Piet Rooi adjusts his Union Jack cap, pushes his glasses up his nose and smiles at the inanity of my question about why he used the hoodia plant. ”Hoekom [Why]?” he asks. ”Because it helps us survive.” He holds up a hand to forestall further interrogation. ”I eat the Xhoba [hoodia] to stave off hunger and thirst and then I no longer feel hungry or thirsty. I eat it when I am feeling weak and then I feel strong and virile. I eat it when I have a bad stomach or flu and then I feel better.”
It hasn’t rained for almost a year in this remote part of the South African Kalahari, near the South African-Botswana border, but after a 15 minute trot in the 42°C heat, Rooi has no trouble finding the cucumber-shaped cactus plant ”We’re in drought now, so I’ll braai it because it’s too bitter to eat raw,” this 73-year-old former farmworker explains while picking two branches, ”but when it rains it turns brighter green and has a nice, sour taste and I can chew it. I’ve been eating it since I was nine years old and I’m still eating today.”
Rooi uses a match to scrape the thorns off the branches and hands it to his 44-year-old neighbour, Susanna Witbooi, who says she will crush it into powder to treat her sister’s asthma.
I ask her what she thinks of the international excitement about the hoodia’s hunger-busting properties — the fact that the Viagra pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, is spending millions of dollars using it to create a new dieting drug. She shakes her head and laughs.
For Witbooi the hoodia is just part of life — always has been. ”All the San people here use the Xhoba and in Nambia they even give it to their dogs to eat when they are hungry. In the old days the men often went three days in mid-summer without food or water when they were hunting and they never felt hungry or thirsty, and now it’s going to make life better me and for my children,” she says.
The San — or Bushmen as many still prefer to be called — trace their roots in the region back to the first modern humans 150 000 years ago, but the Boers regarded them as vermin and were still organising ”Bushman hunts” at the start of the 20th century. Many were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands; others wiped out by European diseases or dislocated by slavery and conflict with African tribes.
Most South African San were classified as coloured under apartheid. They became ”farm boys” or ”house girls” or were used as South African Defence Force trackers in Namibia. Along the way, their culture was buried. Bushmen cave paintings have been dated at more than 20 000 years old, but the last cave painter died 70 years ago, ending a practice that was integral to their ancestor-based religion. And the ancient Khomani San language also seemed to be dying (with only nine native speakers alive today), replaced by Afrikaans and Nama.
Some San clans in Botswana and Namibia maintain the old way of life, but this seemed on the verge of extinction in South Africa until 1994. Nelson Mandela was particularly proud that his country was home to the world’s oldest indigenous culture and his government moved quickly to settle two major land claims that returned large tracts of land to San communities — including the Khomani of the Kalahari, where the best hoodia grows.
Nigel Crawhall, a Canadian linguist who works with the Khomani community, compares their plight with that of Botswana’s 55 000 San. ”The Botswana government seems embarrassed by the presence of what they regard as a primitive people.
”They are using force to remove them from their ancestral lands but South Africa took the opposite approach and settled their land claims quickly, with the result that there is now a growing sense of San pride. There are still huge problems related to poverty and dislocation, like widespread alcoholism, HIV-Aids, domestic violence and drug use but people are returning to the land, starting to relearn their traditional languages and to develop a far stronger San identity.”
The Khomani San may have been using the hoodia for thousands of years, but for the government’s Council for Scientific and Industrial
Research (CSIR) it all started in 1963. Its curiosity was inspired by two sources: first, a 1937 research paper from a Dutch ethno-biologist who quoted Khomani hunters on the plant’s appetite suppressing qualities; second, information supplied to the military by Khomani San trackers who also used it as a source of water.
The CSIR decided to test the San hunger-busting claims and found they stood up to scrutiny. After a decade-long lull the CSIR resumed its research in the 1980s, and eventually isolated the relevant bioactive compound, and in 1997 patented it as ”P57”.
The CSIR licensed P57 to the British drug research company Phytopharm, which specialises in trials based on traditional medicines. After conducting double-blind trials (one group taking P57; the other a placebo), Phytopharm confirmed the CSIR’s claims and sub-licensed it to the United States pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, at a price of $21-million. (Incidentally, some San elders chuckle at the Pfizer connection, because they say the hoodia also has Viagra-type properties — or as one put it, ”when the grandfathers eat the Xhoba, the grandmothers can’t let them out of their sight”).
