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Claiming indigeneity in precarious landscapes: Race, economic globalization and climate 

change in Rooibos land  

 

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

Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. pp 272 ISBN 978-0-8223-6986-8 

 

Keywords Indigeneity, race, South Africa, multispecies belonging, whiteness.  

 

Steeped in Heritage explores the fraught claims of indigeneity of white and colored farmers 

in the rooibos-region of Cederberg in contemporary South Africa. Specifically, Ives sets out 

to answer the following questions: “How do residents grapple with their ‘precarious 

identities,’ and how do they articulate their own concepts of what it means to be indigenous 

when their uncertain claims to belonging in place merge with the uncertainty of the 

rootedness of place itself?” (3). To this end, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork between 

2009 and 2013, as well as archival and primary-source research through 2015, to highlight 

how people drew on their connection to rooibos and its ecological indigeneity to assert their 

natural belonging to a landscape and an ecosystem (4). Ives locates quests for indigeneity in 

the rooibos-region in a context of political, racial, economic and ecological precarity, noting 

that rooibos narratives of belonging were meant to mitigate fears of a post-apartheid ‘black-

controlled’ state (104), the heavy weight of poverty, unemployment and alienation (17), the 

threat of global market-based economy controlling the rooibos valuation systems and the 

uncertainty of the “rootedness of place itself” in light of climate change moving the rooibos 

ecosystem southward (175).  

The book is structured along five chapters. Thematically, chapters one, two and five 

explicitly address the specificities of the plant-place-person configurations of belonging, 

while chapters three and four provide detailed accounts of the political, economic and racial 

contexts. Chapter One explores how people’s subjectivities were linked to rooibos as the 

latter shifted between commodity, native plant, and moral subject. Ives shows how ecologies 

of belonging for white and colored farmers attend to climatic, economic and political 



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vulnerabilities differently: whereas white landowners articulate rooibos as heritage based on a 

connection to traditional past, materially dispossessed colored farmers marked rooibos as 

heritage oriented towards the future, since farming the tea  ‘more naturally’ made them more 

connected to the land (53). Chapter Two delves deeper into the “region’s fraught history of 

cultural indigeneity” (67), using the framework of symbiopolitics to note that both colored 

and white farmers linked their subjectivities, nature and religion “in ways that were not just 

metaphorical but also informed by a deification of nature and by a need for economic 

livelihoods” (94). Despite the marked racialization of kinship relations with both the wild and 

cultivated indigenous plant, both white and colored farmers “saw themselves as simply 

harnessing, controlling, caring for, and living with that which was God’s gift to the region” 

(93). 

Chapter Three places layered and shifting notions of ‘foreignness’ at the core of the 

analysis, noting how markers of endemism was cast both onto the landscape and its residents 

in order to buffer the harmful effects of post-apartheid ‘alien invasions.’ The anxiety caused 

by black migrants and nonindigenous plant species feature “postapartheid negotiations and 

renegotiations of spatial rule, exclusion, and mobility” as uncontrollable; the narrative of 

postapartheid Rainbow Nation, which commodifies rooibos as a symbol of a unified nation, 

threatens colored and white farmers’ claims of indigeneity to the fynbos ecosystem (103). 

Chapter Four documents the interplays between rooibos’s commodity history with the 

“language of globalization, nostalgia, and class with highly emotive ideas of ecological 

belonging and changing but persistent structures of inequality” (137). Taking oral histories 

and circulating gossip as “concrete, academic histories” (141), Ives points out how both 

colored and white farmers struggle to make sense of the changing agrarian landscape, while 

being confused “about the role of the government, neoliberal economic policies, and 

postapartheid politics” (165). Finally, Chapter Five highlights the structures of anxiety related 

to climate change which further complicate uncertainty of the postapartheid landscape (178). 

Ives notices that, despite white farmers’ attempts to map their genealogy onto the rooibos 

landscape and turn invisible colored residents’ labor, climate change threatens the 

“rootedness of place itself,” as the entire fynbos ecosystem might move southward (175, 

189).  

One of the key theoretical accomplishments of Ives’s book is her successful 

destabilization of the study of indigeneity as anthropology’s savage lot. Critically, her 

ethnographic accounts of the fraught, competing and interconnected claims of belonging to 

the rooibos-region of both white and colored farmers underpin a nuanced analysis of 



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indigeneity, wherein she rethinks the concept as a situated and contingent process of world 

making. Rather than the “rooted, essentialized framings of indigeneity that had violently 

incarcerated ‘natives’ under apartheid,” Ives notes how the different articulations of 

indigeneity based on the plant-place-person triad “allow for a different politics of indigeneity 

that was potentially more flexible, encompassing and emancipatory” (8). Through her skillful 

interlayering of numerous vectors of analysis, such as settler colonial history, apartheid 

politics, post-apartheid reform, racial hierarchies, economic globalization and climate change, 

Ives emphasizes that often opposing, though markedly interdependent, claims of belonging in 

a landscape of profound anxiety and uncertainty make indigeneity as an affectively, racially, 

politically, temporally and ecologically charged notion.  

