The Karoo Succulent With a Three-Century Paper Trail: Kanna

Most of my travel time in my thirties went toward reptiles rather than plants. I was doing fieldwork across the succulent Karoo and Namaqualand in the Northern Cape, cataloguing lizard populations for a survey that had nothing to do with botany at all. It was one of the local trackers who first handed me a piece of dried, twisted plant material to chew on during a long, dry afternoon in the field — kanna, he called it, the same plant his grandparents' generation had chewed on hunts. I didn't think much of it at the time. It took years of reading afterward before I understood what I'd actually been handed.

A Plant With a Three-Century Paper Trail

Kanna has one of the better-documented histories of any Southern African plant, if only because European colonists happened to write it down early. The first known written account comes from Jan van Riebeeck, the Dutch colonial administrator at the Cape, who recorded bartering sheep for the plant with local Khoikhoi people in 1662. A few decades later, in 1685, colonial governor Simon van der Stel described its local use in his own journal. Between them, that's a written record stretching back further than almost any other Southern African botanical.

The plant's name comes from the Khoekhoe word for eland, the large antelope regarded by the Khoikhoi and San peoples as a sacred "trance animal" central to spiritual and healing ceremony — the same association that gave the plant its common name, kanna. Its other common name, kougoed, is Afrikaans for "something to chew," a direct reference to how it was traditionally prepared and used. Long before either name was written down by a European hand, San hunter-gatherers and Khoikhoi pastoralists across the Karoo and Namaqualand had already been using it for generations — to stave off thirst and fatigue during long hunts, and for healing, social, and spiritual purposes.

How It Was Traditionally Prepared

The traditional preparation is distinctive, and it's the detail that matters most for anyone supplying kanna commercially today. Harvested leaves and stems were crushed, then packed into an animal skin or cloth bag and left to ferment for several days before being dried, chewed, smoked, or taken as a snuff. That fermentation step wasn't incidental — traditional users understood, empirically, that it changed the plant's effect, even without any way to explain why.

What the Research Landscape Looks Like

Modern analytical chemistry has since confirmed what traditional preparation already implied: fermentation genuinely transforms kanna's chemistry. The plant contains a family of more than two dozen alkaloids, with mesembrine-type compounds predominant, and researchers using HPLC and mass spectrometry have documented measurable shifts in that alkaloid profile during fermentation — most notably a conversion between mesembrine and related compounds like Δ7-mesembrenone.¹ Formal phytochemical study of the plant goes back further than most people would guess, with the first alkaloid isolation work published in the late 1890s and expanded on through the early twentieth century.

I want to be direct about what this section is and isn't saying. This is an active, still-evolving area of analytical and pharmacological research, and the traditional and historical context described here is offered as exactly that — context, not a therapeutic claim about what kanna extract does or doesn't do for any individual. Kanna's alkaloids are pharmacologically active in ways that are more thoroughly studied than most botanicals in this category, and that cuts both ways: it also means genuine caution is warranted. Anyone taking an antidepressant, MAOI, or other psychiatric medication should speak to their doctor before combining it with kanna in any form, given the plant's known alkaloid activity. That's not a footnote to bury — it's the single most important piece of practical information in this article, and it's exactly the kind of question a licensed practitioner is better placed to answer than a company blog post.

Why Fermentation Is Both Tradition and a Technical Problem

This is where the traditional story becomes a genuinely modern manufacturing challenge. Because fermentation measurably shifts kanna's alkaloid composition, and because traditional fermentation was never controlled for time, temperature, or microbial activity, two batches of "fermented kanna" prepared a village apart could have meaningfully different alkaloid ratios. That's a fine, even desirable, source of variation in a traditional context. It's a serious liability for a manufacturer trying to formulate against a consistent specification.

That's the problem Motark Enterprise built its kanna supply around solving. Rather than leaving fermentation to chance, our kanna extract is defined against a documented, repeatable specification that controls for the variables that actually determine the alkaloid outcome — fermentation time, temperature, and microbial activity — instead of the traditional, uncontrolled process. For a formulator, that's the difference between a kanna extract with a known, consistent profile and one where "fermented" could mean almost anything.

A Plant That Predates the Category It's Filed Under

It's easy to see kanna as another entrant into the crowded mood-support supplement category, but that undersells a plant with a documented use history stretching back further than the Dutch East India Company's presence at the Cape. This is a succulent that colonial administrators thought significant enough to write down in 1662, that the San and Khoikhoi built into ceremony and daily life for a great deal longer than that, and that modern analytical chemistry is still working to fully characterise.

For me, what started as an offhand chew on a fieldwork afternoon turned into a genuine interest in the plant's chemistry — and eventually into part of what Motark Enterprise supplies today. Whether you're formulating a new product or sourcing for existing customers, the same principle applies here as it does to anything else we supply: understand exactly what a "fermented" or "standardised" claim actually means for the material in front of you, and work with a supplier who verifies it rather than assumes it. That's the standard our kanna extract is held to, every single batch.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Patnala, S. & Kanfer, I. (2009). "Investigations of the phytochemical content of Sceletium tortuosum following the preparation of 'Kougoed' by fermentation of plant material," Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 121(1), 86–91. Patnala, S. & Kanfer, I. (2010). "HPLC analysis of mesembrine-type alkaloids in Sceletium plant material used as an African traditional medicine," Journal of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, 13(4), 558–570. Both are analytical-chemistry method papers quantifying alkaloid content and change during fermentation, not clinical or efficacy studies. ↩