Indian Ocean Worlds: Tracing South African “Indigenous Medicine”

Abstract

My research takes place at one of the edges of the Indian Ocean at the southern tip of Africa, in Cape Town, South Africa. Baptized the “Cape of Storms” in 1488 by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, it was later renamed the “Cape of Good Hope” in keeping with optimistic hopes of opening a sea route to India and the East. The land around the Cape was home to the Khoikhoi, San, and Xhosa before the Dutch first settled there in 1652, slowly moving inland and leading up to a hundred years of wars over land and cattle beginning in 1779, wars that the British joined from 1795 onward.¹ These histories as well as other more recent histories sometimes surface in the stories I heard while in the Cape from 2006 to 2010. In this chapter, my interests lie in teasing out how Indian Ocean worlds (IOWs) emerge in the practices I followed: not only as a hopeful trade route, but also as shared worlds within turmoil involving land, winds, and waters. More specifically, I am interested in exploring how a notion of IOWs might offer a way to understand people’s engagements with plants for healing in the Cape, namely, by using water’s fluidity as an analogy.