Ives, Sarah. Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea. Duke University Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-8223-6993-6 xv + 255 pp.
Yingkun Hou (Southeast Missouri State University)
Review: Steeped in Heritage
Rooibos, a native plant that grows in the Cederberg region of South Africa, is imbued with special qualities that make it a valuable crop for this region. Unlike other nonnative commercial crops also growing in the region that require irrigation, such as grapes and oranges, rooibos is highly localized—it is adapted to the long, hot and dry summers in this region. Local residents use the leaves of these bushes to make tea to drink themselves, as well as market rooibos tea as a South African national beverage to compete in the global herbal tea market. Based on her fieldwork in the rooibos-growing regions during 2009-2013, Sarah Ives depicts a complex picture of the ecosystem of rooibos farming practices and strategies in growing them, and how everything is deeply implicated in this region’s specific “political, economic, and environmental struggles over land, labor, and ideas of native belonging” (2).
Steeped in Heritage consists of an introduction, five substantive chapters and a brief conclusion. The introduction sets the stage for later discussions about rooibos by situating this cultural product in South Africa’s special political and racial contexts. While the locals had harvested wild rooibos and used their leaves to make tea for centuries, in the twentieth century, rooibos became a profitable global commodity with an approximate value of $70 million as an industry by 2011 (3). Rooibos tea is believed to be a “healthy”, “sustainable,” and “organic offering to the rest of the world” (13), and is marketed as “a cure-all that will do everything from preventing cancer to thwarting the effects of aging” (3). At the same time, it is also considered to be “Mandela-like”—many local residents believe the tea is “imbued with charismatic qualities that supposedly would heal the unhealthy body, the divided nation, and the depleted land” (4). As Ives illustrates throughout the book, while the “semiotic possibilities” of rooibos tea as a cultural product and commodity may seem celebratory and hopeful, this belief in rooibos’ “miracle-like” qualities reflects the complicated colonial history of post-apartheid South Africa.
As Ives points out, consumers from the US and Europe can take comfort by engaging in the fantasies of the captivating lore of rooibos’s origins, imagining themselves preserving a wild “African Bush” in purchasing the tea, the effects and local contexts for this marketing strategy—combining indigeneity and the market—was “hotly contested” (4). For the local residences who engaged in the production of rooibos, topics such as indigeneity, heritage, and the market all tied into “effusive narratives” from two groups in the region who “do not fit easily into discussions of indigeneity” that resulted from the unique history and racial politics of this region—“white Afrikaans” and “coloured” South Africans (4). Afrikaners were primarily descended from Europeans who associated predominantly with the Dutch East Indian company; “the coloureds,” on the other hand, is a South African racial category that is separate from black. “The coloureds” referred to a people with a diverse heritage of “Khoisan (or Bushman), white settler colonists, and slaves and laborers brought from other parts of Africa and Asia” (4). In this introductory chapter, Ives goes into detail to delineate the complexity behind these racial categories and how this system permeates every aspect of people’s daily life, which is quite informative for someone like me who is not familiar with the history of South Africa. With this understanding of racial history, Ives then starts to introduce how rooibos is a significant focal point to understand the local reality, as summarized by a quote from one white farmer in this chapter, “Rooibos tea is a fabric of society.” In discussing properties of rooibos such as indigeneity, Ives explores how rooibos can bring together nature, place, race, and politics of local community in very concrete ways (4) as farming rooibos is “entangled with political, economic, and environmental struggles over land, labor, and ideas of native belonging” (2).
The first chapter, “Cultivating Indigeneity,” provides a more in-depth discussion on the issues of indigeneity and racial tensions by looking into how people involved in rooibos farming wrestled with their identities and grappling with what it means to be indigenous. With 80% of the population classified as coloured, the demographics of the rooibos region is drastically different from the rest of South Africa. In this chapter, Ives portrays the difficult situations coloured people found themselves trapped in. Aside from these vignettes, Ives also draws from South African historical and official documents from the apartheid and post-apartheid era, as well as quotes from interviews with both Afrikaans farmer and coloured residents, to explore the ways in which both groups forged their sense of belonging in relation to rooibos. The Afrikaners, believing that their blood “mingled with the rooibos soil,” claimed they were indigenous. As for the coloured people, since they had limited access to land, it is particularly difficult for them to simply embrace their ethnic identity and claim a culturally indigenous heritage. Ives argues that both groups claim their belonging through their connection to the indigenous plant, rooibos, which challenges the idea of “a culturally indigenous identity” (17) and the understandings of indigeneity as “a form of ethnic essentialism or as a rallying cry for political activism” (24). For example, she argues that the coloured expressed a form of heritage that was more “encompassing and flexible,” which allowed for “fluidity in a way that temporally redefined heritage not only as a claim to a ‘traditional’ past but as a potential for the future” (62).
