Rooibos Has Nearly 280 Cousins, and Almost None of Them Became Tea
The genus Aspalathus holds close to 280 species, nearly all found only in the Cape. Three relatives were once brewed as "stekeltee," and the historical record suggests rooibos itself is a surprisingly late arrival to the Cape teapot.
The Ministry gets one question more than any other about the plant's relatives: is rooibos the only one of its kind. The honest answer is no, not by a wide margin. Rooibos belongs to a genus, Aspalathus, that holds close to 280 recognised species, nearly all of them confined to the fynbos of the Cape and found in no other part of the world. Botanists are still finding new ones. Of those 280, exactly one became a global commercial tea. A handful of its close relatives were once brewed too, under a name that has nearly vanished: stekeltee, thorn tea. And the plain historical record holds a genuine surprise about rooibos itself: it shows up remarkably late, later than its own cousins do.
A genus, not a plant
Aspalathus linearis is one member of a large legume genus almost entirely confined to South Africa's Cape Floristic Region, a stretch of land smaller than most countries that nonetheless holds a staggering share of the world's plant diversity, SANBI's own botanical database records. New Aspalathus species are still being named. A 2024 paper in the South African Journal of Botany described four newly discovered species and reinstated three others that had been lost to the record for decades, researchers reported, the kind of finding that only happens in a genus botanists have not finished cataloguing. Most Aspalathus species have never been tasted by anyone outside a herbarium. Rooibos is the exception the world knows, not the rule the genus follows.
Thorn tea, brewed before rooibos was written down
The clearest account of what else grew in a Cape teapot comes from a 2017 review in the South African Journal of Botany, in which botanists B.E. Van Wyk and B. Gorelik traced the documented history of every plant the Cape ever drank as tea. Three species in what taxonomists call the Borboniae group of Aspalathus, A. angustifolia, A. cordata, and A. crenata, along with the closely related A. alpestris, were once brewed and drunk, the review states. All four share stiff, needle-like, spine-tipped leaves, and that shared shape is exactly where their shared name came from: stekeltee, Afrikaans for thorn tea.
The earliest written record of any Aspalathus used this way is older than most people would guess, and it does not belong to rooibos. Travelling through the Cape in July 1772, the Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg recorded, at Paarl, that "of the leaves of Borbonia cordata the country people make tea," the plant now classified as Aspalathus cordata, the review quotes directly. The review is careful on a point worth carrying: that 1772 note is sometimes cited, uncritically, as the first record of rooibos tea itself. It is not. It names a different species entirely, and the review says so plainly.
Rooibos itself arrives late
Here is the part that surprises even a devoted drinker. Rooibos tea does not appear in that same early literature at all. The 2017 review describes it plainly: rooibos tea is "conspicuous by its absence in the early literature" and is "first mentioned in the historical record in the late 19th century." Set that beside honeybush, the other well-known Cape tea (genus Cyclopia, a legume relative that shares the fynbos with Aspalathus), which the review dates to a first record in 1830, nearly seventy years earlier. Honeybush stayed popular from the 18th century onward, the review notes, though it only recently became a serious item of commerce in its own right. On the plain written record, rooibos is the newer drink, not the older one, however deeply it now reads as tradition.
None of this makes the modern history the Ministry has already told (Nortier's 1930s cultivation of the wild bush, the ant heaps that gave up their hoarded seed) any less real. It just resets when the written record for the drink itself actually begins, and it is later than the record for its own relatives.
A cousin that may still be in your cup
One more Aspalathus deserves a name, because it has not entirely left the story. Aspalathus pendula, known by the common names sweeptee and golden tea, is also fermented and drunk as tea in its own right, and the 2017 review notes something more pointed: it may sometimes be mixed into commercial rooibos to improve the sweating process and the finished tea's quality, a practice reported by an earlier study the review cites. The Ministry has found no evidence this is common or current industry practice, and no source claims it undermines the geographical protection that fixes the name rooibos to Aspalathus linearis specifically. It is simply a reminder that the boundary between "rooibos" and "one of its stekeltee cousins" has not always been as fixed in practice as the label on a box suggests.
Why only one bush left the mountain
None of the other Aspalathus teas made the leap rooibos made, and the historical record does not fully explain why, only that it happened. Rooibos had a plant with a favourable growth form for the era's growers to work with, a cultivator in Pieter Nortier willing to solve its stubborn seed dormancy in the 1930s, and, later, a health-drink reputation from the 1960s that gave it a commercial story its cousins never got. Stekeltee had none of that. It survived mainly as a name in old botanical notes and a handful of Afrikaans common names still attached to plants most people walk past without a glance. The Cape's tea shelf could have looked very different. Only one bush answered the knock.
Nearly 280 relatives, almost all of them still growing wild and untasted, and only one became the tea the world knows.