Biotraffic explores the complex world of biological resource trade. It takes readers inside the contemporary Ciskei region of South Africa, a once-notorious apartheid “homeland” turned extractive hub for wild medicinal plants. Drawing from in-depth ethnographic and archival research, Christopher Morris examines the region’s trade in Pelargonium sidoides, a plant once contested as a tuberculosis treatment in early twentieth-century Europe and now an internationally marketed remedy for the common cold. The story of this trade links past and present, encapsulating a larger tale about colonial legacies and their intersection with global environmental governance ambitions. It also teems with a diverse cast of actors, from plant harvesters and pharmaceutical companies to activist NGOs and the chiefs who have become business partners with multinational drug firms. The book’s analysis extends beyond considering merely the extraction and commercialization of plant resources and offers a critical examination of how demand for therapeutics intertwines with broader struggles over land and political power in South Africa. Biotraffic illuminates how a distance-defying trade is reshaping the sociopolitical landscape of a region—a region grappling with apartheid's afterlives and the challenges of environmental and economic justice.
"At last! A book that engages with the contradictions of access and benefit sharing, and its (neglected) embeddedness in the politics of land, culture, identity, and capital. Christopher Morris's meticulously researched and beautifully written book about the Pelargonium plant trade is a must-read for anyone looking for a fresh and critical perspective on how global biodiversity governance has lost its way."—Rachel Wynberg, South Africa Research Chair of Bio-economy, University of Cape Town
"This profound and ethnographically rich book immerses the reader in the complexities of post-apartheid South Africa, illuminating how the extractive global trade in Pelargonium sidoides intertwines with the labor of Ciskei villagers who collect the plant to survive. Morris deftly illustrates these dynamics, vividly capturing the intricacies of life in a region wrangling with apartheid's enduring impacts. Biotraffic is an extraordinary achievement."—Donna M. Goldstein, author of Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown
“In this rich anthropological account, Christopher Morris illuminates how Pelargonium’s harvesting and trade is enrolled in the re/constitution of political power in postcolonial South Africa. At the same time, his close attention to the contestation over land rights at local levels in the Eastern Cape offers a vital perspective into international debates over the governance of biodiversity.”—Anne Pollock, author of Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery
“Compelling and beautifully written, Biotraffic offers a cautionary tale about prevailing legal regimes caught in their own circularity as they oblige states to sell wild plants to 'save' them, in the process also subsuming politics of indigeneity to an extractive imperative."—Julie Laplante, author of Healing Roots: Anthropology in Life and Medicine
“Biotraffic provides a valuable case study of trade in a naturally occurring biological resource in South Africa, focusing on the experiences of individual informants to elucidate struggles over property rights, profit, and indigeneity.”—Sara Berry, author of Chiefs Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Poverty, Power, and the Past in Asante, 1896–1996
