Living Land

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Ancient soils reborn

Noel Oettlé, Environmental Monitoring Group, South Africa

he Bokkeveld Plateau is a remarkable heritage

site that for many millennia was home to the San

peoples of southern Africa, who left their timeless

art on the walls of caves in the sandstone cliffs of the

area. At the meeting point of the Fynbos and Succulent

Karoo biomes, the vegetation and the soils of the plateau

are remarkably diverse, reflecting evolutionary processes

that are still ongoing. Some of the soils are sands first

deposited in a rift valley that existed here over 300 million

years ago, transformed into monumental rock formations

over time. Others are shales deposited in ancient seas and

by Gondwanan ice sheets.

The diverse soils of the Bokkeveld support the equally

diverse crops of the communities that live here today: wheat

on the loam soils derived from the shales, and rye, oats and

rooibos tea on the infertile sandy soils amidst the sandstone

massifs. Retaining a tenacious grip on the land in the more

marginal parts of the area, where average rainfall may be

as low as 150 mm per annum, a community of small-scale

farmers cultivates rooibos (

Aspalathus linearis

) and also

harvests the wild-growing plant to produce a remarkable

tea, exported to many parts of the world.

Rooibos was first used by the first people of South Africa,

the KhoiSan. In the twentieth century its remarkable health-

giving properties led to its becoming more widely known, both

within and beyond the borders of South Africa. Equipped with

a combination of strategies, rooibos is well adapted to the hot,

dry summers of the area: its tap roots can reach groundwater

metres deep in the sandy soils, nodules on the roots provide

nitrogen and cluster roots use the water from far down in the

soil profile to utilize plant nutrients in the topsoil. These abili-

ties enable rooibos to thrive in conditions that do not favour

any other commercial agricultural crop. While rooibos prom-

ised a way out of poverty for the small-scale farmers of the

Bokkeveld, discrimination and isolation meant that they were

not able to benefit from their knowledge of the plant.

Following the end of Apartheid in 1994, the small-scale

farmers of the Bokkeveld were able to access global markets

for organic and Fairtrade products and thereby improve their

livelihoods. In 2001 they formed the Heiveld Cooperative

to process and market their rooibos products. The Heiveld

has been certified organic since 2001, and in 2004 became

the first rooibos producer in the world to become Fairtrade

certified, illustrating the determination of its members to

create a more equitable society.

Image: N Oettlé

The Bokkeveld landscape, with cultivated rooibos tea in the foreground

Wild rooibos plants are only harvested every second year, and the biodiversity

of the environment is maintained

Image: N Oettlé

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