Reflecting on the possibilities of ties to land of post-Columbian settler populations in 

the Caribbean, Edouard Glissant (1977, 147) argues that, rather than territory and rooted 

absoluteness, land becomes rhizome land; the connection to the land emerges through the 

complicity of relation. Steeped in Heritage provides a fine analysis of the complicity of such 

relations, as Ives teases out the complex affective, ecological, political and racial negotiations 

of belonging that (em-)place settler white and colored populations in the indigenous rooibos 

landscapes. Throughout her ethnography, Ives emphasizes power hierarchies and long-lasting 

economic inequalities between white and colored farmers, closely documenting what Eve 

Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012, 3) refer to as “settler moves to innocence”—i.e. the 

material and ideological practices that “problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and 

complicity, and rescue settler futurity.” Many Afrikaners, Ives notes, foster an ethnic notion 

of their culture through “ritual, festivals and origin myths” (56) to see themselves “as natives, 

not settlers” (57); they imagine their ancestors as “the first occupants of an empty land,” (57), 

while also erasing both the “contemporary existence of the Khoisan” and negating “colored 

connection to land or rooibos” (60). Importantly, Ives’s analysis also captures attempts to 

rearticulate such privilege in the face of political, economic and geographical precarity.  

The book also benefits from Ives’s adroit assessment of rooibos’s “dance of wild 

indigeneity and cultivation” (72), making it a compelling multispecies ethnography. Just as 

Anna Tsing (2015, 4) tracks the matsutake mushroom’s ecology and commerce in order to 

emphasize “open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening 

into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs,” Ives notes how material, spiritual and 

affective relations of belonging and kinship between white and colored farmers and both wild 

and cultivated rooibos are necessarily multifaceted. She highlights that the presence of both 

wild and cultivated rooibos represents both a quality and a tension, engendering problematic 



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“conflations between race and botany” and marking incongruous liminal spaces (71). In this 

sense, while “rooibos’s wild/cultivated identity was celebrated,” “colored people’s 

white/nonwhite identity was pathologized as unnatural” (71). However, while belonging in 

the rooibos-region was unequivocally predicated upon the plant, contingent perception of 

endemism and foreignness in the rooibos landscape meant that “even rooibos, the very 

symbol of indigeneity, could move in and out of these moral certainties: Rooibos is good 

because it is endemic; cultivated rooibos is bad because it leads to plowing in the fragile 

ecosystem. The cultivation of an indigenous plant for the marketplace could reconfigure it 

into a globalized commodity that commits violence against the landscape” (101). 

The book certainly delivers on its promises, offering an engaging analysis of 

multispecies becomings that enable indigeneity in a landscape of precarity. Steeped in 

Heritage makes an outstanding contribution to cultural anthropology. Ives destabilizes the 

discipline’s stubbornness to engage with indigeneity as a sui generis category, instead 

emphasizing how notions of belonging are inherently contingent and constantly evolving. 

The ethnograpy is also contributing to the burgeoning literature on whiteness and settler 

colonialism, complementing the scholarship of Janet McIntosh (2016) on white Kenyans, of 

Darryl Leroux (2019) on French descendants in Canada and the United States, and of T. J. 

Tallie (2019) on Europeans in colonial Natal. Finally, given the centrality of rooibos to Ives’s 

analysis, her book is a valuable addition to multispecies ethnography. Along with scholarship 

such as Tsing (2015) and Eben Kirksey’s (2012), Ives brilliantly teases out how relationships 

between humans and plants are not unilateral, but rather deep entanglements that profoundly 

affect each other.  

 

References 

 

Edouard Glissant. 1977. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,  

[translated by Betsy Wing]. 

Eben Kirksey, 2012, Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of  

Global Power, Durham: Duke University Press. 

Darryl Leroux. 2019. Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity. Winnipeg:  

University of Manitoba Press. 

Janet McIntosh. 2016. Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans. Berkeley:  

University of California Press. 

T. J. Tallie. 2019. Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in  



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Southern Africa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Anna Tsing. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in  

Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.  

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization:  

Indigeneity. Education & Society. 1(1): 1-40.   

 
 
Aida Arosoaie is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-

Madison. Her research sits at the intersection of anthropology of religion, environmental 

humanities and Black feminist geography.  

  
 

 

 

© 2020 Aida Arosoaie 

 


