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162 Chapter 4
infl uence patterns of biomedical research disclosure. Bruno Latour and
Steve Woolgar, scholars of science studies, have convincingly argued that
historically academic institutions were based not on the laws of the mar-
ket but on systems of gifts and credit. Researchers gained prestige from
rates of publication, academic honors, and personal networks in an at-
mosphere of relatively low pay for university professionals. However, the
deepening bonds between industry and scientifi c research in fi elds like
pharmaceutical discovery, biotechnology, and electrical engineering af-
ter World War II led to alterations in these historical regimes of academic
credit.
78
Particularly in scientifi c fi elds where research might be patented
for industrial applications, scientists no longer sought academic popu-
larity through priority of publication but rather fi nancial gain through
timely patent applications. CSRPM, with a dual mandate to commercial-
ize and research plants, found itself caught up in these transformations
of research disclosure. Furthermore, the fi nancial and po liti cal troubles
in the country as a whole made the possibility of industrial rights both
more alluring and more elusive to scientists determined to be seen as
equals on the world stage.
The saga of Ghanaian efforts to commercialize Cryptolepis presents
an alternative narrative and case study that deserves to be integrated
into the discourse on contemporary bioprospecting. At the outset, the
scientists in Ghana were trying to reverse the narrative of quinine, where
colonists extracted fever barks from South America. Much like Mex-
icans interested in creating a drug industry from hormones in wild
yams, the Ghanaians believed that they might develop an in de pen dent
pharmaceutical industry through plant research.
79
CSRPM did not have
the adequate resources for signifi cant chemical tests that they believed
were necessary for the realization of their dream of an herbal drug in-
dustry, forcing collaboration with foreign researchers. The takeover of
the drug wing of GIHOC by Phyto- Riker, a U.S.- based fi rm keen to de-
velop herbal drugs underscored the enduring diffi culties Africa has had
with managing and capitalizing on its commercial resources and was an
ironic conclusion to efforts at CSRPM to make sure no one “in Eu rope
or America claimed credit for” African investigations of Cryptolepis, as
Addae- Mensah had hoped. Negotiating a complex terrain of professional
ties, Ampofo and Tackie’s dilemmas provide a poignant portrait of the
fi nancial and professional strategies necessary for survival in the Ghana-
ian scientifi c community during the late twentieth century.
But the story told here also points to grounds for healers’ mistrust
of scientists with greater access to international legal regimes. Healers
were continually pressed to reveal plant medicine information in their
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Take Bitter Roots for Malaria 163
interactions with scientists in Ghana and with members of internation-
ally funded nongovernmental organizations. The scientists encouraged
individuals knowledgeable about plants to donate concoctions for study,
often making vague promises to give them credit or even to patent any
cures in the participant’s name. Given cases like that of Cryptolepis, why
should healers trust someone who might transform a simple recipe for
bitter roots into a drug protected with international patents and foreign
trademarks?
Elsewhere in Africa, rural populations have been more successful in
holding scientists accountable for their investigations into medicinal
plants. Although Ghanaian healers sought priority alongside scientists,
in other contexts priority went to communities as a whole, opening
the way for joint benefi t sharing. Chapter 5 examines the case of hoo-
dia in South Africa, where the San share profi ts with pharmaceutical
companies and research bodies. By the close of the twentieth century, a
sea change in international policy on bioprospecting alongside shifting
po liti cal dynamics in South Africa meant that scientists could no longer
substitute their names for those of healers and disenfranchised groups
who led them to new treatments.
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Figure 5.1 Bottled hoodia in Economic Botany Collection, Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew. (Photo by author.)
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165
Apartheid had nutritional roots as well as consequences.
—Diana Wylie, Starving on a Full Stomach
If you take the green District line of the underground railway in Lon-
don all the way west to Kew Gardens Station, follow the signs outside
the train to the Royal Botanic Gardens, and look behind a small pond
within the sweeping park grounds, you might catch a glimpse of the
Sir Robert Banks building. Its underground structure emerges as a wall
of glass above the water. Down below it contains a vast cellar, home to
the economic botany collection that contributed to Kew Gardens’ status
as a world heritage site. It contains preserved specimens of all the major
healing plants in the world, stacked along rows of shelves, stored in
small drawers, and leaned against the walls. The cellar is a stark visual
reminder of the wider complexities of sustaining not only medicinal
plants in the environment but also the communities that used them and
claim own ership to them today.
