The political and historical layers of South Africa’s botanical gardens need to be unpeeled to confront colonial and apartheid legacies
Since 1994, in the post-apartheid era, a number of significant buildings were added to the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town, South Africa, reflecting the broader sentiment of the country ambitiously re-establishing itself in the world. In 2013, Kirstenbosch’s centenary was celebrated with the building of a 130-metre-long curved tree canopy walkway in its arboretum. Known as the Boomslang (tree snake), the structure by local architect Mark Thomas and engineer Henry Fagan quickly became a popular attraction. Together, the new additions strengthened Kirstenbosch’s profile as a site of research, biodiversity conservation, education, leisure and tourism.
While the developments added since the 1990s certainly increased the popularity of Kirstenbosch, they did little to address the institution’s colonial and apartheid legacies. Kirstenbosch is framed as a site of natural heritage, defined as contrary to cultural heritage, which complicates any recognition of its political history. Yet Kirstenbosch did not evolve outside politics: the botanical garden was built in 1913 on land that had been shaped by centuries of Indigenous presence; violent conflict in the wake of European settlers’ occupation of the Cape in the mid-17th century; and colonial forestry and agriculture, both of which included the use of the labour of enslaved people. The botanical garden was established with the aim to contribute to the development of the newly established Union of South Africa by promoting science, the economy, conservation, education and a sense of belonging and citizenship among white South Africans. It evolved within imperial networks in the southern African region which is reflected in Kirstenbosch’s collecting practices which, while claiming to exclusively represent the South African flora, included plants from areas under South Africa’s military influence in the southern African region.
The garden hosts the Cycad Collection, palm-like ‘living fossils’, which are slow growing and millions of years old
Credit: Melanie Boehi
In the discussions leading up to Kirstenbosch’s establishment in 1913, Harold Pearson, who was to become the institution’s first director, listed easy accessibility for ‘as large a number as possible of the civilised inhabitants of the country’ – meaning white South Africans – as a criterion for the selection of a site. Black people were imagined as its labourers but not as its visitors. Throughout the apartheid era, Black visitors were not formally excluded, however they were actively discriminated against; refusal to be served in the popular teahouse regularly led to bitter complaints.
Kirstenbosch has for a long time been culturally alienating, as it has throughout its existence centred Western knowledge systems. Plants were displayed as objects of science, ordered according to taxonomic and phytogeographic criteria, and equipped with labels featuring their Latin scientific names – despite focusing, together with the other South African National Botanical Gardens, on plants classified as indigenous to South Africa. Popular names in English or Afrikaans were included, but no connections were made to the African and Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies to which the plants were attached.
The construction of the Boomslang in 2013 is symbolic of an institutional preference to gaze into the distance rather than at the land on which it was established a hundred years earlier, and of how the institution added layers of political history to the landscape. While the post-apartheid government actively demanded the transformation of museums and archives into institutions that served a democratic society, botanical gardens rarely featured in these debates. Rather, botanical gardens were regarded as apolitical; a perception that itself has a specific political history in South Africa.
‘The narrative framed African plant knowledge through an ethnobotanical lens that presented a narrow focus on the ethnicity of people using plants’
The fact that Kirstenbosch was and still is perceived as an apolitical institution is primarily a product of politics of ‘botanical diplomacy’ that the apartheid government developed with the aim to counter international criticism. To present supposedly apolitical and benign images of South Africa to an international public, plants from Kirstenbosch were displayed at flower shows around the world, and on the occasion of Kirstenbosch’s 50th anniversary in 1963, international botanists were invited on a tour of the country with the aim that they would spread positive messages in their home countries. In these endeavours, Kirstenbosch functioned as a front organisation for the apartheid government, which organised and financed the floral propaganda activities.
None of this is acknowledged in the narratives presented at Kirstenbosch today. Official storytelling focuses on the institution’s white directors, curators and their political allies who are inscribed into the landscape with buildings and garden sections named after them. Little mention is made of the people who actually built the garden: the inhabitants of Protea Village – a community of descendants of enslaved people who lived adjacent to the botanical garden until they were forcibly removed during the apartheid era and of whom many worked at Kirstenbosch, often over several generations; the African workers and contributors to plant-collecting expeditions; and convict labourers who were forced to toil in the botanical garden.
Photographed by David Goldblatt in 1993, a wild almond hedge was planted in 1660 to prevent the Indigenous Khoi from removing livestock from this, the first European settlement in South Africa
Credit: David Goldblatt Legacy Trust. Courtesy Goodman Gallery
In 1994, it was suggested that muthi (medicine) gardens should be added to the South African National Botanical Gardens. The first to be established in 1997 was a ‘Zulu Muthi Garden’ in the KwaZulu Natal National Botanical Garden in Pietermaritzburg. Its aim was to provide a display relevant to the majority of South Africans that would promote interest in the country’s cultural and biological wealth, contribute to ex situ conservation, develop partnerships with traditional healers and plant practitioners, and add to the botanical garden’s attraction. The concept was expanded beyond the medicinal to include wider categories of use, and Useful Plants Gardens were established in all of the South African National Botanical Gardens, including in 2002 in Kirstenbosch. The Useful Plants Garden focuses on African and Indigenous uses of plants, including about 150 plant species, which are ordered according to categories of use. In the development process, izangoma/amagqirha and izinyanga (traditional healers) and Rastafari bossiesdokters (a prominent group of plant practitioners in the Western Cape) were consulted. The plants are accompanied by labels which, in addition to Latin taxonomy, also include names in English, Afrikaans and African languages as a standard.
