Plant Lives by Nokwanda Makunga on Current perspectives on an emerging formal natural products sector in South Africa | 26 May

Nokwanda Makunga will speak on

Current perspectives on an emerging formal natural products sector in South Africa

Click here for paper

Indigenous medical plants contribute significantly to a large South African population as part of a long-standing healthcare system intimately linked to folklore and for livelihood security. For the economically marginalized, access to such plants is largely through herbal markets which are part of an informal economy. Otherwise the formal natural products economy services those with a better socio-economic standing. Recently, the latter has experienced tremendous growth which largely mirrors the global cultural trend for organic naturopathies. Commercialisation of traditional plants and their contribution to the cosmeceutical, nutraceutical and pharmaceutical industries locally and abroad is reviewed. Traditional plant knowledge of southern African people is a source of inspiration for new product development. Concomitantly, an upsurge in research activities emanating from South Africa which confirms the pharmacological efficacy of these plants is fuelling a greater trust in indigenous flora. The escalating consumption of ethnomedicinals as highly valued commodities not only presents South Africa with socio-economic opportunities but also with challenges. Sustainable utilization benefiting the commodification of ethno-herbals, plus meeting aims of poverty alleviation and people empowerment, is a new paradigm in South Africa. The future sustainability of local ecosystems depends upon scientific conservation management practices that recognize the importance of involving local communities. Conservationists should remain aware and sensitive of socio-cultural dynamics within communities in order to manage natural resources.

Nokwanda P Makunga (PhD) is Professor in the  Department of Botany and Zoology at Stellenbosch University.  She is group leader of Medicinal plant biology / Medicinal plant research.  Her research is centred around using a multidirectional approach that combines the areas of biotechnology, ethnopharmacology and phytochemistry. Her group uses cutting edge multi-omics technologies to study how plants function at genetic and biochemicals levels in relation to the production of specialized metabolites that impart health-beneficiating properties to medicinal plants. She has an interest in people-plant interactions and so her research is also focused on medicinal plants, their cultural significance and opportunities presented for socioeconomic development.

 In 2011, she was a recipient of the National Science and Technology Forum (NSTF) Annual Award under the category Distinguished Young Black Researcher (Female), TW Kambule NRF award for 2011/12, and a Fulbright Research Scholar where she was positioned at the University of Minnesota in 2017 to 2018. She is a founding member of the social advocacy movement founded in 2020, Black Botanists Week that aims to bring greater visibility to Black, Indigenous and People of Colour who may be formally and informally trained in terms of their interests in plants.

Monday, 26^th May 2025
4-5pm (Johannesburg time)
Click here to register

Plant Lives is a seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall.
It follows two previously successful series, Heated Conversations and Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres, convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall

In these calamitous times, are plants a distraction from pressing problems, or a new way to approach them?  Is the burgeoning field of the plant humanities just another fad with little bearing on the global South? Can we imagine a seedy and weedy politics in which plants are less metaphors for human logics and more themselves?  Can we shift from an abstract concern with plant life to consider material plant lives?  And if so, with what consequences?

This seminar series explores the global plant humanities and the conversations that plant worlds enable.  We envisage a postcolonial plantarium* which encompasses plantations, pre-colonial pharmacopoeias, philosophy, phytopoetics (both visual and textual) and much more. Our starting point is 'ruderal', a term which describes a plant that grows in disturbed grounds. A plant humanities for the global South takes shapes at the intersection of enforced human and plant migrations and works in the wake of disturbance and damage. 

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.

*Thanks to Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka for this term