Tagged: clanwilliam

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 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.