CITATION — REFERENCE ENTRY
Rooibos: An ethnographic perspective. A study of the origins and nature of the traditional knowledge associated with the Aspalathus linearis — South African Rooibos Council
- Key
- gorelik-2017-rooibos-ethnographic-perspective
- Authors
- Gorelik, Boris
- Issued
- 2017
- Type
- report
- Publisher
- South African Rooibos Council
Raw CSL JSON
{
"URL": "https://sarooibos.co.za/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20180723-SARC-format-TK-Paper-SU-1.pdf",
"type": "report",
"title": "Rooibos: An ethnographic perspective. A study of the origins and nature of the traditional knowledge associated with the Aspalathus linearis",
"author": [
{
"given": "Boris",
"family": "Gorelik"
}
],
"issued": {
"date-parts": [
[
2017
]
]
},
"publisher": "South African Rooibos Council"
}
Claims
-
Gorelik concludes that preparing rooibos as a tea appears to be a product of the global expansion of the tea trade, that colonial settlers valued it as a local substitute for expensive Asian tea, and that there is no evidence showing which community first made it; he suggests it may have arisen among Bastaards combining indigenous knowledge of the plant with colonial tea-drinking.
"it appears that the practice making such infusion or decoction, or at least, its consumption as a 'tea', is a phenomenon of the global expansion of the tea trade."
-
Cederberg shops stocked rooibos from at least the 1890s but sold little; Benjamin Ginsberg, a Russian-Empire immigrant who began peddling in the area around 1903, is credited with consistent promotion of rooibos outside the Cederberg and created the oldest surviving packed brand, Eleven o'Clock. In the early 1930s the district surgeon Pieter Lefras Nortier began cultivation experiments and developed the cultivated variety that became the mainstay of the industry; seeds were gathered with help from local Coloured labourers, including Hans and Tryntjie Swart, who found seed stores in ant nests.
"Although we have established that shops in the Cederberg stocked rooibos at least from the 1890s, the product itself, judging by the surviving archival data, did not sell in large volumes."
-
Gorelik found no direct evidence that pastoralists or hunter-gatherers used the rooibos plant in precolonial times, though archaeological evidence suggests the plant may have been used tens of thousands of years ago in an unclear context; if infusions were made, their purpose is unknown and drinking them for pleasure as tea was unlikely.
"No direct evidence of utilisation of the rooibos plant by pastoralists or hunter-gatherers in precolonial times is known to exist."
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