Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea by Sarah Ives (review)

As African nations confront population growth, inequality, job shortages and mounting climate change, struggles over land mark social, economic and historical dilemmas from Cairo to the Cape. Steeped in Heritage, an ethnographic journey through the arid northern farmlands of South Africa's Western Cape Province, traces the global commodification of rooibos tea back to the fraught landscape in which it grows. Indigenous to this region of South Africa – a unique biome found nowhere else on earth – rooibos was domesticated in the nineteenth century by Dutch settlers who conscripted Khoisan hunter-gatherers as their labour. Due to violence and disease, the Khoisan people are said to be extinct in the Western Cape, though their Coloured descendants still perform most labour on Afrikaner-owned commercial rooibos farms. In claiming that the Khoisan are extinct from the Cape, Afrikaners identify as first-comers to the ecosystem and utilise the emotive powers of the rooibos plant as a political symbol of their belonging. A tough, stocky plant yielding a tea touted for its nutritive properties, rooibos is perfectly adapted, it appears, to a landscape in which little else survives. Afrikaner farmers see their familial histories and cultural values embodied in the plant. Cultivating rooibos is, for them, "a holy act" (22), even if Coloured labourers perform the work. Drawing on a robust assemblage of theories from Helmreich, Foucault, Malkki and Marx, Ives explores how rooibos has not only been grown but also acculturated to invoke the belonging of white farmers to the region. By the mid-twentieth century, rooibos tea had gained the status of South Africa's national drink, becoming a staple in schools, medical institutions, the military and many white homes. Since the end of apartheid and the neoliberalisation of South Africa's economy, the rooibos industry has successfully marketed rooibos as a tea for global consumption, using images of Khoisan peoples to mark an exotic and organic origin.

The product of a doctoral dissertation study supervised at Stanford by James Ferguson, the book's most valuable contribution is its animation of Coloureds' voices within the rooibos landscape. Stigmatised for over a century as a product of miscegenation between white and non-white people, Coloured South Africans face unique forms of marginalisation at a time when opportunities for some South Africans expand. In addition to convincing that the rooibos industry makes exploitative use of Coloured labour, Ives explains that Coloured people who grow their own rooibos are disadvantaged within South Africa's affirmative action programs. Ives contends that the African National Congress has tried to drive a wedge between white farmers and Coloured workers and warns that Coloured people stand to gain little from the land distributions that some now demand in their name. In the process, Ives illuminates, for the less familiar reader, the discourse behind South Africa's so-called "coloured problem" (34) – of how to envision a place within a nation for a people with no history or "precolonial reality" (36). As land relations in the Western Cape shift due to the effects of climate change, some Coloured workers are able to purchase land and are successful as small-scale rooibos growers. In response, white farmers are employing genome science and satellite technology to confine the plant, and argue that rooibos grown outside its native land is illegitimate, much like Coloured people.

Offering vivid insight into this socially and ecologically unique region of South Africa, Ives makes effective use of her own whiteness in this timely ethnography of difference. Ives gives a voice to Afrikaner farmers coping with profound social change and conveys in detail how racism still runs deep in some corners of South Africa. The claim that little has changed since apartheid is heard often among rooibos farmers in this region; Ives's descriptions of Coloured workers being infantilised by white employers supports this claim. In 1985, Vincent Crapanzano explored the banality of racism under late apartheid – how racism was "often lost to the social actor...