Reinventing Hoodia

Peoples, Plants, and Patents in South Africa

Laura A. Foster

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780295742199
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

Native to the Kalahari Desert, Hoodia gordonii is a succulent plant known by generations of Indigenous San peoples to have a variety of uses: to reduce hunger, increase energy, and ease breastfeeding. In the global North, it is known as a natural appetite suppressant, a former star of the booming diet industry. In Reinventing Hoodia, Laura Foster explores how the plant was reinvented through patent ownership, pharmaceutical research, the self-determination efforts of Indigenous San peoples, contractual benefit sharing, commercial development as an herbal supplement, and bioprospecting legislation. Using a feminist decolonial technoscience approach, Foster argues that although patent law is inherently racialized, gendered, and Western, it offered opportunities for Indigenous San peoples, South African scientists, and Hoodia growers to make unequal claims for belonging within the shifting politics of South Africa. This radical interdisciplinary and intersectional account of the multiple materialities of Hoodia illuminates the co-constituted connections between law, science, and the marketplace, while demonstrating how these domains value certain forms of knowledge and matter differently.

1

Colonial Science and Hoodia as a Scientific Object

To talk about one’s past makes you human. Your human spirit comes from having a story, from having a history.

—MARIO KAPILOLO MAHANGO (!XUN)

ONE OF THE EARLIEST KNOWN DRAWINGS OF HOODIA GORDONII CAN be found in a climate-controlled room in the Bolus Herbarium Library at the University of Cape Town, which holds the colonial-era records of Dutch and British explorers who collected plants in the Cape region. The drawing appears in a book titled Stapeliae Novae by Francis Masson, a botanist with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London, who collected plants in the Cape of Good Hope from 1772 to 1775.¹ Plate 40 of the large brown leather book fills the entire page with a bright, colorful sketch of the plant (here named Stapelia Gordoni), the plant’s spine-tipped tubular stems standing tall and bearing three circular pink flowers. By identifying Masson as among the first to “discover” the plant, the drawing gives no hint of the plant’s precolonial history or San knowledge of the plant.

This chapter’s consideration of Hoodia at the scale of a botanical sketch, colonial artifact, and scientific object serves as the starting point of this book’s analysis of the ways in which the practices of colonial science constructed both Hoodia plants and San peoples as scientific objects within hierarchical schemes of ordering. By approaching both San and the plant as dynamic and changing subjects, this examination of the complex interplay of science and society provides yet another demonstration that scientific knowledge is not natural and fixed but constructed and continually in flux, and it also contests the conventional histories of San and Hoodia to produce a fuller understanding of contemporary struggles over Hoodia and belonging in South Africa.

While mindful of the risk of reinscribing colonial violence by oversimplifying this long and complex history, in this chapter I aim not to provide a comprehensive history of Hoodia, San peoples, or South African politics but to historicize these subjects as part of a broader interdisciplinary, intersectional analysis of contemporary Hoodia struggles.² The discussion here is also informed and motivated by my conversations with San peoples who regularly asked me to share and honor their histories. Despite the potential risk of reductionism or misrepresentation, it remains important to uncover and understand colonial and indigenous pasts because, as Mario Kapilolo Mahango reminds us in the epigraph, having a history is part of what makes you human. In the context of this book, it also plays a vital role in San demands for legal recognition and national belonging.

