Apartheid and the Erosion or Preservation of Medicinal Plant Knowledge

Abstract

Aston Philander et al. (2011) present data from a fascinating, important and carefully researched study of local plant knowledge in greater Cape Town, illustrating variation in knowledge of medicinal plants, a correlation between levels of knowledge and length of urban residence, and evidence for the continued transmission of knowledge among recent Xhosa-speaking rural–urban migrants. From this, they draw the questionable conclusion that these patterns can be attributed to apartheid. The authors take apartheid on the terms of its designers, as a policy of ethnic separation, while ignoring the consequences of the massive forced displacement which was used to put this policy into effect. Nationwide, under the Group Areas Act of 1950, which created segregated residential zones, more than 3.5 million people were forcibly displaced between 1962 and 1980 (Hallett 1984: 316), transforming many rural landscapes into denuded and densely populated slums (e.g., Murray 1992). South Africa and its “homelands” also forcibly moved nearly three million Africans under villagization and soil conservation programs (de Wet 1995: 28) which were not applied to whites. Before turning to Cape Town, prima facie evidence compels skepticism that apartheid could lead to the preservation of medicinal plant knowledge, given the known effects of resettlement on social capital and (dis)continuity in cultural transmission and natural resource use (e.g., Cernea 1997, Ross 2002). The geography of apartheid-era displacement further suggests that forced resettlement likely destroyed, rather than sustained, environmental knowledge. In greater Cape Town, 150,000 people classified as Coloured were “evicted from their natal homes and communities in the Cape Peninsula between 1957 and 1985 under the Group Areas Act.” In particular, communities living in what became the whites-only southern suburbs, closest to the natural areas of Table Mountain and amongst the farms of Constantia and nearby areas, were displaced into the newly-created Cape Flats townships (Besteman 2008). Conversely, the region least affected by forced displacement was the predominantly Xhosa-speaking “Transkei” region of what is now the Eastern Cape province, which remained free of large-scale white settlement and largely free of internal removals. Substantial migration of Xhosa-speakers to Cape Town (in particular to the Cape Flats townships, where those classified as African were not allowed to live during apartheid) is largely a voluntary, post-apartheid phenomenon, precipitated by the end of influx control (the infamous “pass laws”) in 1986 (Bekker 2002: 24), and is “dominated by people from