Kanna Australia
Kanna Australia field notes

A desert plant,
a living tradition.

Kanna Australia is a small community gathering around Sceletium tortuosum: a resilient succulent from South Africa's Karoo, and the centuries-old tradition behind it.

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Karoo & Namaqualand · South Africa
Sceletium tortuosum growing among rocks in the Karoo, South Africa

Meet the plant

Kanna is a small, low-growing succulent that survives where most plants cannot: the dry, rocky Karoo and Namaqualand regions of South Africa. It stores water in thick, jointed leaves and produces small, pale star-shaped flowers after rain.

Its best-studied alkaloids, mesembrine, mesembrenone and mesembrenol, have drawn steady scientific interest for their mood-related effects, alongside its much older role as a traditional Khoikhoi and San plant.

Botanical nameSceletium tortuosum
FamilyAizoaceae
Native rangeKaroo & Namaqualand, SA
Common namesKanna, kougoed, channa
Pre-1600s

Chewed, smoked and used ceremonially by Khoikhoi and San communities.

1662

First written European record, by Cape colonial administrator Jan van Riebeeck.

2000s to today

Renewed scientific study of its alkaloids and traditional preparation methods.

A tradition older than written history

Long before it had a Latin name, kanna was part of daily and ceremonial life for the Khoikhoi and San peoples of what is now South Africa. Traditional preparation involved crushing the plant, fermenting it in a sealed container, then drying it in the sun, a process that gave rise to its old name, kougoed.

The dried material was chewed, smoked or taken as snuff. It was used to fight thirst and fatigue on long hunts, to ease social tension, and in spiritual practice. Some accounts connect the name "kanna" to "eland", the large antelope regarded as a trance animal in San spiritual tradition.

"The Khoisan people used it in folk medicine, and it became known to the early colonisers of the Cape in the seventeenth century."
From the historical record surveyed in modern pharmacological literature on Sceletium tortuosum
03 · gathering

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