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boiling point
Boiling Point is suffused with the author’s sympathy for all forms of life and her passion for both
environmental and social justice. It integrates a wide range of sources into a clear and coherent
argument. Much of the text is based on primary research which demonstrates how the impact of
climate change will be most severe on the poor and vulnerable.
—Jacklyn Cock, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

When you tug on a single thing in nature, conservationist John Muir said, you find it attached
to the rest of the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the climate crisis, where tugging
on a thread of our shared atmosphere somewhere on the planet causes the fabric of local
weather patterns to unravel half a world away.

In Boiling Point, Leonie Joubert embarks on a journey into the lives of some South Africans
affected by this phenomenon, people who contribute little to the pollution responsible for
global warming, but are most vulnerable to its fallout: a rooibos tea farmer in the Northern
Cape, a traditional fisherman in Lambert’s Bay, a farmer in the Free State’s maize belt, a political
refugee in Pietermaritzburg and a sangoma in Limpopo mining country.

LEONIE JOUBERT
LEONIE JOUBERT is a freelance science writer and the author of Scorched:
South Africa’s changing climate (2006), which was awarded an honorary
Sunday Times/Alan Paton award. Boiling Point grew out of the 2007 Ruth
First Fellowship.
people in a changing climate

LEONIE JOUBERT
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boiling point
people in a changing climate
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boiling point
people in a changing climate

LEONIE JOUBERT
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Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
2001
http://witspress.wits.ac.za

First printed 2008

Copyright © Text, Leonie Joubert 2008

Copyright © Photographs, Leonie Joubert 2008, except where otherwise credited

ISBN 978-1-86814-467-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans-
mitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, with-
out the prior permission of the copyright holder and publisher.

Cover, design and layout by HotHouse South Africa

Edited by Judith Marsden
Printed and bound by Creda Communications
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Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Foreword: Climate change and the response of our species x

Introduction 1

1 The red tea tales 9

2 A little bit of nothing 27
3 On the whim of the undercurrent 43
4 Waiting for the rains 57
5 When weather goes awry 75
6 Muti queen 87
7 Forces of nature 97
8 One person’s excess is another’s empty belly 115
9 The blessed energy crisis? 135

FACT FILE: The nitty-gritty of climate change 145

Notes 161

References 168
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For money you can have everything, it is said.

No, that is not true. You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but
not health; soft beds, but not sleep; knowledge, but not intelligence;
glitter, but not comfort; fun, but not pleasure; acquaintances, but not
friendship; servants, but not faithfulness; grey hair, but not honour;
quiet days, but not peace.
The shell of all things you can get for money. But not the kernel.
That cannot be had for money.
Arne Garborg, 1851–1924

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by
our institutions, great is our sin.
Charles Darwin, 1809–1882
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To my gaggle of nieces and single nephew

– Isabelle, Stella, Amelie, Megan and Zack:

Sorry about the mess we’ve left you.

uuu
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Acknowledgements

Like so many things in life, this book happened by accident. Actually, it was a string
of accidents – a chance encounter with a newspaper advert, tripping over a conference
invitation here, and stumbling upon a new contact there. It would be impossible to
chronicle each bend in the road that brought me here, but I will try to list all the people
who, somewhere along the way, pointed out the route for me.
I must start by thanking the many people who made this research possible, partic-
ularly those who kindly opened their homes to me, or shared their stories: Hendrik
Hesselman and his family at Dobbelaarskop in the Suid-Bokkeveld; Lambert’s Bay
fisherman Ernest Titus and his neighbour Hennie van Wyk who flouted fisher tradition
by allowing a woman aboard their boat; Albert and Pat Whitfield whose kindness and
generosity made me forget I was working; the community in Sobantu, but particularly
Ward Councillor Dumisane Ngubane; and Selina Thotse for throwing the bones and
introducing me to her muti.
Many other people helped me along the way: Shirle Greig and DaimlerChrysler
provided me with a courtesy Mitsubishi 4x4 without which I would have spent my
first night in the Suid-Bokkeveld sleeping in a dry river bed, thanks to a late-night
map-reading mishap; Cameron Ewart-Smith at Wild and Xplore magazines made the
introduction; Bettina Koelle, Noel Oettle and Rhoda Malgas opened a door into the
Suid-Bokkeveld; Jackie Sunde and Nico Waldeck of Masifundise introduced me to the
Lambert’s Bay crowd; Peter Johnston at the University of Cape Town’s Climate
Systems Analysis Group (CSAG) shared his Free State contacts; Simon Joubert, civil
engineer with SiVEST, introduced me to most of Pietermaritzburg’s water experts;
Gavin Harrison, Val Spearman and Felix Ntombela of Msunduzi Municipality gave
me valuable insights into the history of Sobantu and the vulnerability of a community