Here, on a damp autumn day, I held a bottled specimen of hoodia. Two
pieces of the plant, bleached and bloated with age, fl oated inside a heavy
glass cylinder with a fl at top that I hoped would not open. Pickled around
1874, when the British governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Henry Barkly,
donated it to science, the cactus- like plant hailed from Namaqualand, an
arid region between South Africa and Namibia. It was one of many such
CHAPTER 5
Take Kalahari Hoodia for Hunger
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166 Chapter 5
specimens preserved in aging, amber liquids. Formerly, the collection of
bottled plants— a set of odd curiosities into which school children would
peer— had resided with the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. But
by the time I visited, these and other plant relics had moved into the
temperature- controlled ware house of the Banks Building to be perused
by the occasional researcher. In the softly lit basement, ghosts of plants
past mingled as I wondered what this plant’s collector had known about
it before dispatching it to En gland more than a century before. Were its
prickles still sharp, or would they fall limp if the liquid spilled?
1
The plant’s name, hoodia, may sound familiar as a new miracle diet
drug. At the Longs Drugs Store across from my house in Berkeley, Cali-
fornia, I could purchase such products as Liquid Hoodia Extreme, DEX-
L10 Hoodia Gordonii, Maximum Strength Hoodia Sure Rapid- Gels, or
H57Hoodia, all of which claimed to contain Hoodia gordonii from South
Africa. At Elephant Pharmacy, an alternative health store two blocks
away, twenty bags of Bija Healing Teas’ Hoodia Slimming lingered on
the shelves. A pamphlet inserted in a box of Bija’s Hoodia tea explained,
“When Bushmen of Africa’s Kalahari Desert went out on long hunting
trips, they would munch on the stem of the Hoodia Cactus to stave off
thirst and hunger. [We have] resurrected this thousands- of- years- old se-
cret: curbing the appetite to help with weight loss.”
2
The Bija box design
incorporated photographs of cowrie shells, a South African stamp show-
ing a rhinoceros, and an elephant bead. All of the hoodia packaging
sported green, gold, and black colors, and several boxes contained copies
of certifi cates from South African bodies guaranteeing rights to export
barrels of powdered hoodia from the country.
3
This chapter considers how hoodia migrated from its location in
the Kalahari Desert region of South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia to
my neighborhood pharmacy in the United States. It seeks to address
the question of who benefi ts when plant medicines become drugs. In
contrast to other plants in this book, the story of hoodia’s transforma-
tion into a blockbuster drug and international nutraceutical in the late
twentieth century came at a time when scientists were under pressure to
acknowledge the rights of communities thought to have originally used
medicinal plants— in this case, the Bushmen (or San) living in the Kala-
hari desert. The 1992 International Convention on Biological Diversity
(CBD) recognized the contribution of First Peoples groups to drug discov-
ery, and the 2004 South African Biodiversity Act provided a blueprint for
how researchers were to compensate local communities in the country.
As we shall see, however, the case of hoodia and the San rests uneasily as
a model for profi t- sharing herbals drugs.
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Take Kalahari Hoodia for Hunger 167
Although it might be tempting to class this case as an apparently
unique “success story” for benefi t sharing, the history of hoodia suggests
similarities to the trajectory of other medicinal plants in this book.
4
By
the 1700s, use of hoodia among other African ethnic groups and set-
tlers from Eu rope made the plant less San and more of a pop u lar South
African plant, with other communities staking a claim to knowledge.
Additionally, other countries and other San communities outside South
Africa sought benefi ts from the South African Council for Scientifi c and
Industrial Research (CSIR), the research institution that patented the
drug. Second, South African scientists (like researchers in Ghana, Re-
public of Congo, Madagascar, Canada, and the United States) also used
patents to protect drug insights. Only as an afterword, history pushed
them into benefi t- sharing agreements structured to right wrongs from
the apartheid period. It remained unclear whether CSIR initially ob-
tained samples and information from the San in South Africa during the
1960s, although it was po liti cally expedient to assume they did.
