Some of the Oldest Rooibos Never Reached a Cup
The earliest documented Khoi and San use of rooibos was not only a drink. It was something you put on your skin, and the record of that use is older than the industry that grew from it.
Before rooibos was anyone's cup, it was on their skin. A 2014 study commissioned by South Africa's Department of Environmental Affairs1, the study the whole modern benefit-sharing arrangement rests on, concluded that Khoi and San use of the red bush, current and historical, was "for its health benefits but also for other purposes such as in cosmetics and to treat skin disorders." Some of the plant went onto people rather than into them.
Almost everyone meets rooibos as the caffeine-free tea in the red box, and reasonably assumes it has always been a beverage first and everything else afterwards. The written record of its oldest use runs the other way round. It is, to a striking degree, a record of skin.
The Ministry will be precise about what that does and does not mean, because this is the corner of the subject where language slips easily. What follows is a description of what people did with a plant and what a government study found when it asked them. It is not a treatment, and nothing here says that rubbing rooibos on anything will help a skin condition. What holds about the drink is what has always held: no caffeine, and a genuine antioxidant content.
What the 2014 study actually found
The national environment department commissioned the study to settle a question with money and law attached to it: whether the Khoi and San hold traditional knowledge associated with rooibos and honeybush. Its answer became the legal foundation for everything that followed, not a folklore collection filed away and forgotten.
Its conclusion, quoted directly in the factsheet Natural Justice published1 summarising the findings, names cosmetics and the treatment of skin disorders alongside the health benefits of the plant. The knowledge itself, including how to find the plant, how to harvest it, and how to prepare it, was passed down orally within families, from one generation to the next. Some of the people interviewed traced their family's knowledge back more than three hundred years.
Three hundred years is a long time before anyone thought to put rooibos in a packet. The commercial trade dates to the early twentieth century, and the farming to the 1930s, a sequence told properly in the history of rooibos. The knowledge the study documented was already old when the first merchant arrived.
Axes, stones, and a heap left in the sun
The same factsheet describes the traditional practice in plain terms, and the plainness is the pleasure of it. People walked the Cederberg mountains looking for the plants. They harvested what they found. They chopped it into small pieces with axes, crushed the pieces with stones, and in later years with hammers. They gathered the crushed plant into heaps to ferment, and then spread it out to dry in the sun.
Anyone who has read about how rooibos is processed today will recognise the shape of that: bruise the leaf, let it ferment, dry it. Whether every step in the sequence is as ancient as the knowledge of the plant itself is genuinely argued over by historians, and that argument sits at the heart of the benefit-sharing story. What is not in dispute is the walking, the finding, and the knowing which bush was worth stopping for.
The ointment, and how firmly it is attested
There is one further detail, and it needs its hedge stated before it is stated itself. According to National Geographic's travel reporting on the rooibos country, "Historically, the Khoi and San peoples would pick the needles off the red bush, mix them with animal fat, and rub the ointment onto their skin as an antiaging or anti-inflammatory agent."2
That is a lovely, concrete image, and it is a single source. The piece is travel journalism, and it does not name the primary record or the researcher behind the claim. So take the fat-and-needles preparation as what one reputable magazine reports, not as an established fact with several independent authorities standing behind it. The Ministry would rather hand you a smaller certainty than a larger guess.
The broader pattern around it is much firmer. Ethnobotanical writing on South African plants records rooibos in traditional use for stomach complaints, for eczema and other skin conditions, and for colic in infants. Skin turns up again and again in that literature, from different observers in different decades. It is a theme, not a stray anecdote. The exact recipe is where the record thins out.
The laboratories arrived about three centuries late
Modern science has, quite separately, put rooibos near skin twice, in 2025 and 2026. A laboratory in Daegu, South Korea, traced aspalathin, the flavonoid rooibos carries, to calmer skin in mice with induced atopic dermatitis. At the University of Malaga, researchers folded rooibos extract into sunscreen and measured up to a 50 percent rise in sun protection factor, along with slower breakdown of the UV filters, with no testing on human skin.
It is tempting to read those as the laboratory catching up with the Cederberg, and that reading would be wrong. Both studies used modern processed extracts and isolated compounds, in controlled conditions, on a mouse model and on a bench. Neither one tested a crushed leaf mixed into animal fat, and neither one asked whether the old practice worked as it was actually used. Nobody has run that experiment. The two threads rhyme, which is interesting, and rhyming is all they do.
Recognition arrived last of all, and only under law
The industry took its time about the people who held the knowledge. Not until 2019 did a benefit-sharing agreement oblige rooibos processors to pay a traditional-knowledge levy, set at 1.5 percent of the price they pay farmers for each kilogram of harvested leaf, split between the San Council and the National KhoiSan Council. That story, including the argument that the arrangement still does not reach far enough, is told in full in Rooibos pays the Khoi and San for their knowledge.
What prompted it is worth naming here, because it bears directly on everything above. The agreement came about because international law on bioprospecting and traditional knowledge forced the question, and South Africa's own legislation obliged the industry to answer it. It did not come about because a laboratory validated an old remedy, or because anyone in the trade grew curious about what the plant had been used for before it was a drink.
The levy is reckoned on dried leaf, by the kilogram, at the moment it leaves the farm for the processor. It is the tea that gets weighed.