Historicizing Hoodia: South African Indigenous and Colonial Histories

Representations of San have figured prominently within the historical construction of modern Western science. When developing his hierarchical taxonomies, Carl Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist and zoologist, classified San and Khoi peoples as the lowest order of humans and thus closer to animals.³ Until recently, anthropological accounts of San peoples also depicted them as an isolated and unchanging people stuck in a primordial past.⁴ This view was promulgated for more than four decades from the late 1950s to 2001 in dioramas of San peoples in Cape Town’s South African Museum that displayed them as seemingly frozen in time, thereby preserving, romanticizing, and naturalizing notions of San as closer to nature. This view was even spread internationally in the popular 1980 South African comedic film The Gods Must Be Crazy, which told the story of Xi, a San of the Kalahari Desert, who travels to the end of the world to return a Coke bottle in order to restore the primordial life of his people. As we shall see, these understandings of San as ancient and not fully human peoples continue to have a lasting legacy on science projects and real material consequences for San. In the case of Hoodia, to give but one example, Phytopharm executive Richard Dixey told a reporter for the London Observer that his company had not originally considered benefit sharing with San peoples because they were “extinct,” and, as described in the introduction, Internet ads for Hoodia weight-loss supplements were replete with colonial-era images of San peoples dressed in loincloths and carrying bows and arrows. That the current struggles over the patenting and scientific making of Hoodia are embedded in these cultural understandings of San peoples and the colonial past from which they flow make it imperative to understand South African colonial and indigenous histories. When San peoples made demands for benefit sharing, they were compelled to make their claims within the confines of the law and its acceptable parameters of dissent. This meant strategically asserting themselves as a traditional people with ancient Hoodia knowledge, reinforcing these cultural understandings of San peoples and presenting them as a homogenous group.

Prior to European colonization, various San peoples viewed themselves not as a single group but as distinct and heterogeneous groups who also shared some attributes, customs, and click languages with other indigenous peoples across South Africa.⁵ Indigenous San and Khoi peoples, some of the earliest inhabitants of South Africa, developed strong relationships and interacted often. Although San relied more on hunting and gathering and were historically more mobile and less agrarian than Khoi peoples, who often lived in areas with more reliable rainfall that enabled the herding of sheep and cattle, the distinction between the hunter-gatherer San and pastoralist Khoi is a false dichotomy, as likely some San farmed and some Khoi hunted.⁶ Even referring to these indigenous groups as “San” and “Khoi” is somewhat misleading, as they organized themselves more closely into familial groups than into collective groups of peoples. Prior to colonization, the groups that came to be referred to as San and Khoi had also developed symbiotic relationships with each other, in which San hunters offered game to Khoi and defended Khoi herds in exchange for milk from their cattle.⁷ These mutual relations also produced tensions as Khoi herders and their livestock took over increasing amounts of land, threatening the San hunter-gatherer way of life.⁸ In response, some San began to kill Khoi sheep and cattle with poisoned arrows, prompting violent clashes between the two peoples.⁹ Over time, the majority of San continued to live as hunter-gatherers in small mobile groups, although several San groups took up more agrarian ways of life and began to assimilate with Khoi herders and farmers.¹⁰

These histories shape San and Khoi peoples’ ongoing political mobilization for rights within South Africa since the formal end of apartheid rule in 1994. San peoples have repeatedly deployed these histories to claim rights in South Africa. South Africa does not formally recognize Khoi peoples (Griqua, Nama, Koranna, or Cape Khoi) or San groups (≠Khomani, !Xun, Khwe) as indigenous peoples or grant them representation in the National House of Traditional Leaders. In making claims for San-CSIR benefit sharing in particular, the South African San Council claimed a distinct history as hunter-gatherers to assert that they were the first people to know about Hoodia in order to assert rights against South African scientists. The assumptions differ, though, when San groups make claims to knowing Hoodia in relation to other indigenous peoples. The San Council of Namibia, for example, recognized San and Khoi as sharing a similar history when the council was negotiating agreements with the Association of Nama Traditional Leaders to form a joint venture in which they would share benefits and knowledge regarding indigenous plants. In advancing their political and economic rights through benefit sharing, San and Khoi aim to strengthen their demands that the government recognize them as indigenous peoples.