5
Finally,
the pharmaceutical preparation from hoodia was as elusive as producing
cryptospirolepine for malaria. In fact, the potential toxicity of a hoodia
drug, as well as competing patents and unlicensed preparations, destabi-
lized the CSIR’s agreements with the San. The more I learned, the more
this perfect case began to look like Madagascar and the rosy periwinkle,
where important medicinal knowledge spread to Jamaica, the Philip-
pines, Canada, and beyond.
6
Thus, I began to wonder: What were the pa ram e ters of community
and the period of original knowledge? How do we affi rm and pay the
codevelopers of knowledge without resorting to the racial and class log-
ics of greedy (foreign) scientists versus poor indigenes? Phi los o phers have
argued that scientifi c knowledge is a public good that cannot belong to a
par tic u lar ethnic group.
7
Similarly, critics of expanding intellectual prop-
erty regulations have argued that “ethnobiological knowledge should . . .
remain where it belongs— in the global public domain.”
8
And yet, the
claims of patent holders and benefi t sharers in South Africa showed how
a society might construct lineages of scientifi c inheritance along class
and ethnic lines.
MULTIPLE USERS OF GHAAP
The San were the fi rst “bioprospectors” in Southern Africa. For at least
120,000 years, they have lived a nomadic lifestyle in the semiarid and
arid regions skirting the Kalahari Desert.
9
To survive in areas with low
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168 Chapter 5
rainfall, they experimented with different species of wild plants, iden-
tifying vegetation containing nontoxic sap and juices. To protect their
skin from the harsh climate, San began to dry leaves of certain shrubs
that they carried in small containers made from turtle shells. They mixed
the dried leaves with animal fat, smearing it on their body as skin lo-
tion. Their nearest neighbors, the pastoralist Khoi, named them in the
Nama language after the bushes or San that literally adorned their bod-
ies. For settlers from Eu rope, San use of herbal creams represented a
sign of “fi lth” and grounds for discrimination.
10
Today, the more than
100,000 San residing across South Africa, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe,
Botswana, and Angola seek to claim rights to valuable plants associated
with them, including the thirst- quenching hoodia and the antimicrobial
bush leaves used for skin protectorants, Pteronia onobromoides.
11
Historically, the San recorded the past through conversations, songs,
and pictorial art on rocks. Until the late nineteenth century, they did not
write down their language. The San’s early twenty- fi rst century lawyers
therefore faced an evidentiary problem familiar from the other stories
told in this book— namely, how to document the San’s use of hoodia
for the same purposes covered in the CSIR’s patent. For evidence of the
San’s claim as a First Peoples group they could point to archaeological
remains and distinctive murals throughout Southern Africa. Further de-
scriptions of hoodia’s use among the San came down through accounts
of early explorers and settlers of Eu ro pe an descent in South Africa. But
those accounts also alluded to the ways in which the plant was used
among other groups besides the San.
The earliest written references to consumption of desert succulents
date to the 1700s, with increasing accounts from the nineteenth century
made by Eu ro pe an settlers, missionaries, and explorers as white and
other African families displaced Bushmen communities. From the seven-
teenth century, Khoi- San lived near the Atlantic Coast of Southern Africa
and provided information on hoodia to new migrants who came from Af-
rica, Eu rope, and Asia. San included hoodia within the category of juicy,
edible plants known as “xhoba” or “ghoba,” a term that migrated into the
creole language Afrikaans as “ghaap” or “ngaap.”
12
An early observer of
ghaap on the Cape of South Africa in the 1770s noted that succulents
were consumed not only by indigenous inhabitants that he called “Hot-
tentots” (now seen to be a derogatory term replaced by “Khoi- San”), but
also by Dutch farmers. The observer referred to several wild plants by
their earlier botanical names and recalled in a memoir of his journey
that “the Stapelia incarnata, a very branchy plant without leaves, was
found in the vicinity of the mountains, though it was rather scarce;
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Take Kalahari Hoodia for Hunger 169
the Hottentots ate it, after peeling off the edges and prickles.”
13
He ex-
plained that Dutch settlers also harvested a species of Stapelia, possibly
now known as H. pilifera, and preserved it in vinegar
14
(see Figure 5.2).
