Reinventing Hoodia: peoples, plants, and patents in South Africa

Can scholarship and practice in responsible innovation benefit from a feminist decolonial techno-scientific analysis? Through her meticulous, concisely-written and well-argued monograph on the politics of knowledge, being and commercialization of !Khoba (or Hoodia, an indigenous plant native to present day South Africa), Laura Foster’s answer to this question is a resounding yes. In particular, Foster’s book shows the need for even further problematizing what is meant by ‘inclusion’ in discussions on patenting and ownership for responsible innovation so as to not simply be additive in the name of diversity, but to take framing effects from racist and gendered colonial histories into account to deal with profound power asymmetries.

Such a feat requires such deliberative experiments to be structured where organizers and more powerful participants must reflexively interrogate their own normative commitments. Early on in the book, Foster describes sitting in a classroom in a US law school where the professor attempted to elaborate the distinction between discovery and invention by narrating a story with the infamous Indiana Jones as its hero. In the story of mixed colonial canons, Jones travels to the rainforest and meets Oompa Loompas, who show Jones a medicinal plant. Jones takes the plants back to scientists, who then isolate and patent the molecule with therapeutic properties. Who is the inventor here? Jones or the scientists? Foster discusses how the Oompa Loompas were erased from subsequent discussions amongst the students, who focused their attention on how Jones’ contribution was unacknowledged, as he had made an ‘arduous journey and skillfully gained knowledge’ (12). The students asked, ‘Why did the law recognize the moment of invention, but not that of discovery?’ (12) Foster exhorts those interested in responsible innovation to ponder why this last question does not go nearly far enough. In doing so, Foster also helps scholars of science and technology policy understand how public policy can better intervene into the politics of patent systems produced from racialized, indigenous, and gendered colonial histories.

Foster’s book is firmly situated in a sympathetic, but wholly unromanticized, social justice framework that seeks alliances with the indigenous San peoples in South Africa, who have long claimed nonhuman kinship with Hoodia. Foster focuses, in particular, on the benefit-sharing agreements between the San and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the partnerships and patenting issues between the CSIR and pharmaceutical companies, as well as the benefit-sharing between the San and Hoodia growers. Knitting together histories, ethnographies, interviews and media analysis, informed through Foster’s legal expertise, Foster persuasively documents the multiple ways of knowing Hoodia in its different forms – as made in nature, a molecule and a cultivated plant – as well as claiming various identities and belonging to exemplify the ambivalences of empowerment and disempowerment faced by various actors. Foster shows her scholarly credentials in the sizeable section of notes, where much of the theory resides, whether it is Karen Barad’s agential realism, or Jasanoff’s coproduction of science and society, or the resistances of Latour’s nonhuman actants. The strength of Foster’s book is to sparingly and judiciously call on theory to illuminate her work, and letting her finely-wrought thick descriptions do the convincing.

Chapter 1 is necessary reading to understand how knowledge of Hoodia passed through racist knowledge production circuits of discovery, where the San were thought of as nonhuman at worst and childlike at best and not belonging to sophisticated culture. Chapter 2 demonstrates that, to press claims, the San had to negotiate this racialized and colonial legal and scientific regimes by strategically portraying themselves as nonmodern and ‘closer to nature’ (58), which simultaneously showed the San to be ‘modern political subjects seeking new pathways to rights, recognition, and belonging’ (65). Chapter 3 argues that the CISR wanted to be seen as neoliberal knowledge producers in their own right, as compared to the patent-holding scientists in the Global North, and not only a source of raw materials. Yet, as Foster shows in Chapter 4, South African Hoodia scientists, in their partnerships with Pfizer and Unilever, were beholden to vicissitudes of the market when Hoodia proved recalcitrant to being converted to a market commodity (due to its complex stereochemistry), and were once more placed in a subsidiary political position. Chapter 5 discusses how white Afrikaans Hoodia growers forged both alliances with the San, but also perpetuated clear epistemic hierarchies. In a story of white saviourism, Afrikaans who held a religious attachment to South African land that they historically saw as being wasted by indigenous groups, viewed patenting the Hoodia molecule as going against God. Yet, in contrast to the San foraging for !Khoba, growers took pride in their ability to cultivate Hoodia for the market under very difficult environmental conditions. While the growers entered into benefit sharing agreements with the San, there was still a clear hierarchy in knowledge.

Of particular interest for practitioners in NGOs, policy and legal domains is the epilogue and appendices. In the epilogue, Foster makes special note of how indigenous communities are drafting their own protocols to enter into negotiations with outside actors intent on commercializing plants that form the substrate of their cultures and histories. In Appendix 2, Foster provides strategies for patent litigation and creating just benefit-sharing agreements with indigenous communities, stating that in the US, indigenous communities may have better luck challenging a patent on nonobviousness, where the invention would indeed be obvious to skilled individuals – including indigenous communities – using printed publications and oral disclosure. Foster advocates for alliances between indigenous communities and ‘reasonable’ scientists skilled in chemistry, for example, to help these claims gain traction (136).

In conclusion, Reinventing Hoodia unpacks with delicacy and confidence the muddle of power, politics and technical jargon that forecloses finding terra firma through which to understand the knotty becomings of different peoples, nonhumans and epistemologies, and in the process shows why both responsible innovation scholars and science and technology policy scholars may want to undertake feminist decolonial technoscience analyses.