San and Khoi peoples’ ongoing political efforts to negotiate with the ANC government for formal recognition are also shaped by the histories between them and Bantu-speaking groups who were later classified as Black under apartheid. Between the fourth and the late eighteenth centuries, interactions between San and Khoi changed with the emergence of Bantu-speaking peoples who engaged in mixed-farming practices in the eastern region of the territory.¹¹ Many Bantu-speaking peoples spoke dialects of Nguni, which is the basis of the modern Xhosa and Zulu languages, and a second language that evolved into what are now known as Sotho, Pedi, and Tswana.¹² Their economies were based on hunting, gathering, and herding, on cultivating crops such as sorghum, and on trading in iron and copper. Although they developed relations with San and Khoi through mutual exchange and trade, as the Bantu-speaking groups’ diverse cultures and economies began to dominate southeastern Africa, they began to threaten San and Khoi ways of life.¹³ Violent clashes between the groups ensued, and some San and Khoi were forced to assimilate with Bantu-speaking peoples.¹⁴

The relationships among the indigenous peoples of South Africa were also shaped by colonialism. The founding of the Dutch Cape Colony in 1652 exacerbated existing tensions between San and Khoi. Much of this began through practices of what Winona LaDuke refers to as “the power of naming and claiming” in colonizing indigenous subjects.¹⁵ Early Dutch settlers referred to San and Khoi in a derogatory manner, calling San “Bosjesmen,” or Bushmen, meaning low-status people from the bush, and calling Khoi “Hottentots.”¹⁶ As Dutch settlers took possession of increasing amounts of land and began growing crops and herding cattle, accelerating tensions led to violent clashes as Dutch took Khoi and San peoples’ cattle, exploited divisions among the two groups, and turned their superior weaponry against the indigenous groups, leading to large-scale violence and the death of many San and Khoi.¹⁷ Some San and Khoi survived by fighting back or moving to new lands, while others were forced to work for Dutch landowners under harsh conditions alongside slaves that Dutch brought from southeast Asia to help build infrastructure for the growing colony.¹⁸ This history informed later struggles for rights to Hoodia, with the South African San Council accusing scientists of participating in familiar colonial practices by taking their knowledge without recompense. That Unilever was a Dutch-based company made the connections between Hoodia research and the colonial past even more apparent.

The colonization of South Africa, however, occurred on multiple spatial and temporal scales, as it was ruled first by Dutch and then by British forces starting in 1795 before reverting back to Dutch rule in 1803 and then finally British control in 1806. British forces quickly implemented a systematic plan of conquest over South African lands and peoples that resulted in even more bloodshed and violence. An influx of British settlers in 1820 took over considerable amounts of land and increased farming production, boosting tensions with local Dutch settlers and indigenous groups. British settlers distinguished themselves from Dutch settlers by referring to the latter with the derogatory term Boers, meaning farmers, while Dutch settlers referred to themselves with the term Afrikaners, the Dutch word for Africans.

More importantly for our current purposes, British land seizures also increased European settlers’ control over Khoi and San. The British needed more labor to work their newly obtained lands, but Britain had banned the slave trade in 1807, making it illegal to acquire new slaves. They therefore used Khoi and San as farm laborers and domestic workers alongside individuals who were already enslaved. Although Khoi and San laborers did not always give in easily—for example, they staged a large-scale revolt against their conditions in 1808—by the time a set of 1828 British proclamations forced British settlers to grant equality under the law to San, Khoi, and former slaves, generations of forced labor had increased poverty and landlessness among those groups to such a degree that many had little choice but to continue working on white-owned farms.¹⁹ While England pressured British settlers to follow emancipation proclamations, the settlers found new ways to distinguish white ruling classes from groups of Khoi, San, and former slaves by referring to those groups as “Cape Coloured People,” setting a foundation for the eventual system of racial classification and segregation under apartheid. These South African histories continue to shape its politics today, but as South African scholar Premesh Lalu argues, colonialism, postcolonialism, apartheid, and postapartheid are so woven into South African politics and subjectivities that scholars should not view them as linear but rather examine how South Africa has never been postcolonial.²⁰ By mobilizing against Hoodia patents and demanding benefit s...