History of rooibos tea - Discovery and cultivation
As the traditional beverage of the non-literate South African Koishan tribe, the actual historical roots of Rooibos tea are left in the dark. Neither is it known how exactly, nor since when the Khoisan started to brew a tea from the rooibos leaves.Nevertheless, as early as in 1772, the Swedish botanist Carl Thunberg reported, that South African “natives” drank tea from a "good plant", serving for health purposes. This plant is most likely to have been rooibos. Soon, the rooibos broom was discovered by Dutch settlers as a cheap alternative to the import of black tea from China and India, which lead to the widespread consumption of rooibos within the colonized territories of southern Africa.
In 1904, the Russian settler and tea-tradesman Benjamin Ginsberg developed an interest in the rooibos broom. Applying the traditional Chinese method of fermenting Keemun Tea (that is, in barrels, covered with wet sacking), he soon established rooibos as a widely demanded good, mainly in the colonies, but also increasingly all over Europe.
Already in the early 1930´s, the natural supplies of rooibos were not sufficient anymore to meet the growing demands. Immediately, attempts were undertaken to cultivate the plant. Although the seed was hard to obtain (which made it for a short period of time the most expensive seed in the world), those attempts succeeded finally, and rooibos tea became a world wide product of export, distributed by a lot of major tea-companies. A particular boost gained the market for rooibos tea in the early nineties, in relation with the rise of alternative/esoteric or health-oriented concepts of lifestyle.
How popular rooibos is today (and how profitable its trade), can be illustrated by a famous lawsuit, fought from 1994 to 2005, in the course of which several companies tried to force Burke International to give up the monopoly they virtually had on the trade of rooibos by registering the name of the plant with the "US Patent and Trademark Office". Burke International hat patented the name when rooibos was still nearly unknown in the USA, speculating on future profits, but were defeated in court with the verdict that as an established common name "rooibos" is not protected by patent.