The term ghaap covers a number of stapeliads, a group of succulents,
now considered part of the botanical family Apocynaceae.
15
Botanical
names for hoodia varied over time and overlapped with related species
of Trichocaulon, Stapelia, or hoodia. As scientists debated the botanical
differences among the plants, not only did hoodia’s assigned genus shift,
but its many “discoverers,” often amateur botanists, constantly affi xed
their names to new species. Hoodia juttae, for example, was “discovered
by Mrs. Jutta Dinter on a botanical expedition to Klein Karas in October,
1913, and dedicated to her by her husband.”
16
The genus Hoodia was re-
named after one Mr. Hood in 1830, and gordoni—later gordonii— after col-
o nel R. J. Gordon, who made or commissioned a drawing of the species
on a journey along the Orange River in 1779.
17
Figure 5.2 Collection points of forty- four Hoodia gordonii, H. pilifera, and H. currorii samples in herbaria
accessed through the online database of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility: Southern Cape
Herbarium and Bolus Herbarium, South Africa; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Botanical Conservatory
at University of California, Davis; Missouri Botanical Gardens; National Museum of Natural History;
National Botanic Research Institute. (Source: Global Biodiversity Information Facility Data Portal.)
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170 Chapter 5
Eu ro pe an settlers migrated to South Africa in large waves during the
nineteenth century, helping to increase references to hoodia and ghaap.
Dutch settlers competed with British colonists for jurisdiction over the
Cape, with the discovery of diamonds and gold deposits pushing those
of Eu ro pe an descent further inland. Eu ro pe an migrants looked to South
Africa’s unique fl ora for another avenue to acquire wealth. A physician
who taught at South African College in Cape Town cited the usefulness
of hoodia in a botanical survey he published in 1862:
The stem of this plant, which grows in the dreary wastes of the Karroo,
is fl eshy and of the size and form of a cucumber. It has an insipid, yet
cool and watery taste, and is eaten by the natives who call it Guaap, for
the purpose of quenching their thirst. Infused with spirits, this plant is
said to be a useful remedy in piles.
18
As rail travel improved, missionaries, botanists, and settlers from Eu ro-
pe an families moved further inland, adopting valuable plants like hoo-
dia. Botanists at Kew Gardens in London received an early photograph of
the plant around 1876, apparently sent because of the interesting shape
of its branches. Barkly sent several living samples of hoodia back to Kew,
in addition to the bottled specimen. I was surprised to open one her-
barium page to see Barkly’s thorny dried stalk with brown dust around
it rather than a fl at pressing or dried slice (see Figure 5.3). Someone had
labeled it “Guap,” suggesting wider awareness of its edible qualities by
the late nineteenth century.
19
In the 1870s, a Swedish botanist journeyed to Southern Africa, where
he adopted a young San child whom he raised while in Africa and later
Sweden. In his diary, he described how he ate a plant thought to be a
species of Hoodia:
I found a kind of cactus; it is called “kovapp” and is eaten by Hottentots,
Bergdamara, and Bushmen. The sharp thorns are scraped away and then
the whole plant is eaten as it is. It tastes somewhat bitter but leaves a
sweet and pleasant after- taste as is often the case with a “bitter herb.”
20
This botanist sampled raw plants while his colonial contemporaries
might have preserved edible succulents by making sugared hoodia jams,
alcoholic decoctions using brandy, or dried hoodia. Afrikaaner commu-
nities of Dutch immigrants as well as British colonists circulated such
recipes thought to cure upset stomachaches and hemorrhoids.
21
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Take Kalahari Hoodia for Hunger 171
Knowledge of hoodia’s multiple uses spread to Eu rope. At an eve ning
meeting of the Pharmaceutical Society of Britain in November 1892,
those assembled recalled the specimens of Hoodia sent to Kew on behalf
of Barkly.
22
One of those assembled believed the sample before them
could be a new species of Stapelia:
Figure 5.3 Unusual, full- stem Herbarium sample from 1876: “3 Living plants of this were sent to
Kew by Sir H. Barkley, but never fl owered and soon died; a drawing of one of them was made
by me, and this specimen is a branch of one of the plants.” The name “guap” suggests early
awareness by botanists of its use as a food. (Source: Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens,
Kew.)
https://t.me/med1917
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