viii BOILING POINT

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living on a flood plain; Sithle Sokhela was so efficient that he became more of a
research assistant than just a guide and translator; Simon and Tracey Joubert allowed
me to squat in the Midlands for a few nights; the Stockholm Environment Institute
(SEI) kindly funded my board, lodging and transport in Limpopo; Dr Gina ‘Mansfield
Road’ Ziervogel – research fellow with the SEI and UCT’s CSAG and a dynamic and
invaluable resource, a true leader in her field – and her SEI fellow researcher, Dr
Takeshi ‘Super’ Takama, allowed me to gatecrash their party: thank you both!; and
Herbert Mahlahla translated for me – without his skills, I would never have gained
the insights into the life of a sangoma.
Many scientists have helped me to get my head around the multi-layered issues in
this book. I’d like to single out Dr Roger Smith, Iziko Museum’s resident Karoo expert
and gifted teacher of palaeontology, for the considerable time spent explaining Earth’s
deep past; Eric Miller, Linda Martindale and Adele Baleta who gave all the moral and
professional encouragement I needed; Dr Robin Joubert who travelled all the way
from Durban to be at the Memorial Lecture; the inimitable ladies of The Koeksisters’
Boekclub – Fran Meyer, Margie Jordan, Tessa Redman, Josie Carbone and Karen
Collett – who were always cheering from the sidelines, with at least a glass of wine in
hand; and my parents, Bruce and Elena Joubert, who never seem surprised by how
things have turned out.
This book is an extended version of research done for the 2007 Ruth First
Fellowship. I am indebted to the Ruth First Trust, Wits Journalism School and the
Ruth First Fellowship Committee – Anton Harber, Liza Key, Jackie Cock, Shireen
Hassim and Birgit Schwarz – for the honour of being appointed the 2007 Fellow.
Without the generous funding of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, this journalism fel-
lowship would never have materialised.
Veronica Klipp, Melanie Pequeux and the rest of the Wits University Press team
always seem to make light work of the formidable task of beating a manuscript into
shape. Thank you for making the process so effortless.
No doubt I have inadvertently left someone off this list – I do apologise, but am no
less grateful to everyone who has somehow facilitated my journey during the writing
of this book.
Finally, thanks to Wayne de Villiers for his enduring patience and for keeping the
home fires burning.

Acknowledgements ix
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Foreword

Climate change and the response of our species

By Prof. Brian O’Connell, Rector and Vice-Chancellor, University of the Western Cape

What is success, what is failure? ‘Time alone will tell,’ said theologian Dietrich
Bonhoefer.
I recently spoke to Grade 12 science and maths students at a Cape Flats school about
the success of our species to date. I told them that there are more than six billion of us
and that the number keeps growing. The species Homo sapiens has conquered all, a
hugely unlikely victory given that we are relatively puny – physically. We are not the
biggest, not the strongest, not the swiftest, and definitely not the most agile. In fact, we
are way down on the list of those most likely to succeed. Yet we have. It seems that we
had one big advantage that made this victory possible – it’s what has been called our
greatest evolutionary achievement: the development of our frontal cortex.
American psychologist Jerome Bruner argues that because of our incredible brain
we have evolved into a cultural species. We have learnt to be human, and this process
has been driven by five humanising forces: our long childhood; our capacity to create
organisations; our development of language; our inquisitiveness and urge to explain;
and our technological genius. Together these have proven to be highly effective and
efficient, in general terms. Through these forces we have enhanced our control of both
our social and natural environments.
Just consider how well we have done in terms of human life: we now live longer
than ever before and we have created the idea of the sanctity of human life, enshrined
in declarations and constitutions. Through our technical capabilities, we now keep
alive those whom nature would have dispatched without sentiment. In fact, we are
quite majestic and, because of this, we have been highly successful.

