather than a single company's supply. The arrangement and its background get the full account on their own page.

No document says who among the Khoi and San knew the bush first. The levy that took effect in 2019 does not settle that question; it pays them for the knowledge they still hold.

Timeline