In contrast to the other structures in the gardens, the round hut that was erected in 2003 in the Useful Plants Garden appears small and unimposing. Yet it speaks more powerfully than any of the other architectural additions of ideas, imaginations, hauntings and possibilities for rooting a decolonial botanical garden at Kirstenbosch. Like the Useful Plants Garden, the hut was developed in a communal way, with master hut builder, uTata Zanazo, to lead the construction. The hut is designed in the architectural style developed by the amaMpondo people in the Eastern Cape: a wattle and daub design, with a structure of woven branches and a mixture of mud and cow dung as filler. When the finishing touches were added, a group of township schoolchildren were invited to participate. For many of the children who grew up in Cape Town, this was their first encounter with traditional architecture. The hut thus not only drew inspiration from communities outside the botanical garden, but also actively became a building around which a new community could emerge.
The traditional Xhosa/Mpondo hut in the Useful Plants Garden displays African and Indigenous objects made from the plants. It is pivotal in centring not only African plant knowledge and practices, but also the history of Black people at Kirstenbosch
Credit: Melanie Boehi
While celebrated as a step towards the Africanisation of Kirstenbosch, the Useful Plants Garden did however reproduce colonial stereotypes in several ways. By setting apart a display section for African and Indigenous plant knowledge, the supposedly universal order of botany in the rest of the botanical garden was left undisturbed. Several information boards followed a narrative that framed African plant knowledge through an ethnobotanical lens that presented a narrow focus on the ethnicity of people using plants, failing to capture the heterogeneous nature of plant practices in South Africa and marginalised plant practitioners who do not readily fit into ethnographic and ethnobotanical categories, including the descendants of enslaved people. African knowledge and technologies were also framed in opposition to Western medicine as ‘ancient’ and ‘forgotten’; thereby implying a linear development from traditional to Western medicine. As a distinctly cultural display in a natural history setting, the imagery invoked by the hut also connects to an archive of colonial ethnography, imperial exhibitions and the human zoo.
The Useful Plants Garden is not only haunted by colonial epistemologies but the hut also introduces a ghostly presence. The display section was largely celebrated as the first representation of Africans in the botanical garden, which – unintentionally – added a layer of silence to the history of Africans contributing to building the botanical garden, both as participants in plant-collecting expeditions and as workers. Before the end of apartheid, labour at Kirstenbosch was organised in a racialised way which also structured the allocation of staff housing. White employees were allocated houses; employees classified as coloured were accommodated in cottages, and African employees had to build huts for themselves. It had been largely forgotten that Africans had worked at Kirstenbosch; many current employees thought that in the past, all Black staff members had been classified as coloured – an assumption that mirrors the broader apartheid era policy of treating Africans as alien to the Western Cape. Yet, Kirstenbosch’s archives contain references to African employees and a map from 1925 includes the huts. Reading through the archive, the hut in the Useful Plants Garden becomes a starting point for not only centring African plant knowledge and practices but also the history of Black people at Kirstenbosch.
An intricate web of string keeps hungry Egyptian geese at bay at Kirstenbosch – the string entwines humans, the wild geese and the seedlings they both prize in a messy multispecies story, from which new botanical narratives can grow
Credit: Melanie Boehi
The Useful Plants Garden illustrates both possibilities and limitations for rooting a decolonial botanical garden at Kirstenbosch. Crucially, the Useful Plants Garden can only succeed as a decolonial intervention if Kirstenbosch becomes more accessible. Although constituting the majority of the city’s inhabitants, Black, working-class and poor people continue to be a minority among visitors, most of whom are white and wealthy. With an admission fee of R75 per adult, tickets are too expensive for most locals. A further barrier to the entrance of the botanical garden is in the apartheid legacy of spatial planning, which forced Black people to live far away in the townships on the Cape Flats with lack of adequate public transport to Kirstenbosch.
The challenge for the future will be to develop modes of storytelling that depart from ethnobotany and ethnography and allow for a multiplicity of stories, voices and dialogues to emerge that transcend the nature-culture binary that currently structures Kirstenbosch’s displays. To do so successfully, the Useful Plants Garden must be approached as a starting point for the transformation of Kirstenbosch and the other South African National Botanical Gardens. Key to a successful transformation process is the inclusion of diverse interests in redefining botanical gardens to strategically serve different sectors of South African society. Practically, this means redefining the value of traditional knowledge systems, supplying access to plant material and providing scientific services to enhance methods of sustainable plant and biodiversity use.