x BOILING POINT
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But we do – we must – recognise the awesome power of nature and how vulnerable
we are. Even within the grips of nature, however, we have become resilient and capable
– and we consistently bounce back. Tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes test us
and we respond. But, in a sense, these events are localised – they impact only on some
of us, on some parts of the globe and, when they occur, we have found ways to deal with
these ‘disasters’. The world rallies, we send aid, and we rebuild or relocate. These
responses simply become projects and, with money, technology and goodwill, we repair
what has been damaged and remain confident about our capacity to contest with nature.
But are we now reaching the limit of what we can control in our natural environ-
ment? Will this gravely impact on our capacity to bring order and majesty to our
social environment? Are we now facing a time when our old brain will be called into
action as we fight for individual or group survival? Climate change might be the
demon that undoes us.
We now know that there has always been natural climate change. Our scientists have
proved this. But now the facts about human caused global warming ‘are in’. After years
of debate, a near consensus among the world's scientists has concluded that the planet is
warming, our climate is changing, and we are contributing significantly to these changes.
Computer models are now being developed to project the possible consequences, and
many of them are desperately frightening.
We know that the Cape Flats in Cape Town, where almost two million people now
live, were once inundated, and we know that we had a glacier in Clanwilliam. We also
know that one day it may be so again. But will these challenges still be of the localised
sort, subject to international humanitarian and technical responses, or will they be of
another order altogether? Will this planet-wide danger remorselessly pit the strong
against the weak as our instincts respond to these threats?
It has taken a long time to convince ourselves of the fact of climate change, and
global warming in particular. But this is not an uncommon trait, as history will confirm.
Think of physicists Galileo and William Harvey, and the British anti-mechanisation
movement, the Luddites, and our own response to HIV/Aids. As Paul Simon, from the
musical duo Simon and Garfunkel, commented so astutely in his folk ballad ‘The boxer’
written in 1968: ‘… a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.’

Foreword xi
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But the good news is that, since we are causing a lot of this change, then elements of
it are under our control and a cultural response is possible. We can apply our consider-
able brain power to the matter, change our behaviour appropriately, and so contribute to
reducing or eradicating the danger. While we may not be successful in stopping the
rhythms of nature, we can certainly deal with the parts that flow from our behaviour.
Should this make us confident? We have trumped every foe of every kind so far. Are
we magnificent? When threatened we think, we innovate, we develop the technology,
we apply it, and we succeed. We have always done so. Surely climate change should
not trouble us too much.
We could be comforted if we did not also have a record of how brutally we behave
when our own interests are challenged. How, in our interests, we subsidise our farm-
ers and so destroy the competition; we concoct reasons for war and destroy those less
powerful so that we might flourish while they die; and we build engines of horror in
order to threaten or destroy those who would challenge our way of life, even if that
way of life is based on conspicuous consumption.
I am reminded of an experience I had standing on a corner of Fifth Avenue in New
York a while ago. As I was waiting to cross the road, a stretch limousine passed. It
was the length of half a street block. To this day, I cannot comprehend why anybody
would consciously create such a vehicle, knowing full well that we live in a time in
which fuel consumption must be rationalised.
If there were no examples such as Kyoto, which portray the refusal of the powerful
to work with others in order to face threats to the very existence of our species
because such cooperation would interfere with their way of life, culture, and right to
self-expression no matter what, we could be confident and cry (as so often – trium -
phantly – we have done), ‘Nature, do your worst’. This we could only do if we had
not experienced a culture's reluctance to accept a scientific truth, such as the existence
of the HI virus and how it infects, and made various, not too challenging cultural
changes and so vanquished it; and if our annals were not replete with examples of
humankind’s mindless brutality when there is a bone to be fought for.
I fear that the challenge of climate change may not simply yield to money and tech-
nology. It may require a largeness of heart and a shared sense of equity that has eluded
us thus far.

xii BOILING POINT

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Only a deep social transformation will suffice, and only majesty will see us through.
Time alone will tell whether we are able to challenge the fantasies that, according to
poet William Butler Yeats, have consistently made our hearts brutish when our narrow
welfare has been threatened. I believe that all of our constitutions, pacts, conventions
and declarations are about to be challenged.
May we surprise the past and embrace a majestic future.

uuu

Foreword xiii
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 Hendrik Hesselman has lived as a

share cropper, a bywoner, in the Suid-
Bokkeveld for over four decades.

Hendrik with his wife, Sanna

(seated), daughter-in-law, Raagel
(standing) and the family dog Oogies.

Dinner simmers over the fire

inside the kookskerm, a rondavel made
of thatching reed and clay. There’s no
running water or electricity, this far
from the municipal grid.
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1
The red tea tales
When the well's dry, we know the worth of water.
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac, 1706–1790

