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 the Khoisan are recorded as the first people to make a drink from it. The written record of that use is thin and begins only in the late nineteenth century; the commercial trade 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. It is set down with the gaps left visible, because the gaps are part of the story.

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 teas, 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 trace its use as a drink no further back than the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Two things hold at once, and both are in the record: the people of the Cederberg are recognised as the originators of the knowledge that the plant makes a drink, and the documentary trail for that deep use is sparse. A history written to last keeps both, rather than choosing the prettier one.

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 trade, 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 1904. The scholarly record is careful here: Boris Gorelik, who researched the industry's origins for the South African Rooibos Council, 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 his farm Eastside and at Klein Kliphuis, 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 it, until a court struck the mark down in 2005 and the holder surrendered it. South Africa drew the opposite lesson and moved to lock the name down at home, issuing rules in 2013 under the Merchandise Marks Act 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 status. 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 Cape, putting the legal status of the name in line with where the plant actually grows: the Cederberg and its immediate surroundings, and nowhere else on Earth.

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 Protocol, because it covers all commercial rooibos through one process rather than a single company's supply. The arrangement and its background are set out separately.

The people who knew the bush first were the part of the record that went unwritten the longest, and the formal recognition of their knowledge came last of all.

Timeline

• 1772. Carl Thunberg records country people brewing a wild bush near Paarl. The plant is Aspalathus cordata, a different species, not rooibos.
• Late 1800s. The earliest reliable record of rooibos itself as a drink.
• 1904. The conventional date for the start of the commercial trade, associated with Benjamin Ginsberg, who promoted rooibos beyond its home valley and created the Eleven o'Clock brand.
• From 1930. Pieter Nortier solves seed germination and raises the first cultivated plants; the bush becomes a farmed crop.
• 1948. Stellenbosch awards Nortier an honorary doctorate.
• 1994. A South African skincare entrepreneur registers a US trademark on "Rooibos"; sold to Burke International in 2001 and defeated in court in 2005, returning the name to public use.
• 2013. South Africa reserves "rooibos" and related terms under the Merchandise Marks Act.
• 2019. The industry-wide Khoi and San benefit-sharing agreement takes effect, a 1.5 percent farm-gate levy.
• 2021. The EU grants rooibos a protected designation of origin, the first for an African food.