Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea

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.

Author: Sarah Fleming Ives
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 10/27/2017
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780822369936

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2018

About the Author
Sarah Ives is a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University.