T he rains finally came to the Suid-Bokkeveld in May. Huge, ample fronts

swirled in from the Atlantic with allusions to life and a bitter-sweet sug-
gestion of hope. Back to back, they pounded their way across the
drought-dry escarpment, hurling their contents down onto the scrubby veld below.
The rains came in May to a landscape which had probably changed little since a
hot October day in 1961, when a young man crested the hill above the Dobbelaarskop
homestead, his shoes soaked through from broken blisters after a day-long walk from
the nearest bus stop. After two years in the city, Hendrik Hesselman had been sum-
moned home to the bedside of his ailing father.
‘Ek het bitter swaar gekry (I struggled bitterly),’ he says in neat, colloquial Afrikaans,
referring to his early days on the farm.
Today the 71-year-old ‘Oompie Hen’ sits in the family dining room, a rondavel, and
smiles in a way that suggests he has become accustomed to the frugal life of a farmer
in the deep rural Northern Cape. His wife, Sanna, potters about in the kitchen nearby,
a crude kookskerm made of thatching reed and clay.
Like many of the landless and impoverished in the Suid-Bokkeveld, the Hesselmans
have survived as bywoners – tenants on mostly white-owned farms, initially paying rent
with a percentage of their crop, and later in cash. Many work as seasonal labourers, earn-
ing less than a thousand rand a month, on top of the pittance they make off their land.
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This is fynbos country – the last sliver of a fire-adapted, shrubby veld before the
land gives way to the near-desert succulent Karoo. It is the most arid type of fynbos
and good for just about nothing in the commercial farming sense. Except for tea. In a
century, rooibos has grown from being the poor man’s cha to one of the most sought-
after health teas in Europe, North America and Japan. And the Suid-Bokkeveld has it
growing wild.
Oompie Hen is chairman of the Heiveld Co-operative, a group that has grown to
just over 40 sharecroppers who, in 2001, broke into the swelling rooibos market.
Most of their tea is cultivated but they also comb through the natural veld for rare
wild rooibos. Their individual contributions remain small – some may only have three
or four bags of rooibos to sell each season, amounting to less than 200 kg of crop.
The total 2007 harvest for the Heiveld Co-operative was 60 tons – a fraction of what
a single commercial farm might produce. Many commercial operations will sell 200
tons or more of the stuff each year, and even then it is usually just one of several crops
grown on their farms.
The Heiveld Co-operative is exporting its crop to markets in which people happily
spend their pin money on premium-priced organic, Fair Trade and wild tea. And the
community’s fortune is changing. All the co-operative members have their first bank
accounts. One person had a set of dentures made; another took a family member to
hospital for treatment – both healthcare ‘luxuries’. These are quiet signals that a com-
munity, whose education often does not extend beyond the fourth grade, is dipping its
toe into a viable mainstream market.
The Hesselmans’ operation now sports a second-hand tractor and trailer – paid for
with cash – and a small, if slightly weathered, 2x4 bakkie. This means they can bring
their supplies to Dobbelaarskop by vehicle from nearby Nieuwoudtville, if they have
the cash to afford fuel that month, instead of hauling it in on their backs or by bicycle
or donkey cart.
Desperately poor and mostly illiterate, Oompie Hen would probably never have
believed that he might one day become a landowner. But rooibos may be his ticket to
gaining the one thing that has evaded his family – a title deed. Except that shifting
long-term weather trends might put an end to this dream.

uuu

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Far from Nieuwoudtville’s shops, the family’s ... while the rest of the cooking is done in the
bread is baked in an outdoor oven kookskerm.

The Dobbelaarskop homestead is a cluster of small buildings – some reed and mud
constructions, others brick. There is no electricity out here; it’s too far from the national
grid. A telephone line was only recently strung up, in the late nineties. The occupants
have no running water since the farm’s groundwater is too deep to extract using a bore-
hole and windmill, and they are too remote from anywhere to have municipal water
piped in. Since Hendrik’s parents settled here in 1960, the Hesselmans have depended
on a nearby spring which filters through bedrock and sand before spilling water into a
catchment from where they collect it in buckets for cooking, cleaning, drinking and
watering their livestock.
Only now, after four years of drought, the spring has withered to little more than
a muddy drink. They’ve had to haul water in, in tanks, by bakkie – and if there’s no
cash for fuel, it’s back to the donkey cart. One neighbour refused access to a water
course because he didn’t want anyone other than himself on the property, he said.
The Dobbelaarskop spring is something of a symbol of the tremendous irony of the
global climate crisis. Perhaps it’s helpful to think of it in this way: imagine taking a fish
tank full of water and then emptying the cartridge of your fountain pen into each of its
four corners. Allow your mind’s eye to follow the ribbons of fading colour as their cur-
rents slowly swirl the water about. Eventually, there will be almost no visible suggestion
of ink, but molecular remnants of it will be found in every square millimetre of water.
There’s no way that you could tell exactly where each molecule entered the tank – yet
each molecule is still equally complicit in the pollution of the entire tank of water. Our
home, in this metaphor, is the fish tank, and the water is our atmospheric system.
Let’s stay with the fish tank analogy for a moment longer, to consider just how
ancient and well-travelled its contents are. One molecule of water – that tasteless coali-
tion of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom – might once have been tossed down
in a snowflake over Antarctica during a storm before being imprisoned in an icecap or

