Exploring arrow poisons from Windvogel’s Country, Eastern Cape, South Africa: a discussion between Piet Windvogel and William Atherstone on 6 February 1846

Some 170 years ago Piet Windvogel told William Atherstone about two plant-based arrow poisons prepared and used by Khoe-San living west of the Great Kei River in the modern-day Eastern Cape interior of South Africa. Atherstone’s interest in botany and in indigenous knowledge of local plant species fed into colonial intellectual networks, as well as imperialist concerns with scientific and/or economic profit. Yet his diarised record of Windvogel’s accounts has prompted us to compile a list of potential arrow poisons for a region where such ethnohistorical information is comparatively sparse. We have narrowed these down to the most likely botanical species used in Windvogel’s poison recipes: Prunus africana or rooistinkhout for the manufacture of t’ghee poison and perhaps Euphorbia mauritanica or gifmelkbos for taah poison, although species such as Acokanthera oppositifolia or gifboom, Asclepias fruticosa or melkbos and Carissa macrocarpa or the grootnoem-noem also merit consideration.