The Board That Owned Rooibos for Forty Years
From 1954 to 1993, one government board was the only legal buyer and the only legal seller of rooibos in South Africa, and it built that monopoly on a rule that quietly shut coloured growers out. Here is how that came to be, and what it left behind.
For nearly forty years, a single government board was the only legal buyer of rooibos from a South African grower and the only legal seller of it to anyone else. The Rooibos Tea Control Board held that position from 1954 until it was dissolved in 1993, and the licence it used to enforce the monopoly is also the documented reason coloured wild-harvesters in the Cederberg, the people who had gathered the plant longest, could not sell it themselves. The Ministry keeps a warm cup and a plain record, and this is the plain record.
A cooperative that asked for a monopoly
Rooibos nearly did not survive its own early success. Commercial planting had begun in the 1930s once the district surgeon Pieter Nortier worked out how to germinate the plant's stubborn seed, but the market that followed collapsed after the Second World War, and growers around Clanwilliam banded together in 1948 to found the Clanwilliam Tea Cooperative to stop prices from falling further. It was the Cooperative itself that asked the government for more power than a cooperative normally holds. The Minister of Agriculture answered in 1954 by appointing the Rooibos Tea Control Board under the Rooibos Tea Control Scheme, with a mandate to regulate marketing, stabilise prices, and standardise quality. In practice that meant the Board became, in the plain words of the historical record, "the sole buyer from producers and the sole seller to approved exporters and tea processors."
What a licence like that actually does
A sole buyer is also a gate. The Board's approval was required before any rooibos could legally be sold at all, and for nearly forty years it used that gate for exactly what a state-appointed, all-white board in the apartheid era could be expected to use it for: protection and subsidy for the commercial growers already inside the system, and exclusion for those outside it. The Board's support, research funding, and extension services went to registered producers, and coloured wild-harvesters in the Cederberg, families who had cut and dried rooibos from the veld long before it was anyone's commercial crop, found themselves on the wrong side of a rule requiring a licence they had never been offered.
That was not an oversight in the law. It was the design. The subsidies, research support, and market access the 1954 scheme provided were built around the registered commercial sector, a sector that racial land and business law of the same era kept almost entirely white. A harvester picking wild rooibos on land the Cederberg's original people had gathered from for generations could grow the plant and still have no legal route to sell it that the Board itself did not control.
Forty years, and then the board fell with the system that made it
The Control Board did not survive South Africa's political transition, and the two events line up closely enough that they are not really two stories. As apartheid-era state control began unwinding, the Board was dissolved in 1993 and its functions handed to a new public company, Rooibos Tea Natural Products, which took over the industry's processing and packaging at Clanwilliam. The company was renamed Rooibos Limited in 1995, and it operates today as a private, market-facing business rather than a state monopoly, one of many state marketing boards across South African agriculture that liberalisation dismantled in the same stretch of years.
Deregulation opened the market. It did not redistribute the land. The commercial farms the old Board had spent forty years subsidising stayed in the same hands they were already in, and those hands are still overwhelmingly white today: commercial growers cultivate roughly ninety-three percent of the land rooibos is grown on, while coloured and indigenous small-scale farmers, organised since liberalisation into cooperatives such as those in Wupperthal and the Suid Bokkeveld, hold the rest and account for only around two percent of national production. Ending the licence did not undo four decades of who got to build a farm, a brand, and an export relationship while the licence was in force.
The pattern the Board set has outlasted the Board
The clearest sign of that is a much newer arrangement built to fix a related grievance. In 2019 the rooibos industry agreed to pay the Khoi and San peoples a 1.5 percent levy on the price a processor pays a farmer, in recognition of the traditional knowledge the industry was built on, the full story of that agreement is its own piece. It was hailed at the time as a milestone, the first time anywhere that an entire industry, not one company, was made to pay for traditional knowledge. Yet independent research into how the money actually moves has found small-scale Indigenous farmers, many of them descendants of the same communities the old Control Board licence shut out, capture only around five percent of the benefit the 2019 agreement generates, even though they are expected to contribute to the very levy meant to compensate them. A monopoly that is gone in name can still leave its shape in who owns the land and who collects the payout, six decades on.
That is the straight history: rooibos spent nearly forty years as one board's exclusive property to buy and sell, by a rule that was never built to include everyone who already knew the plant.