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glacier for millennia before being cast adrift in the Southern Ocean in an enormous
chunk of bobbing ice. This would have melted, freeing the molecule to swirl about in
a myriad ocean currents for decades, or even centuries. A chance encounter with the
right conditions might have seen it sucked up by the skies, gathered into clouds and
swept towards the Cape Peninsula during a particularly black south-easter.
The Cape Fold Mountains, the remaining stumps of giant tectonic surges during the
Gondwanaland era, now jut up into the path of clouds that are inbound from the sea.
They harvest the cold front’s mist, channelling droplets of water from the frilly edges
of scrubby vegetation and trickle it down the mountainside, into a riverbed and
onward to a municipal reservoir, through a network of often-leaking pipes and into a
domestic tap from which we can fill our hypothetical fish tank.
The point of this frolic through the natural history of a water molecule is this: who,
on Earth, can claim ownership of that bit of water, which has shape-shifted between
solid, liquid and gas more times than can be counted? This molecule is part of the
global commons – those massive bodies of natural resources upon which we all
depend for survival. These operate outside of any manufactured notion of ownership
which modern humans have chosen to formalise in wordy title deeds and legalised
property rights. No one can own the atmosphere, the oceans or the water cycle. But
we have nevertheless found ways to tamper with them, tainting them with pollution
and tweaking the way in which weather works. And we’re doing this at a global level.
And for the Hesselman family and their fellow members in the Heiveld Co-operative,
this could spell the end of their early ventures into the world of tea exports.
It would be misleading – possibly even incorrect – to say that climate change has
caused the drought which has halted the water that usually trickles from the
Dobbelaarskop spring. Droughts are entirely natural to this region. They are part of
what has shaped the distinctive landscape and many rare plant species for thousands
of years. But we can say for sure that climate change and the parched spring are indi-
cations of exactly how drought affects a family like this, one that exists on the very
margin of the economy and far from the amenities that so many people take for granted
every time they flush a toilet or flick on light switches once the sun has gone down.
Although natural drought cycles are written into the farm’s history, this one is bad,
and it’s a harbinger of things to come.

uuu

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A cluster of reeds, so typical of fynbos,

grips the sandy, nutrient-poor soil. This is
the most arid type of fynbos and good
for just about nothing in the commercial
farming sense. Except for tea.
BP_Chap1:BP_Chap1 9/8/08 10:11 AM Page 14

The Clanwilliam Dam reflects the magnificent vista of the Cederberg. This is rooibos country.

Something curious is happening in the Western Cape, and it’s a bit of an enigma to the
climate scientists who discovered it. The province is warming twice as fast as the rest
of the country, and they can’t explain why.
The first to notice that something was afoot were the commercial apple farmers in
the Cape – their farms were getting warmer and their fruit was battling. There seemed
to be an increase in sunburn to the fruit during summer. In the meantime, during the
autumn and winter months, trees were not becoming fully dormant because the seasons
simply weren’t getting cold enough. The result was early and uneven bud break and
flowering. Orchards were failing to ripen their fruit in unison, making the control of
pests and diseases difficult. The bottom line was very bottom line: their farms were
struggling to produce export quality fruit.
Temperature readings from different weather stations around the province con-
firmed the suspicions of the apple farmers. Over a period of 30-odd years, there
appeared to be a definite increase in maximum and minimum temperatures. It varied
between places, but it averaged at about a rise of 1°C.

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Dr Stephanie Midgley, a horticulturist at Stellenbosch University, noted that in

places the increase was even higher.
This is the first in a series of clues from the natural environment which hint that
long-term weather trends in southern Africa may have been bumped off course by rising
greenhouse gases in recent decades. In 2006, someone at the University of Pretoria
gathered all the weather data from 26 meteorological stations around South Africa
and sat down to indulge in a bit of number crunching.1 The result: between 1960 and
2003 the numbers showed an increase in the average temperature of about 0.5°C dur-
ing that time (averaging at 0.13°C per decade), an increase that was similarly reflected
in an increase in the maximum and minimum temperatures. So the Western Cape’s
1°C average increase was double that of the rest of the country.
The strongest evidence that change is already afoot, however, comes from much far-
ther north – from deep in the Namib Desert where the quiver trees (Aloe dichotoma)
had been dying. It’s become a well-documented case now: many Namibian farmers,
some of whom had grown up playing in the kokerboomwoude around their family
farms, began to notice that the trees were dying out completely or appeared to be
retreating up mountainsides. Since the dead trees failed to rot in the dry climate, they
became their own tombstones, monuments to where they once stood.
A team of scientists from the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI)
set about finding what might have been causing this mass die-off. They surveyed the
full range of the quiver tree, from the north in the mountains of the Brandberg in the
Nama Desert, down to the very south of its natural range in Nieuwoudtville in the
Northern Cape. Near Nieuwoudtville, they found healthy, abundant forests of the tree
aloe. But the further north they moved, they greater damage they found.
In many places they found no evidence of seedlings, which suggested that conditions
had been too harsh, year on year, for seeds to germinate and young trees to survive. In
other places, they found no trees under adult size. By the time they got to the
Richtersveld, they counted a 60 to 70 per cent mortality rate and, once they reached
the valleys near the Brandberg, a few hundred kilometres north of Windhoek, they
found entire graveyards of trees, with hardly a live one in sight.
Counting the dead remnants scattered about the desert, and comparing sites with
photographs taken at the same places decades ago, it was easy to see where the trees
were dying, and to count the rate at which the die-off was happening. A clear trend

