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South African rooibos tea is a commodity of contrasts. Renowned for its healing properties, the rooibos plant grows in a region defined by the violence of poverty, dispossession, and racism. And while rooibos is hailed as an ecologically indigenous commodity, it is farmed by people who struggle to express "authentic" belonging to the land: Afrikaners, who espouse a "white" African indigeneity, and "coloureds," who are characterized either as the mixed-race progeny of "extinct" Bushmen or as possessing a false identity, indigenous to nowhere. In Steeped in Heritage Sarah Ives explores how these groups advance alternate claims of indigeneity based on the cultural ownership of an indigenous plant. This heritage-based struggle over rooibos shows how communities negotiate landscapes marked by racial dispossession within an ecosystem imperiled by climate change and precarious social relations in the postapartheid era.
List of contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction. The "Rooibos Revolution" 1
1. Cultivating Indigeneity 29
2. Farming the Bush 65
3. Endemic Plants and Invasive People 96
4. Rumor, Conspiracy, and the Politics of Narration 134
5. Precarious Landscapes 173
Conclusion. "Although There Is No Place Called Rooibos" 210
Notes 217
References 229
Index 245
About the author
Sarah Ives is a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University.
Summary
Exploring the racial and environmental politics behind South Africa’s rooibos tea industry to examine heritage-based claims to the indigenous plant by two groups of contested indigeneity: white Afrikaners and “coloured” South Africans.