Chapter 2, “Farming the Bush,” shifts the focus to the cultivation of the rooibos plant itself, but continues the discussion of indigeneity and belonging “through and with rooibos” (24). In this chapter, Ives depicts a picture of the unique fynbos ecosystem in which rooibos grows and how the residents understood the plant’s unique characteristics in relation to the ecosystem and themselves. Citing discourses around the scientific description of the plant and its ecosystem, once again, Ives points out that the people in the region would invoke an “ecological exceptionalism” in relation to rooibos, signifying how the crop itself is valuable, yet intensely political. As Ives points out by citing from handbooks for rooibos farming, there is an emphasis on a “symbiotic relationship” among farmers, soil, and plant: “Working together, each participant is crucial to the health of all” (66). However, Ives argues that this idea of symbiosis also erases other important factors, such as the coloured and black workers’ labor. Drawing on the history of both race and botany in South Africa, Ives uses multiple examples throughout the chapter to show how this connection to rooibos can have very different implications for coloured and white residents. While both groups have “articulated a complicated kind of ecological belongs in which both their livelihoods and their sense of self were formed through their spiritual connections to the rooibos landscape,” the stakes for coloured people in the rooibos region were much greater (94).
The racial tension of the region is further complicated by black migrants who came to labor in rooibos field. As South Africa deals with the consequence of apartheid and post-apartheid policies, the number of black migrants in the rooibos region increased rapidly in recent years, which in turn deeply influenced the labor dynamics, politics, and how the coloured and white residents negotiated their precarious positions. Chapter 3, “Endemic Plants and Invasive People,” looks into how local people imagined and articulated “an alien invasion and risk to indigeneity posed by ‘alien’ plants and people” (97). Building on the previous chapter’s discussion of the indigeneity of rooibos and local people, this chapter shows how both coloured and white residents drew on parallels between alien people and invasive species to articulate their sentiment as they felt that their indigeneity and local belonging was threatened in this carefully balanced, fragile ecosystem. Moreover, Ives argues that this “threat” was “contingent, dynamic, and entangled with politics, economics, ecology, and subjectivity” (24). In this context, alien invasion also led to a process of post-apartheid negotiations and renegotiations of access to resources. For instance, coloured workers and black migrants formed an “uneasy alliance” that aimed to challenge the local political dominance and the economic power of the white farmers (132).
Chapter 4, “Rumor, Conspiracy, and the Politics of Narration,” examines versions of rooibos history Ives recorded from people and a selection of rooibos rumors to shed light on how these rooibos narratives interweave into people’s political and economic struggles over labor, livelihoods, and sense of social belonging. They both “affected and were constitutive of people’s understanding of current political, economic, and environmental trends” (135). In analyzing their significance, Ives argues that the discussion is not so much about the truths or facts, rather, it’s more about the influence and concrete effects these rumors, gossips, and cosmologies had on the people and the plant. Indeed, as Ives points out, these stories that people repeated were “the daily, lived histories that became sedimented in the landscape” and through the retelling, “the stories gained lives of their own” (136). This chapter provides a sense of how insistent Ives’ informants were in making sure that she wrote down their accounts as they told them in her fieldnotes—as she obliged, she kept a quote in the chapter even though she wasn’t sure what they meant (e.g. quote on 157). Indeed, as she reiterates in the concluding section of this chapter, “in the context of a fused human-plant social and ecological world, the force of these sentients and the stakes involved were high. The battle over history was not only about looking to the past, but also about determining the course of rooibos’s future and attempting to protect that future from the seemingly unstoppable effects of globalization and climate change” (171-172).
The last chapter, “Precarious Landscapes,” highlights the theme looming in the background of all previous chapters—anxiety induced by precarity, which had become part of daily life in South Africa. As people became disillusioned in the New South Africa and the sobering reality of the post-apartheid country set in, local residents had to confront the harshness of an uncertain and potentially threatening future (172). Here, Ives uses Marx’s theory on alienation to analyze how anxieties connect to people’s complex relationship with rooibos. In the rooibos region, Ives emphasizes, the workers weren’t the only ones who feared alienation, instead, “nearly everyone whose livelihood and sense of belonging depended on the plant” were deeply concerned about rooibos becoming an ordinary, global commodity that is placeless (175). In addressing the residents’ existential anxieties about the future of the rooibos region, the chapter returns to the themes covered in previous chapters. This final chapter draws our attention back to the significance of rooibos’s charismatic and “miracle-like” quality that local people kept emphasizing, the tensions among white and coloured residents, the connection both groups felt with the local landscape through rooibos, as well as the factors that threaten the vulnerable local cultural ecosystem such as globalization and climate change. As Ives shows the strategies residents were developing and contemplating, this last chapter leaves us with a sense of precariousness in an ever more complex and changing local landscape. Steeped in Heritage is a detailed ethnography supplemented with archive evidence that depicts the complicated and nuanced cultural ecosystem of the rooibos region in contemporary South Africa. While discussions in this book center around rooibos tea, it is not so much about the plant and the taste of its tea. It is not a casual read about rooibos’ cultural biography either. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in economics and/or racial politics in South Africa.
FoodAnthropology 