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emerged: the further north they travelled, the greater the die-off of quiver trees, with
a few remnant huddles surviving on the higher mountain slopes. In the far south, near
Nieuwoudtville, however, the trees were thriving. Yet even far north, more trees survived
on higher mountain slopes than in valleys.
The significance of this case lies in its confirmation of one of the scientists’ long-
held theories about the responses of the natural environment to shifting long-term
weather trends. In theory, they argued, the climate envelopes in which different species
live would be shifted towards the poles (north in the Northern Hemisphere, south in
the Southern Hemisphere), or else up in altitude as climbing greenhouse gases forced
a rise in global temperatures.
There are seven distinct plant communities in South Africa – desert, forest, fynbos,
grassland, Nama-Karoo, savanna and succulent Karoo. Since their natural range
reflects the climatic envelope of the biome, it made sense to use climate modelling to
see how these plant communities might respond to rising temperatures. In the late
1990s, SANBI and the University of Cape Town climate scientists put some of their
models to the test on the vegetation map of South Africa. These showed clearly that
the natural biomes might shift to the south-east, with a significant drying sweeping
down from the north-west of the country (see ‘Migration of the Big Seven’ on page 24).
The most significant changes, they said, would probably occur in the succulent Karoo
biome, while the Nama-Karoo would shift eastward.
When the SANBI scientists placed their quiver tree survey alongside the bio-climatic
projections of the country’s climatic envelopes, they found the two mirrored each
other perfectly. The quiver trees were dying in the north because conditions were
becoming even hotter and drier in the desert, but they were thriving in the south where
conditions were still favourable.
It looked as though the trees were ‘moving’ south in response to their shifting bio-
climatic envelope. What makes the case more alarming, however, is that they appear
to have been doing so for decades. The desert is pushing down towards the Cape –
and the rooibos tea farmers of the Suid-Bokkeveld are directly in its pathway.

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A pincushion protea marks the edge of a small rooibos plantation in the Suid-Bokkeveld.

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BP_Chap1:BP_Chap1 9/8/08 10:11 AM Page 18

Tasting notes, 27 March 2007: Distinct honey whiff over subtle

herbaceous notes; a distant hint of wood. Contents of teacup are dark and
brooding, a deep rusted red, like metal that’s been stripped down by the
corrosive touch of sea air. It is dark enough to obscure the bottom of the cup.

Bundles of rooibos, fresh from the veld, on their way to be chopped and sweated.

This is the aroma, flavour and colour of the Suid-Bokkeveld’s best wild tea, steaming
within the rim of a teacup during an informal comparative tea-tasting in a suburban
Cape Town kitchen. Alongside a cup of commercial rooibos tea – with its knock-you-
down organic herbal smells and paler, orange-brown colour – the characteristics which
set the wild rooibos brew apart might be indistinguishable to an untrained palate. But

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to the fathers of commercial rooibos tea farming, it was enough to relegate this wild
tea from Nieuwoudtville to the cups of peasants and poor folk who, for generations, had
picked over the flanks of the mountains of the Cederberg for the distinctive needle-like
leaves and branches.
Rooibos grows wild among the mountain fynbos vegetation type on the Cederberg
and its surrounds in the Western and Northern Cape. That’s it. Nowhere
else on the planet. The indigenous Khoisan people first used it, and their
knowledge of the plant has been passed down through the generations
so that many rural communities today still know the wild plants and col-
lect them for their own use.
The locals collected at least four types of wild rooibos – and it was from
this indigenous knowledge that the first foray into commercial rooibos
began, with some export of the product to Europe at the beginning of the
1900s. But it was local medical doctor Le Fras Nortier and the poet cum
botanist C Louis Leipold who were credited with the decision to allow
one type of rooibos, today known as Nortier or Rocklands rooibos, to
become the crop of choice for commercial plantations, leaving the ‘vaal’
or grey tea – like that found in the Suid-Bokkeveld – to its own devices,
along with various other wild types.
Nortier rooibos was selected because of its high yield and what was con-
sidered to be a more market-pleasing odour and taste. It’s this particular tea
that has become the darling of hot beverage menus in Europe, the United
States and Japan – driven mostly by the fact that it’s caffeine-free and has
documented health properties. It’s well known as an anti-inflammatory, a
tonic and digestive aid, and it also has some skin treatment potential.2
In response to the phenomenal demand, the footprint of commercial
rooibos has expanded considerably. And, bizarrely, it looks as though this might be
assisted in part by the shifting climatic envelope, allowing the southern range to thrive
while the north remains productive – for the moment.
Johan Brand, technical manager at Rooibos Limited, said the crop has thrived in
Piketberg during the past few seasons when, ordinarily, normal rainfall for the area
would drown plantations. This is allowing more farming of the plant in formerly higher
rainfall areas in the southern reaches of the fynbos biome.

