The Cut That Used to Take All Day
Cutting a rooibos harvest into tea once meant an axe and an entire day's work by hand. Here is how that job passed from a worker's own arm, to one family's private farms, to a single government board that owned the only legal cutting operation in the country, and finally, only in the last two decades, to the growers themselves.
An 80-year-old former rooibos worker named Johannes Ockhuis once described his own working day to Klipopmekaar's historians in three plain sentences: you put your left hand on the branches, grab the axe with your right, and start chopping. It was not an hour's task. He chopped all day. A rotary machine now does the same job, on far more tea, before that same worker could have finished his own morning's pile. Getting from his axe to that machine took more than a century, and the machine itself did not stay in the same hands the whole way. It moved from an individual worker's own arm, to one family's private farms, to a single government board that held the only legal cutting operation in the country, and only in the last two decades to something small-scale growers actually got to own for themselves.
An axe, a mallet, and a day that did not end at lunch
From the 1900s until roughly the 1960s, cutting rooibos meant hand tools and little else. Harvesters worked the branches with knives and sickles, a method still in use on some farms today because, as Klipopmekaar's own account puts it, a sickle is simply the most effective way to take a branch without damaging the bush it grows from. What happened after harvest was the harder labour. A district assistant conservator, writing in 1907, recorded the process in one sentence: the branches are cut and collected, the leaves are then beaten off, moistened, and rolled up tightly in sacking for a few days. In practice that beating meant an axe, swung all day by hand, to chop bound sheaves into pieces small enough to ferment evenly.
Once chopped, the pile still needed crushing, not cutting, and that step used its own dedicated tool: a heavy wooden mallet workers called a moker, shaped from a hardwood dense enough to survive the pounding, sand olive, wild olive, or the mountain Waboom tree. Only after the moker had done its work was the pile watered, heaped, and left to sweat. None of it was quick, and none of it scaled. A worker's own stamina was the only limit on how much rooibos could be cut in a season, a ceiling every mechanised step that follows exists to raise.
A machine built for someone else's crop, borrowed for this one
The first real mechanisation did not arrive as a purpose-built rooibos machine. It arrived as a chaff-cutter: cutting machinery Britain had developed for processing black tea, adapted for rooibos rather than built for it. By 1926, Klipopmekaar's own historical account records, rooibos processing already ran through exactly this borrowed tool: twigs and leaves went through a chaff-cutter, were stamped down by a heavy mallet, and were left to ferment in packed heaps before drying. The elements of mechanisation, in other words, came from someone else's industry first. Klipopmekaar's account of the wider processing history is explicit that the same pattern held for cutting more broadly, that mechanisation developed for other purposes elsewhere was adapted for rooibos rather than invented for it. A chaff-cutter did in an afternoon roughly what an axe did in a day, and the day it entered a Cederberg yard, cutting rooibos stopped being purely a test of one person's endurance.
The Ginsberg farms take mechanisation to scale
Rooibos owes its commercial start to a trader named Benjamin Ginsberg, who cured the first consistent, packaged batches in 1904, the fuller story of which the Ministry has already set down in the history of rooibos. It was his son, Henry Charles Ginsberg, who took mechanised cutting from a borrowed farm tool to an industrial scale. In the early 1940s Chas Ginsberg laid out the first dedicated large-scale rooibos plantations South Africa had seen, three farms named Die Berg, Môreson, and Stillerus, and built the processing infrastructure to match: purpose-built drying and curing yards and cutting equipment run at a volume no single farm had attempted before. By 1950 those three farms alone were producing roughly half of all the rooibos grown in South Africa and collecting a third to half of the industry's seed, a concentration of both cultivation and mechanised processing in one operator's hands that the borrowed chaff-cutters of the 1920s were never built to support.
One board, and for forty years, the only legal cutting operation in the country
Mechanised scale then met a second, very different kind of concentration: legal monopoly. From 1954 to 1993 the Rooibos Tea Control Board was the sole legal buyer from every grower and the sole legal seller to every processor and exporter, a licence whose racial exclusions the Ministry has traced in full elsewhere. The detail that story does not dwell on is the machine itself: the Board did not just police who could sell rooibos, it ran the industry's central processing and packaging operation at Clanwilliam, the one facility the successor company inherited when the Board was dissolved. For most of the twentieth century, there was effectively one legal place in South Africa where a grower's harvest was cut into sellable tea, and a state board owned the machine that did it.
Deregulation, and the machine finds new owners
What changed after 1993 was not who ran the biggest machine but how many other people got a machine of their own. Industry output grew enormously in the decades that followed, from roughly 500 to 600 tons a year in the 1950s and 1960s to the order of 15,000 tons a year South Africa now produces, a scale the Ministry has covered from the harvest side. The specific change was in the early 2000s, when small-scale growers in the Suid Bokkeveld and Wupperthal, working roughly one to five hectares each, organised into cooperatives with the help of local NGOs, chiefly to qualify for organic and Fair Trade certification. The Heiveld Cooperative and three Wupperthal cooperatives were among them, and within a few years, once buyers recognised the quality of what they were growing, those cooperatives built their own post-harvest processing facilities and began selling cut, finished tea directly to buyers rather than raw material to someone else's yard.
The cutting step Chas Ginsberg once ran on three private farms, and a government board then ran as the country's sole legal facility, is a step a Suid Bokkeveld or Wupperthal cooperative can now run for itself, on its own machine, on its own land. The blade has not changed shape all that much since the 1940s. Who is allowed to stand behind it has changed almost completely.
What a modern cut still owes this history
Today's rotary cutting machines, uniform, fast, and standard across the industry, are what the Ministry has already described in full: the cut length a machine produces is a deliberate choice now, fine for a teabag, coarser for a loose-leaf tin, made by whoever is running the machine that day. That choice did not always belong to the grower.
An axe took a day. A borrowed chaff-cutter took an afternoon. A private farm's machinery took an industrial scale most growers could never reach on their own. A state board took the whole country's legal supply of the step. None of those machines belonged to the person who grew the bush. The rotary cutter running in a Heiveld or Wupperthal yard today is, by comparison, a fairly recent thing: the same job, back in the hands of the people who cut the first branch.