The History of Rooibos Tea

Rooibos (pronounced as roy-boss) is the Afrikaan word for “red bush”.  It is a broom-like relative of legumes used for making tisane or herbal tea.  In South Africa, it is commonly drunk with milk and sugar although served without in most parts of the world.  Rooibos’ flavor is described to be a little nutty and naturally sweet.  Its production is the same as that of black tea although unlike black tea, rooibos’ taste gets better with longer brewing.  Its brew is reddish brown in color which explains why it is sometimes also referred to as “red tea”.

Although Rooibos was first documented by botanist Carl Thunberg in 1721 the Khoisan people of South Africa has been long using it and were well aware of its medicinal benefits.  Most undoubtedly these native people has been collecting the fragrant rooibos bush, crushing its leaves with their indigenous tools and leaving them in heaps to allow them to ferment and then dry since the early times.

          Rooibos was first exported in 1903 by Benjamin Ginsberg, a Russian cape settler and an offspring of a well known tea family.  He realized the market potential of rooibos and began trading with the Khoisan people.  In his venture to make rooibos tea more profitable, he persuaded local farmers to grow the plants.  But due to rooibos’ small seeds which makes it strenuous to find and collect, attempts in large volume production of the plant failed.  Because rooibos seeds are no bigger than a grain of sand and is very hard to come by, it has reached an astonishing £8/pound which farmers could not afford.  Ginsberg employed seed collectors to meet the demands for the precious seeds. A story is told that while most seed collectors delivered them by matchboxes, one woman delivered them by bags.  She said that by following a trail of ants gathering the little seeds back to their nest, she discovered a granary of rooibos seeds.

          The rooibos tea gained its momentum during the World War II.  A conflict-ridden Asia made it grueling to buy and ship tea and the search for alternatives to “real” tea began.  Rooibos was found to be a very decent substitute for the “real” tea brought in from China.  Since then, its popularity soared and became even more revered worldwide because of Annique Theron’s book “Allergies: An Amazing Discovery” published in 1970.  Annique, a South African mother found out that rooibos tea has the ability to calm colic and insomnia in babies.  From then on, she explored and documented the healing properties of rooibos tea.

Rooibos Teas