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But four decades of climbing temperatures are also leaving a mark on traditional rooi-
bos farming areas. Rhoda Malgas, a member of the Nieuwoudtville-based non-govern-
mental organisation (NGO) Indigo Development & Change, comments that many com-
mercial plantations are showing signs of strain. Their longevity is dropping from the
normal seven- to twelve-year lifespan of an ordinary commercial plant to as little as five.
Rising temperatures, increased drought and altered rainfall patterns, which climate
change modellers predict will occur in the two most vulnerable provinces – the Western
and Northern Cape, will continue pushing certain commercial rooibos plantations to
the very margins of viable production. And this in a province that is expected to see a
further 1.5°C temperature increase along the coast and a 3°C increase in the interior
by 2050. Winter rainfall will decrease with a slight increase in late summer downpours
and higher precipitation in the Cape Fold Mountains, although the overall trend is one
of drying. The province will experience more warm days and fewer cooler days.3
Wild rooibos was once known as the poor man’s tea in much the same way as oysters
were collected from the sea by peasants long before they became the food of the elite.
Over the years, wild rooibos was used as a substitute for families when there was no
money to buy the more ‘classy’ English tea. Or English tea was blended into the wild
rooibos to elevate its proletarian status.
Like the Hesselmans, many rural families still take their children with them into the
veld to collect wild tea, and teach them how to process it. It is picked by hand,
chopped up into fine twigs – often using a small axe – before being ‘bruised’ using the
back of the axe. The twiggy, olive-green stuff is left to sweat for 24 hours before being
spread out on a flat rock to dry in the sun, a process that creates the typical rich
brown-red colour we’ve come to associate with the tea. Commercial rooibos goes
through the same process, only on an industrial scale.
Malgas and her colleague Noel Oettle at Indigo have been working extensively
among communities in the Suid-Bokkeveld and Wuppertal area to identify all the
types of wild rooibos, which they are finding to be better adapted to the tough environ-
mental conditions than the commercial rooibos or maktee. Tougher, more drought-
resistant wild rooibos types are known to live up to 50 years and to bounce back from
long, dry spells with greater vigour than commercial plantings.
The research being done on wild rooibos alongside local communities has enabled
Malgas and Oettle to identify distinctive, region-specific wild rooibos types in the

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Suid-Bokkeveld plateau and the northern Cederberg, each of which carries the name
given to it by the locals.4
There’s the rankies tea which grows around Wuppertal in stony, mountainous
areas. It’s a low-yield plant that grows close to the ground and overlaps in places with
another type, the langbeen (‘long-legged’) tea. Bossie tea (‘bush’ tea) grows in the
Hesselmans’ part of the world, in the Suid-Bokkeveld, mostly in the sandstone areas.
It grows into a large, wide, thick bush. The tall, upright rooibos used by communities
around Heuningvlei, Langkloof, Vaalheuning near Wuppertal and the Agter Pakhuis
area is called the langbeen rooibos – and it’s a prolific plant. The ‘tree type’ is also tall
and upright, say Malgas and Oettle, with a single trunk which might grow as high as
an average-sized person’s chest. They’ve found this type around Kleinvlei near
Wuppertal, Lokenburg in the Suid-Bokkeveld, and near a youth camp at Biedouw.
There’s a simmering conflict here, though – as commercial rooibos plantations
expand to meet the growing international demand, so the footprint of the crop extends
deeper and deeper into the veld. The same veld where the wild tea occurs naturally. The
expansion of the commercial interests is starting to wipe out the habitat and the individ-
ual wild rooibos plants whose genetic blueprint might one day mean the very survival
of the industry as a hotter, drier climate continues to grip the province.
It’s somewhat ironic that the success of the poor man’s tea, some of which now
scoops a premium Euro for its novelty factor, could be the very thing that helps to con-
serve the entire rooibos gene pool.

