The Wartime Rooibos Boom the Record Cannot Quite Confirm

Ask almost anyone who sells rooibos why it became South Africa's own tea, and you will hear a version of the same story: the Second World War cut off the real thing, and a nation learned to love the substitute. It is repeated everywhere, from tea-tin copy to an academic dissertation. Follow it back to the actual evidence, though, the wartime figures, the decrees, the contemporary record, and a gap opens between the two halves of the claim. The shortage itself is undisputed and well documented. What rooibos did in response is real in outline but far thinner on paper than the story now told about it.

The shortage was real, and the government ran it by the pound

Start with what is documented beyond argument. South Africa imported 11,370,626 pounds of tea in 1934. By 1941 that had risen to 20,533,787 pounds, nearly double, even as the war closed off the supply lines that fed it. When the Far East fell to Japan, the main sources shifted to India, Ceylon, and some East African territories, and Britain's tea-importing imperial partners met in London to set up a coordinated purchasing scheme that fixed prices and rationed the available supply. South Africa was granted an 80 percent quota of its estimated requirement, buying through the British Ministry of Food, and a July 1941 government decree limited wholesalers and retailers to 75 percent of their normal sales, with an outright cap of one pound of tea per consumer. None of this is folklore. It is set out in historian Yolandi Albertyn's study of Union food control, which draws the figures and the decree from two postwar official accounts: A.P. van der Post's 1951 South African war-history compilation and J.M. Tinley's South African Food and Agriculture in World War II, published by Stanford University Press in 1954. Both are reconstructions written after the fact rather than contemporaneous wartime records, a distinction that matters once the story turns to rooibos itself.

Where the rooibos part of the story gets thin

Here is where the paper trail loosens its grip. Albertyn's own thesis does state that the use of "indigenous bush teas" was encouraged in print during the shortage, citing a March 1942 article in the Afrikaans farming weekly Die Landbouweekblad, titled, roughly, "Bush tea: the tea from our own land." That is a real, dated, findable publication. But the single sentence naming rooibos specifically, that it "grew increasingly popular in wartime for consumers to substitute for unavailable Ceylon tea," is footnoted not to a wartime document or a sales figure, but to a 2013 interview the historian conducted with one witness, seventy years after the fact. A second scholarly source, anthropologist Sarah Fleming Ives, records essentially the same claim from her own fieldwork: that rooibos, once dismissed as a "poor man's drink" found mainly in hospitals, schools, and jails, "soon commanded the same price as English tea" once the war cut off Ceylon imports. She, too, is reporting what farmers and industry figures told her decades later, not citing a contemporary rooibos sales ledger. Neither account, nor any other source, carries a rooibos production or sales figure from the 1940s themselves.

The silence sits in exactly the places a real surge would be hardest to miss. The South African Rooibos Council's own official history page, the industry's authoritative voice, does not mention the war at all, jumping straight from the crop's commercial beginnings in the 1930s to a string of later product and market milestones: a 1968 health anecdote, a 1980s marketing push in Japan, the 1990s arrival of green rooibos. A body with every institutional reason to repeat a flattering founding story simply does not tell this one, at least not in the form now common on tea retailers' history pages. The earliest hard rooibos tonnage figures on record start in the 1950s, after the Control Board existed to collect them, not during the war itself.

What happened once the real tea came back

The postwar arc is where the record firms back up. Demand for rooibos, per the industry's own retrospective account, fell sharply once ordinary tea imports resumed after 1945, a genuine market collapse rather than a smooth continuation of any wartime boom. Growers responded in 1948 by founding the Clanwilliam Tea Cooperative, and when that still was not enough to steady a volatile market, the government appointed the Rooibos Tea Control Board in 1954 to regulate prices and set quality standards. End to end, the Ministry reads it thus: a real wartime shortage, a real and documented push toward domestic substitutes in general, a claimed rooibos-specific surge that no contemporary figure confirms, and an undisputed postwar bust severe enough to need two rounds of institutional rescue. The bust is better evidenced than the boom said to have preceded it.

The Hamburg importer story belongs to the First World War

One version of this story in wide circulation deserves a direct correction rather than a repeat. Several accounts describe a Hamburg tea importer holding onto rooibos stock "during the war" because no one in Germany wanted it until supplies of everything else ran out. Traced back through the fuller history the industry itself publishes, which rests on a 2004 German thesis, that episode belongs to the austerities of the First World War, not the Second, a mix-up that has spread across enough retellings to look authoritative. Germany's real rooibos story starts later and slower: serious German interest began only after 1945, and the country did not become rooibos's largest importer until the mid-1960s. It is the kind of detail a wartime founding story quietly absorbs and gets wrong, one more reason to hold the whole narrative a little more loosely than the marketing copy does.

What the record will and will not support

None of this means the story is false. A real shortage, a real and printed push toward "our own" teas, and a documented postwar collapse severe enough to need a cooperative and then a statutory Board all point the same direction: something did happen to rooibos in those years, and it likely involved more households discovering it than otherwise would have. What the record will not support is the confident, specific claim now standard on tea websites, that the war is the moment rooibos "became" South Africa's tea, backed by a figure nobody can produce. What happened to rooibos in the years the record is quietest, between the shortage and the Board, is one of the few things about it that cannot yet be pinned down.

Sources

1. Upsetting the Applecart: Government and Food Control in the Union of South Africa during World War II, Yolandi Albertyn, MA thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2014, on the wartime tea-import figures, the July 1941 rationing decree, and the single sourced mention of rooibos substitution. Its figures and decree draw on two postwar official compilations, A.P. van der Post's "Foodstuffs in Short Supply" (1951) and J.M. Tinley's "South African Food and Agriculture in World War II" (Stanford University Press, 1954).
2. Tea Stories: Cultivating Indigeneity in South Africa's Western Cape, Sarah Fleming Ives, PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2014, on the oral-history account of rooibos's wartime price rise.
3. Rooibos, Rooibos Route, on the postwar demand collapse, the 1948 Clanwilliam Tea Cooperative, and the 1954 Control Board.
4. Rooibos History, South African Rooibos Council, the industry's own official history, notably silent on the war.
5. Rooibos, People and Plants International, on the earliest available production tonnage figures, starting in the 1950s.
6. Rooibos Importers: Germany, Klip op Mekaar (an extract of "The Rooibos Story," published with the South African Rooibos Council and resting on a 2004 German thesis), on the Hamburg importer episode's dating to the First World War and Germany's postwar rooibos history.