The Red Bush Two Different Histories Both Call Home

In South Africa's Cederberg mountains, two kinds of rooibos farmer who come from opposite ends of the region's history make a strikingly similar argument for why they, personally, belong there. White Afrikaans commercial growers point to the plant. So do coloured smallholders farming land their own families were kept from owning for generations. Both say that because rooibos is indigenous, native to this one dry range and nowhere else on Earth, growing it makes them native to it too. That finding comes from the American anthropologist Sarah Ives, who spent more than fourteen months living among rooibos-growing families between 2009 and 2013 and published the research as Steeped in Heritage (Duke University Press, 2017). A plant is being asked to settle an argument about people, and both sides are using the same plant to make their case.

Why the word "indigenous" carries more than botany here

Rooibos, Aspalathus linearis, grows as a commercial crop in exactly one place on Earth, the Cederberg and the mountain country around it, the full geography of that range is its own record. Botanically, calling it indigenous just means it evolved there and does not grow wild anywhere else. In the rooibos-growing region, Ives found, the word had quietly migrated from botany into biography. Coloured and white residents alike, she writes, came to measure their own belonging in the country through their relationship to a plant that unquestionably belonged there itself.

The case an Afrikaans farmer makes through the plant

"Rooibos tea started from the wild," a white Afrikaans farmer Ives calls Kobus told her, walking her across land his family had farmed for generations and stopping now and then to point out rooibos still growing wild at the edge of his cultivated fields. (Ives changed the names of everyone she interviewed, standard practice for protecting research subjects.) "Rooibos is part of the fynbos family," he said. "Fynbos is the smallest of the world's six flower kingdoms. It's what makes it special, unique. It's only in South Africa, only here." For a farmer like Kobus, tending a plant that grows nowhere else became a way of arguing that he, too, belonged nowhere else. An ecological fact was standing in for a genealogical one.

The case a coloured farmer makes through the same plant

Coloured South Africans, a population descended from the Khoikhoi, enslaved people brought to the Cape, and European settlers, occupied a harder position. Apartheid held that the country's original Khoisan inhabitants had already gone extinct, which left coloured people, in the era's own racial logic, belonging to no ancestral line at all: not settlers, and not officially indigenous either. Ives records coloured farmers using rooibos to answer that exclusion directly. One farmer she calls Theunis named his rooibos cooperative Ebenezer, a biblical word meaning "the stone of help," after years of legal fights simply to lease rooibos land in a district where white farmers held almost all of it. Another she calls Nigel put it more plainly still: "We are slowly starting to get our dignity back because we are working with our heritage, our own rooibos; we reap the benefits of rooibos. Before, rooibos was only in the hands of white guys. This helps us become independent and proud again."

Why an anthropologist calls this a new kind of claim

Ives argues this is not the familiar shape of an indigeneity claim, one people rooted in one place since time out of mind. It is a three-way relationship between a person, a place, and a plant. Neither Afrikaans nor coloured South Africans fit the older definition cleanly: Afrikaner claims to an African belonging have long been disputed by Black and coloured South Africans, and coloured identity itself was legally defined, under apartheid, as belonging nowhere in particular. Rooibos gave both groups a route around that impasse. Rather than staking a claim on ancestry, a person could stake it on stewardship: on caring for, working with, and depending on a plant that was demonstrably native, in a way no argument about bloodline could be.

The history the claim runs alongside, not over

That triadic claim does not erase what came before it. South Africa's land-restitution law sets 19 June 1913, the date of the Natives Land Act, as the cutoff for claiming dispossessed land back, South African History Online records. Land in the rooibos region had mostly been in white hands well before that date, some of it since the early 1700s, which meant the legal door most South Africans could use to reclaim lost ground was largely already closed here. The Rooibos Tea Control Board later built its own forty-year licensing monopoly on top of that same imbalance, and the pattern has proven durable: commercial farmers, overwhelmingly white, still cultivate the great majority of the region's rooibos land today, a fact this Ministry has set down in full elsewhere. Rooibos's indigeneity gave coloured farmers a dignified language for belonging. It did not, on its own, give them the land.

What the claim has actually changed

By 2011, the government's own agriculture department counted roughly five thousand people working rooibos farms and processing plants, and rooibos had become a roughly seventy-million-dollar industry, Ives's own research notes, figures already over a decade old and worth reading as a snapshot of that moment rather than today's market. What has visibly changed since is not the ledger but the argument coloured farmers are able to make while working inside it. "We are slowly starting to get our dignity back," as Nigel told Ives. "Our farmers will not be small farmers forever," another farmer told her. "We will grow big." A South African review of Ives's book, published in the literary magazine LitNet, described it as an exploration of the country's "socio-political underbelly," precisely because rooibos turned out to be a small enough subject to hold a very large argument.

The Ministry has no stake in who wins that argument, only in setting down, plainly, that it is happening. Both a white Afrikaans farmer and a coloured smallholder can point to the exact same bush, growing wild at the edge of a field, and mean two entirely different, entirely sincere things by "this is mine."