Knowledge Free & Unfree : Epistemic Tensions in Indigenous, Slave and European Knowledge of Medicinal Plants in the Early Cape Colony

by Geri Augosto

The Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope was the gateway to Enlightenment sciences in Africa, one of the earliest “biocontact zones” between indigenous Africans and colonizing Europeans, and the convergence point of two nefarious traffics—the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. The reverberations of this entanglement at the Cape are still felt in today's dynamic South African “ecology of knowledge,” where the discursive practices of indigenous African knowledge systems, local sciences and global sciences all collide in public health, biodiversity use and emerging biotechnologies. This paper explores some of the historical and socio-cultural background to early knowledge interactions in the Cape colony, by taking indigenous medicinal plants as epistemic objects known differently . It draws on historical archives in Cape Town and a transdisciplinary range of literatures to explore the Khoikhoi, Sonqua, colonial “frontiersman,” and slave epistemologies which were in contested, dynamic tension. In doing so, the paper puts Africana studies and the study of African indigenous knowledge systems together, and both in wider conversation with feminist epistemology and social studies of science and technology. Four specific 17 th and 18 th century botanizing expeditions, along with a few of the medicinal plants which they bring into focus, are probed in the paper. The authoritative publications they gave rise to back in Europe are juxtaposed to other sources which help illuminate indigenous and slave knowledges, and the epistemic contexts in which the acquisition, use and exchange of knowledge about medicinal plants figures. The paper then adumbrates what the South African case might suggest for comparative research on colonial sciences, slave and Amerindian knowledges, and medicinal plants particularly in New Seville and the Jamaican Cockpit country pre-Emancipation, but also in French St. Domingue and Dutch West India Company-run Suriname .