Cape Town Installation Turns Rooibos Into a Story of Loss
At Suidoosterfees 2026 in Cape Town, artist Yonela Makoba built an installation called Rooi-Land from soil and teabag paper, using rooibos to explore colonial land loss and the labour behind the cup.
An art installation using rooibos to tell a story of colonial land loss and gendered labour opened April 29 at the Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town.
The work, "Rooi-Land," is part of Suidoosterfees, a South African arts festival, and runs through May 3 in the theatre centre's Marble Foyer.
It was made by Yonela Makoba, a multidisciplinary artist from Mthatha, South Africa, now based in Cape Town. Her practice spans photography, performance art, sculpture, mixed media and printmaking.
The festival's programme describes the installation as built from "soil constellations and delicate objects made from teabag paper," creating "a quiet but powerful space where ritual, gendered labour and the legacy of colonial theft come into view."
The programme calls rooibos in the piece "both warmth and wound," the everyday comfort of the cup set against a history of extraction.
This year's Suidoosterfees runs under the theme "Tuiste," the Afrikaans word for home. Artscape Theatre Centre, an independent venue and not the festival's organizer, separately confirms the April 29 to May 3 run.
The material carries its own record. Rooibos is endemic to South Africa's Cederberg region, where it grows wild and nowhere else, and it was harvested for generations by the Khoi and San peoples long before it was farmed as a commercial export crop. That history is not only a matter of memory. The rooibos industry now operates under a benefit-sharing agreement that formally recognizes Khoi and San traditional knowledge holders as the originators of the plant's use.
Teabag paper is the ordinary end of that long chain: the last object between the Cederberg and a kitchen table, and the one most people ever handle.
Makoba has worked in this register before. The art publication ArtThrob profiled her broader practice on May 16, 2025, in an article titled "On Circuitry and Iterative Practice: Yonela Makoba's Ritual Studies," describing her method as built around durational, iterative studies of ritual and collective memory.
"Rooi-Land" is open to Suidoosterfees audiences in the Marble Foyer until May 3.
Sources: Suidoosterfees, "Program 2026"; Artscape Theatre Centre, "Suidoosterfees" event listing; ArtThrob, "On Circuitry and Iterative Practice: Yonela Makoba's Ritual Studies" (16 May 2025).