Part 90
When I was still working in the local South African film industry, probably in the 1980s, I met Diana Ginsberg and Lionel Friedberg. Lionel was an up-and-coming cinematographer in the local industry and Diana was a really creative film editor. They later married and went to Los Angeles where they both carved out successful careers in the movie industry. One evening over drinks, we got into where we had grown up. Diana said that she had grown up in Clanwilliam, a small town to the northwest of Cape Town, and that her father was a businessman who also owned farms in the area. Only later did other friends tell me that Diana’s family were the first people to commercialize a unique form of tea called Rooibos. At the time it was becoming an increasingly popular drink in South Africa. It had numerous healthy and herbal qualities, with more and more people preferring it to regular tea.
With my normally inquisitive mind, I delved into the history of Rooibos whose genus is Aspalathus Linearis. It seems that it was a favorite drink of the Khoi and San (Bushman) tribes who had lived in the Western Cape for many centuries, having been driven steadily south by advancing Bantu tribes such as the Zulus and Xhosa. I decided to look into the origins of the Ginsberg family and how they became involved with the development of Rooibos. I discovered that their story was typical of the many Jewish families who left Europe for the United States or places like South Africa in the late 1800s.
Diana’s great-grandfather, Aaron Ginsberg, was born within the Pale of Settlement in the town of Daugavpils (in Russian, Dvinsk) in Latvia. The Pale of Settlement covered largely sections of what is now Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, much of Ukraine and Poland, with a small section of Latvia and the Russian Federation. The word pale is derived from the Latin palus meaning a stake but with the larger meaning of fence or boundary.
Jews could reside within the Pale but could not claim residency elsewhere. The exceptions were Jews with university education, certain nobles and some with military experience. Aaron chose to join the army to acquire this exclusion. After leaving the military, he managed to obtain a small apartment in a degraded slum suburb of Moscow (where, incidentally, he lived near to the upcoming writer Anton Checkov).
He married a girl from his hometown and brought her to Moscow. Their first child Benjamin was born in 1896. The couple decided to return to a healthier environment, for the child’s sake, and returned to Dvinsk. Aaron managed to make a living from embroidering carpets. The area was known as “Little Manchester” because of its thriving carpet industry.
Meanwhile, Solomon Slavin, Aaron’s brother-in-law, had left for South Africa some years earlier. He had settled in the Cape in the Clanwilliam district as a successful farmer and store owner. Amongst other things he supplied horses for the Namaqualand postal coaches on the west coast. As soon as Solomon became a naturalized South African, he sent for Aaron and Elke to join him. Aaron became a general dealer and produce buyer, delivering goods to local farms. In 1904, he opened a coaching stop and trading post on the wagon road to Clanwilliam, at the foot of the Cedarberg Mountains. A few years later, his son Benjamin joined the business, initially by peddling the store’s wares on foot in the district and eventually on a mule cart.
It was a poor area. The local whites lived mainly on goat’s milk, honey, with wild birds and rock rabbits for meat. If anyone got sick, they would turn to local plants and herbs, especially the Buchu plant, that settled stomach and urinary ailments. They would also have a primitive tea-making process which reminded the Ginsbergs of the Russian samovar rituals. In this case, they would use the Naaldetee, from the needle-like bush, also known as Rooibos. They would brew it on a stove all day and they called it Bush tea.
Benjamin married Bertha Abramowitz, who came from a wealthy family in Belarus. She found the Ginsberg home near the Cedarberg trading post too lonely and persuaded Benjamin to move to the small town of Clanwilliam, where they opened a shop. Their first child Henry Charles was born in 1913.
During World War I, Benjamin decided to market Rooibos. Many tea growers in Natal, South Africa, had switched to growing sugar cane and there was a crisis in the tea industry. Benjamin declared, “I’m going to make a Ceylon of the Cedarberg.” He bought all available Rooibos in the area.
He also realized that the existing primitive method of preparing the plant for making tea would have to be modernized. It consisted of moistening the branches and covering them with sackcloth to make them “sweat.” This was no longer a “poor man’s brew,” so it would require a quality standard to make it acceptable to the bigger markets. This eventually led to a sifting and packaging factory in Cape Town.
Benjamin died in 1944. His son Charles inherited the business. He improved the marketing of the product and created the “Eleven O’Clock” brand, a whimsical take on eleven o’clock teatime. The Ginsbergs were by now the biggest growers and marketers of Rooibos in the country. The product became hugely popular. They invaded the Johannesburg and Pretoria markets in partnership with Fred Smollan (who had been only the second Jewish rugby player to play for the South African Springboks).
Charles’ son Bruce (presumably Diana Ginsberg’s brother), introduced Rooibos into Britain in the 1970s, under the brand name “Tick Tock.” It has also reached the US market as a popular brand of herbal tea. This just goes to prove that South Africa is not only known for gold, diamonds, platinum and other minerals, but is making itself known for the herbal contents of teabags!
ExoTech will never be marketed in teabags, but – like the dogged perseverance of the Ginsberg family – Peter Warren, in just one generation, is planting a new indelible brand of incredible potential on the world markets.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.