The refreshment station never closed

In 1652, the Cape was organised to supply an economy whose centres of power and accumulation lay elsewhere. Today, South Africa must decide whether Indigenous knowledge and biodiversity will remain inputs into value chains controlled elsewhere or become foundations for productive communities, South African enterprise, manufacturing and ownership

4 SEP 2026, 00:00

7 min read

What if the most revealing fact about 1652 is not simply that Jan van Riebeeck arrived at the Cape, but why he came?

The Dutch East India Company sent him to establish a refreshment station at Table Bay for ships travelling between Europe and Asia. The Cape was not intended to be the centre of that economy. It was expected to supply food, water and logistical support for journeys towards wealth accumulated elsewhere.

The station did not remain an innocent stopping point. Land, water, livestock and labour were progressively reorganised around the requirements of a company headquartered abroad. Indigenous systems of governance, law, stewardship, spirituality and social obligation were subordinated to a colonial legal and commercial order. The station became a permanent occupation, dispossession, forced labour and slavery.

Colonialism at the Cape therefore did not arrive only through conquest. It arrived through logistics, law and institutional design. It began with a value chain: one territory supplied the resources while control of the route, productive infrastructure and accumulated value sat elsewhere.

Three hundred and seventy-four years later, the ships and language have changed. The underlying economic question has not.

In the Indigenous knowledge economy, communities can still occupy the beginning of value chains whose most powerful institutions sit downstream. Knowledge holders contribute medicinal knowledge, healing practices, ecological intelligence, biological resources and cultural expressions. Universities document. Laboratories validate. Regulators certify. Companies formulate, manufacture, package and brand. Investors finance expansion. Markets determine the final price.

The crucial question is not simply whether communities benefit. It is where decision-making power, productive capability, ownership and accumulation sit along the value chain.

A community may originate knowledge or protect biodiversity essential to an innovation while research facilities, data, intellectual property, processing, manufacturing, finance and distribution remain elsewhere.

It participates, but does not necessarily acquire the institutions through which value is created and compounded. This is why benefit-sharing, although necessary, cannot be mistaken for ownership. A more generous refreshment station remains a refreshment station when somebody else owns the productive system.

Democracy fundamentally changed South Africa. It established universal citizenship, political participation and a rights-based constitutional order. The Constitution protects culture and community association and recognises customary law and traditional leadership. But constitutional recognition does not automatically produce institutional or economic power. The right to participate has expanded more quickly than the capacity to determine what counts as knowledge, who may certify it, who controls its documentation and where the resulting value settles.

Economic transformation must therefore mean more than placing new participants inside inherited value chains. It must also ask whose institutions set the rules and where higher-value functions are located.

If communities remain providers of knowledge and biological materials while laboratories, patents, manufacturing facilities, brands and investment portfolios are built elsewhere, inclusion may widen without altering the geography of power.

Jobs and negotiated benefits can improve lives but they cannot substitute for the productive assets that allow communities and countries to determine their own economic direction. Transformation becomes durable when capability and ownership grow together.

Every September, South Africa becomes fluent in heritage. Indigenous communities appear in speeches, ceremonies, clothing, music and food. That visibility matters. But heritage is not only what a people remember or perform; it includes the knowledge, institutions and productive capabilities through which they shape their future. When decisions about the scientific, regulatory and commercial future of Indigenous knowledge are taken, custodians cannot again be reduced to informants, research participants, suppliers or beneficiaries.

South Africa now has an important opportunity. The Protection, Promotion, Development and Management of Indigenous Knowledge Act of 2019 provides for community rights, conditions of access, recognition of prior learning and Indigenous knowledge-based innovation.

Draft regulations gazetted in 2026 propose mechanisms including biocultural community protocols, registration, accredited assessors, practitioner certification, norms and standards, an advisory panel and dispute resolution.

This is not a reason to dismiss regulation. It is a reason to design implementation carefully and collaboratively. The test is whether the system changes communities' position in the economy or merely administers their knowledge more efficiently.

A community protocol can protect collective authority, but a standard template cannot replace a community's law, leadership and memory.

Registration can guard against appropriation but documentation can expose knowledge previously protected by restricted access.

Certification can affirm practitioners but it can also transfer authority over legitimacy from Indigenous systems to external institutions. Regulatory certainty must therefore coexist with Indigenous authority. Properly structured, both can create confidence for communities, researchers and responsible investors.

Knowledge sovereignty also includes the right not to participate. Not all knowledge exists to become a product, dataset or publication. Some knowledge is sacred, restricted, relational or inseparable from particular people, territories and responsibilities. The first act of knowledge sovereignty is deciding whether knowledge may be shared at all.

Where communities choose to participate, they must enter before commercial value has already been created. They require authority over access, consent, documentation and data, with credible pathways into intellectual property, enterprise, processing, manufacturing, investment and ownership. Universities must likewise recognise that ethical clearance is not community authority and consultation is not co-ownership. Equitable research begins when communities help determine the questions, governance arrangements, data rules, publication rights and economic pathways.

This does not require Indigenous knowledge to retreat from science, technology, capital or markets. The opposite is required. South Africa's knowledge, biodiversity, agricultural capability and cultural assets intersect with expanding opportunities in health and wellbeing, natural products, regenerative agriculture, food systems, biomaterials, climate adaptation and the creative industries. The opportunity is larger than commercialising individual products. It is to build productive ecosystems around them.

That means developing researchers and laboratories, practitioners and skilled workers, entrepreneurs and enterprises, cultivation systems, processing facilities, manufacturing capacity, standards, intellectual property, logistics, finance and routes into South African, African and international markets.

At the centre should be productive communities: not communities in which an external investment has merely created jobs, but communities able to educate their people, organise assets, retain and advance knowledge, build enterprises, mobilise capital and reinvest value across generations. This is the difference between participating in somebody else's economy and building productive capacity within one's own.

What is needed is a stronger governance and economic architecture through which Indigenous practitioners, communities and institutions can participate as knowledge holders, researchers, professionals, producers, entrepreneurs, manufacturers and owners. No single institution can build this architecture alone. It requires an intentional partnership among Indigenous leadership, communities, government, universities, science councils, development-finance institutions, industry, investors and markets.

The government has opened an important policy door. The task now is to ensure that implementation protects community authority while building governed, validated and commercially credible pathways for investment. Development finance and private capital should not view Indigenous economies principally as social expenditure. Investment in productive capability can create enterprises, intellectual property, technologies, skilled workforces, manufacturing, exports and new markets.

The unfinished economic work of liberation is not to make South Africa a more efficient supplier of Indigenous knowledge, biodiversity, labour and raw materials. It is to build the institutions and industrial capabilities through which South Africans can govern, transform, trade, own and accumulate value from the assets in their territories.

This Heritage Month, the question is not whether South Africa values Indigenous knowledge. It is whether we will build the legal, institutional and economic architecture that allows it to seed new industries without reproducing the economic geography of the past.

The refreshment station never closed. The opportunity before us is not to improve it, but to build an economy whose centre of gravity is here.