In her new book, Sarah Ives steeps us in the biology, ecology and politics of rooibos tea in South Africa. She first learned of the now famous tea while a study-abroad student at the University of Pretoria. She then took on the rooibos bush as a topic for her anthropology PhD at Stanford. Her book is a nuanced, elegantly written study of what it means to own and profit off a crop and the land that sustains it.

Ives writes in a lyrical fashion, using the metaphors of cultivation, steeping and sipping to create an interpretive framework around rooibos growing. Rooibos – as a not quite wild, not quite cultivated plant – mimics the ambiguous indigeneity of both Afrikaaners (those of Dutch descent) and ‘coloured’ population (descended from white settlers, Asian labourers and slaves, as well as black Africans) who tend it. Both Afrikaaners and coloureds speak Afrikaans (a creole derived from Bantu root words, as well as Asian languages, and of course Dutch) which was the primary language of the South African apartheid regime from 1948 to 1994. Using rooibos, Afrikaans speakers in the Western Cape region have created a narrative of first rights to land to push out other groups, including black Africans who might displace them now that apartheid-era restrictions on movement have lessened.

In Chapter 1, Ives considers how rooibos growers in Clanwilliam narrate their senses of belonging. She emphasises that coloured populations experience a sense of rootlessness as they were never afforded ‘homelands’ under apartheid and remain cultural bastards of the South African state. She witnesses everyday violence as poverty and drunkenness afflict coloured communities with high rates of unemployment. Coloured informants describe their ambivalence surrounding recent genetic analyses which link some to Bushman. In contrast to Afrikaaners who situate themselves in relationship to their past roles as rooibos growers, coloureds describe high hopes for their future roles as rooibos exporters through new collectives. In addition, she draws on historical research of other scholars to outline the ethnic landscape and set the scene for the book.

In Chapter 2, Ives pays close attention to the biology of rooibos and the ecological conditions which allow it to thrive. She situates herself as a budding rooibos expert, laughing when her mother visits and is unable to identify rooibos growing wild among similar bushes. She drinks in local lore about the biology of the plant on the Western Cape. Again learning from both white Afrikaaner and coloured interlocutors, she details how both subcultures situate themselves in relationship to the rooibos plant to shape narratives of belonging. Borrowing from the anthropologist Stefan Helmreich, she outlines the symbiopolitics of rooibos cultivation as an alternative to biopolitics. Her informants were literally weaned on rooibos and tout its chemical properties that purportedly allow it to combat everything from obesity to cancer. She considers the extent to which Aspalathin (a flavonoid unique to rooibos) can be given full credit for all of these claims.

In Chapter 3 she creates a rich multispecies historical ethnography of Clanwilliam to disentangle local discourses surrounding civilised plants/people, and invasive plants/people. On one hand, her informants likened coloured people to cultivated rooibos with the potential for civilisation. On the other hand, they interpret the growing number of black Africans moving to live and work in the area as suggestive of ‘bad seeds’ of invasive plants that would choke out rooibos farming. Ives notes that in her study area, census data indicated 80% coloured, 15% white, 5% black and 1% Asian. This is a big contrast to the rest of South Africa where blacks make up 79%, whites 9%, coloureds 9% and Asians 2.5%. Given a precarious demographic situation where coloureds currently hold a majority but are surrounded by a country where blacks are the much larger population, people in Clanwilliam have created stories of indigeneity that contrast directly with the larger story of settlement and displacement patterns in South Africa.

Ives pays deep attention to these fictive accounts of displacement and rights to land which place Afrikaners and to a lesser extent coloureds at the centre of Clanwilliam's legacy. This is of course ironic since historically, the ancestors of both Afrikaaners and coloureds displaced earlier inhabitants, including Bushman, Xhosa and other ethnic communities. It is a mental feat to continually remind oneself that in Ives’ story, the Afrikaans speakers in the Western Cape are the ‘first peoples’ and the blacks are the newcomers and ‘migrants'. It is in keeping with the curious logic of regional South African identity politics, but remains quite a stretch even for those who are well aware that Afrikaaners and coloureds have fashioned themselves as new South African tribes since the 17th century with their own claims to territory. At points, a full spectrum of identity politics in Clanwilliam to include the so-called black newcomers for their views would have been welcome.

In Chapter 4, Ives studies rumours and conspiracies around who will claim rooibos in the coming years. Rooibos has become an extremely lucrative crop with wide consumption across the world. Farmers contend with the global popularity of rooibos while hoping to retain a sense of locality in the marketing and control of the export. By Ives’ account, Afrikaner informants are confident that they will retain economic control over the cultivation and sale of rooibos. They link new industrial regimes to their savvy development of rooibos as an early crop in poor soil. For coloured informants, industrialised rooibos suggests the potential for redressing apartheid wrongs, but they struggle to gain access to the necessary land and capital. Tensions have been so high in Clanwilliam that according to Ives, people on different sides of rooibos conflicts still attend the same church, where the scent of drying rooibos wafts inside, but will not drink from the same communion cup.

The final chapter opens with the violence of rooibos strikes, in a context when farmworkers seeking higher wages are at the risk of being replaced with new mechanised agriculture. Large-scale white farmers hope to profit from global demand and go into cahoots with international companies that might displace them. Rather than worry about the international companies or their larger white rivals, small-scale white farmers focus their anxieties on the possibility of losing land to coloured and black collectives in the same way as Zimbabwean land redistribution reforms. Coloured workers who had long endured poor working conditions fear the influx of black workers with less recent connection to the area who might further undermine their fight for rooibos rights. Further compounding these anxieties is the new potential for growing rooibos in a wider region as climate change has shifted the stretch of dry, arid terrain southwards.

This timely book immerses us in Clanwilliam, leaving us decidedly unsettled. Through her diary notes and rich descriptions, Ives brings us along with her to the houses, bars, hospitals, churches, fields and factories where rooibos cultivators fight for control over a valuable plant. In this vital study of plants and people, commodities and labourers, Ives centres her discussion on the supply side to show where the tea we drink is made. Ultimately, with each sip of the popular tea, we are all much more consciously aware of how we are also implicated in these conflicts and contests for land, plants and products.