Meanwhile South Africa’s 7 000 San were forging links with other Southern African San communities and forming national and regional councils to represent their interests. The first they heard of the patents was when their solicitor, Roger Chennels, came across a quote from Phytopharm head Dr Richard Dixey, who said that the people who discovered the plant ”have disappeared”.
Chennels, a 52-year-old human rights lawyer, proudly showed me an intricately designed hunting bow and arrow that took pride of place on his farmhouse-office wall in Stellenbosch. It had been presented to him by a Khomani San leader for his role in winning back their ancestral land — as it happened, shortly before hearing the claim that his clients were ”extinct”.
He immediately realised this fallacy represented an opportunity and contacted the newly formed San Council, who asserted their rights as the source of the knowledge about the hoodia.
”The timing was a complete luck,” he acknowledges. ”The San have been giving away their secrets for ever, but it was only then that they were in a position to benefit. Any earlier and they might not have been in a position to act on it.”
The CSIR acknowledged its mistake: ”They realised that if they fought this they’d be in big trouble, so they came to us cap in hand and apologised,” says Chennels. Asked to comment, the CSIR insisted it had never claimed the Khomani San were extinct and stressed that its 1998 biopolicy stated that owners of indigenous knowledge ”will benefit from commercialisation of research findings”.
”Meeting up with the San was about implementing our own policy”, says CSIR director Dr Petro Terblanche.
In any event the Khomani San had no interest in snubbing these overtures. They realised that a successful patent challenge might lead to open season on the hoodia, with no benefit to the indigenous communities. The best option for both parties therefore lay in negotiation and in February this year, the CSIR and the San Council reached a ”memorandum of understanding” acknowledging the rights of the Bushmen as ”custodians of the ancient body of traditional knowledge” and the CSIR’s role in developing the technology involved in extracting the plant’s anti-obesity properties.
There are still crucial loose ends to settle — not least the precise division of future profits — but if Pfizer meets its goal of marketing P57 in 2007, the San hope to receive several million rand a year to be shared between all the San communities within Southern Africa.
Chennels has the task of ensuring that the money will be tightly audited in a way that will minimise the risk of corruption and ensure that the communities, rather than a few individuals, will reap the benefits. In the meantime, the CSIR and Phytopharm have agreed that the San will be involved in the cultivation of the plant and will be assisted with bursaries, education programmes, computer training and annual performance payments from 2004.
Dixey, who says he is ”embarrassed” by his earlier claim that the Khomani San had disappeared, is delighted that the hoodia’s custodians are now firmly on board.
”The San-CSIR deal is very far-sighted and I think there’s the potential for a happy ending,” he says. ”One of the main assets of traditional people lies in the wealth of their ancient medical knowledge but it is usually difficult for them to get any payback from this. This case is unusual because the Khomani San were clearly the primordial originators of the knowledge about the hoodia, and they have been able to act on it. This could be the first time ever that a traditional people get royalties from one of their herbs and plants, and while money is obviously part of it, I think they will also be reinforced in their view of life by the international recognition of their way of life.”
There is no guarantee P57 will get through the final loop of American Food and Drug Administration approval, but the two companies involved are optimistic it will one day have a major impact in combating obesity.
”The trial we conducted last year was extremely impressive,” says Dixey. ”It showed that P57 reduced appetite by an average of 2 000 calories a day, which is remarkable.”
With this kind of data in its bank, Phytopharm has begun setting up hoodia plantations and supply units in South Africa. Pfizer has already spent more than $400-million in additional research, in preparation for its entry into a market currently estimated at more than $3-billion a year in the US alone.
Back in the Kalahari these numbers may still seem remote, but you can sense the spread of a cautious optimism. Men like Rooi are just relieved to be back in the land where the hoodia grows. The past is the past and future will take of itself. ”For most of my life I had to work on white people’s farms but now we own our own land. I was born here and I will die here too.”
For Witbooi, however, the hoodia deal offers far more: a fresh hope for her children’s prospects.
”Things have already improved for me,” she says. ”I’ve worked in white people’s kitchens in Upington since I was 14 but now at last I am back home, and doing well making crafts for the Khomani craft project. But children like Kayla [her daughter] are the future and they need more, so I feel very grateful that these companies are going to be making pills out of the Xhoba. I’m hoping the money will bring us teachers and computers and work projects. Things will be much better in the future.”