Hendrik’s son, Bennet, works the land. Small profit A diminutive field of cultivated rooibos, amidst the
from tea exports allowed the Hesselmans to buy a veld where the wild rooibos grows freely.
second-hand tractor.

uuu

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The young man who took over the Dobbelaarskop farm after his father’s passing in
1961 would probably never have guessed that he might one day own a piece of land.
But now Hendrik Hesselman would like to secure an endowment for his family – in
the form of a title deed. He would like to hand his rooibos interests over to his
youngest son, Bennet, and hopes that this legacy will include the land they have lived
on for four decades. The recent success of the Heiveld Co-operative, through its rooi-
bos exports, might be Hendrik’s ticket to becoming a landowner – if the family can
survive the increasingly severe droughts, rising temperatures and more erratic rainfall
that is expected to hit the region.
Already the community is adapting its farming methods in an effort to stave off the
creeping desert. Farmers protect soil moisture by mulching the land; they plant buffer
strips and windbreaks between plantations using the reeds and shrubs which occur
naturally in fynbos; and they drop reeds in a hatchwork pattern to protect the soils
which would otherwise be reduced to shallow, dune-like fields as soon as the plough
is put through them and the natural vegetation removed.
Life in the Suid-Bokkeveld is not for softies, Hendrik Hesselman once told a friend, but
when it’s in your blood, there’s nowhere else to be. After so many years on the plateau,
he should know. In 2003 an unexpected cold snap punctuated a severe drought that had
hammered the Heiveld Co-op’s small rooibos plantings. Nearly half of their projected
harvest was lost. Many of the sharecroppers lost everything. Without capital to draw on,
they would not have recovered. This time, however, with the Heiveld Co-operative
behind them, they were able to start again with assistance from other members.
Oompie Hen is not ignorant of the looming cloud of global warming, which threatens
a hotter, drier future. But, for today, he is content because the rains finally came in May.
As if in some overzealous reach for dramatic irony, the clouds moved in over
Dobbelaarskop during the same week that Hendrik Hesselman counted his 71st birth-
day. ‘I don’t have much,’ says the old man, his body swaying minutely to the measured
ambulations of the bakkie as it sways and lurches down the weathered farm road, ‘but
what I have, I’m grateful for.’

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Life in the Suid-Bokkeveld is not for softies, Hendrik Hesselman once told a friend,
but when it’s in your blood, there’s nowhere else to be.

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MIGRATION OF THE BIG SEVEN

S
outh Africa has seven broad groupings of plant communities: desert, forest, fynbos,
grassland, Nama-Karoo, savanna and succulent Karoo. In theory, as the bio-climatic
envelopes in which they live are forced south owing to rising temperatures, species
should follow.
When climate change models were applied to the country’s seven biomes, they indicated
that, by 2050, the bio-climatic zones might shift south-east, with a warming and drying
sweeping in from the north-west. Within the next fifty to one hundred years:

Potgietersrus

25o S
Nelspruit
Mafikeng Pretoria
Johannesburg
Mafi Pretoria
Johannesburg

Ulundi
Kimberley
Bloemfontein
U
Pietermaritzburg
30o S
B
P

Bisho

Cape Town
B
25o E 30o E

Cape T Courtesy of the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI)

Biome
Desert
Forest
Biome distribution in South Africa in 2000 Fynbos
Regional climate is reflected so closely in the vegetation that they are almost congruent. Grassland
Nama-Karoo
Early climate maps literally involved mapping the vegetation first then calling this mapping Savanna
a ‘climate map’.5 Succulent Karoo

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‘ … the bioclimate of the country shows warming and aridification trends which are sufficient
to shrink the area amenable to the country’s biomes to between 38% and 55% of their current
combined (regional) coverage. The largest losses occur in the western, central and northern
parts of the country. These include the virtual complete loss or displacement of the existing
succulent Karoo biome … an extensive eastward shift of the Nama-Karoo biome and contrac-
tion of the savanna biome to the northern borders of the country and its expansion in the
grassland biome. The species-rich fynbos biome … may … lose many species.’6

Potgietersrus

25o S
Nelspruit
Mafikeng Pretoria
Johannesburg
Mafi Pretoria
Johannesburg

Ulundi
Kimberley
Bloemfontein
U
Pietermaritzburg
30o S
B
P

Bisho

Cape Town
B
25o E 30o E

Cape T Courtesy of the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI)

B

By 2050? Biome
This is an illustrative map showing how our biomes might have shifted by 2050 or
Desert
beyond, in response to an anticipated atmospheric carbon dioxide level of 550 parts per Forest
million (PPM). The areas left white will be novel landscapes – scientists can only speculate Fynbos
Grassland
about which species and communities might be found here and which might not. Since Nama-Karoo
its publication, scientists now speculate that this might be a projection for 2080, rather Savanna
than 2050. Succulent Karoo

The Red Tea Tales 25