Sarah Fleming Ives Steeped in Heritage sku-55833097

Sarah Fleming Ives's Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea is a hardcover African History Books title, sku-55833097, in the New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century series. It examines how Afrikaners and people described as “coloureds” make different claims of indigeneity through cultural ownership of rooibos.

The plant is known for its healing properties and is regarded as ecologically indigenous, yet it grows in a region marked by poverty, dispossession and racism. The book discusses Afrikaner claims to “white” African indigeneity and depictions of “coloureds” as descendants of “extinct” Bushmen or as indigenous to nowhere.

It places the dispute over land and belonging in a postapartheid setting shaped by climate change and precarious social relations.