Tagged: apartheid
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.
The Biggest Rooibos Market on Earth Never Grew a Single Bush
For nearly sixty years the country that bought and resold more rooibos than any other on earth was Germany, which cannot grow a stem of it. How a health-food house sold the tea under a Kilimanjaro logo, how Hamburg became the trade's logistics hub, and why Japan finally took the crown.
The Red Bush Two Different Histories Both Call Home
In South Africa's Cederberg, white Afrikaans commercial growers and coloured smallholders come from opposite sides of the region's history, yet both point to the same fact, that rooibos grows nowhere else on Earth, as the reason they themselves belong to this land.
Japan Boycotted Apartheid and Bought the Rooibos Anyway
How the red bush reached what is now its largest market, straight through a contradiction the trade was built on.