The History of Kanna: From San Tradition to Zembrin (2026)

Kanna's use by the San and Khoikhoi peoples of southern Africa predates any written record and is generally described as spanning centuries. The oldest firm anchor in the written record is European: kanna's use was noted in Dutch colonial accounts of the Cape in the 17th century, commonly dated to around 1662. So the honest framing is two-layered: an oral, indigenous tradition of unknown but long antiquity, and a documented European record beginning in the 1600s.

The rest of this guide walks that timeline in order: the indigenous tradition, the words and the fermentation, the early European accounts, the long quiet period, and the modern scientific and supplement era.

The story begins with the Khoisan, the collective term for the San (Bushmen) hunter-gatherers and the Khoikhoi (Khoekhoe) pastoralists of southern Africa. These peoples used Sceletium tortuosum, a low, mat-forming succulent of the semi-arid Karoo and surrounding regions, long before Europeans reached the Cape.

Traditional accounts describe kanna being used to blunt hunger and thirst, ease tension, and steady the mind and lift the spirits on long treks and hunts. It was chewed, brewed as a tea, and used as a snuff. This is a genuine traditional-knowledge lineage, and any honest history of kanna credits the San and Khoikhoi as its source. That credit is not just courtesy: it is why reputable suppliers today increasingly emphasize ethical, community-partnered sourcing of the plant.

The plant carries several names that are used more or less interchangeably, and each is a small piece of history.

Kanna and channa are the traditional names for the plant (the spelling varies with transliteration). Kougoed refers to the prepared, fermented material, and it is the most telling name of all: it is commonly translated from Afrikaans/Dutch roots as "something to chew" (literally in the sense of chew-goods or chewable stuff). The name records the mode of use directly, kanna was, first and foremost, something you chewed.

A note on the name "kanna" itself: it is shared, sometimes confusingly, with certain other southern-African plants and animals in historical usage, which is part of why the precise botanical name, Sceletium tortuosum, matters when reading old accounts.

The traditional preparation was more sophisticated than simply picking and chewing a leaf. The harvested plant was bruised and packed to ferment, sometimes described as "sweating," over a period of days, and only then dried. This fermented product is kougoed.

The fermentation step matters because it is thought to shift the plant's alkaloid balance and reduce harshness, producing a mellower, more palatable material. The dried kougoed was then chewed (the classic mode), brewed as a tea, or ground and used as a snuff. Modern chemistry has since focused on the same alkaloids this traditional processing was intuitively managing, the mesembrine-type alkaloids covered in our guide to mesembrine.

Kanna crossed into the European written record during the Dutch East India Company (VOC) era at the Cape of Good Hope. The Company established its refreshment station at the Cape in 1652 under Jan van Riebeeck, and it is in the settlement and exploration records of the following years that the plant's use is documented, commonly dated to around 1662. Later Cape administrators and naturalists of the Simon van der Stel era continued to record the plant and the indigenous trade in it.

These early accounts are notable for what they preserved: European observers documented that local peoples valued and traded the plant and chewed it for its effects on mood and stamina. We attribute the general period and the ~1662 record because those are well-documented; we avoid pinning the discovery on a single named individual or an exact day, because the record is a body of colonial-era observations rather than one tidy founding moment.

For a long stretch after those first accounts, kanna sat largely outside Western scientific and commercial attention. It remained in continuous traditional and regional use in southern Africa, but there was no meaningful body of Western research, no isolated compounds, and no international market. It was, in effect, a locally known plant with a footnote in colonial records.

That quiet period is worth naming honestly, because it explains why kanna can feel simultaneously ancient and brand-new today. The tradition never stopped; the science simply had not started.

The modern chapter is a chemistry-and-pharmacology story. Researchers isolated and characterized the plant's mesembrine-type alkaloids, chiefly mesembrine, mesembrenone, mesembrenol, and Δ7-mesembrenone, and began to work out how they act.

The mechanistic keystone is Harvey et al. (2011), published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, which characterized kanna's dual mechanism: it is both a serotonin-reuptake inhibitor (SRI) and a PDE4 inhibitor. Mesembrine is the most potent at the serotonin transporter; mesembrenone is the strongest PDE4 inhibitor.

That dual profile is why kanna occupies its own category among legal botanicals, and it is the scientific reason the modern era treats the plant as more than folklore. The full study-by-study picture is in our science pillar, Sceletium tortuosum: The Science of Kanna, and the mechanism itself in how kanna works.

The bridge from tradition to a modern, testable product is standardization. Raw plant material varies widely in alkaloid content, which makes consistent dosing, and rigorous study, difficult. The answer was a standardized extract, Zembrin, a patented Sceletium tortuosum extract formulated to a consistent alkaloid specification and deliberately mesembrenone-forward rather than high in mesembrine.

Zembrin's importance to the modern history of kanna is hard to overstate: nearly all of the published human clinical research on kanna has used this single standardized extract, typically at a 25mg daily dose. That is what turned an ancient chewed plant into something a laboratory could dose precisely and a supplement shelf could sell consistently. We cover the extract in depth in how kanna works and the broader dosing picture in our kanna preparation guide.

The honest caveat that belongs in any history: because the clinical record rests so heavily on this one extract (in studies of roughly 16 to 37 participants, short in duration, and partly industry-linked), we cannot assume raw plant or high-mesembrine concentrates behave identically. Kanna's tradition is centuries old; its clinical evidence base is young and modest.

The final chapter is the one still being written. Over the last several years, kanna has moved from a specialist botanical into a fast-growing supplement category, sold internationally as gummies, chews, tinctures, capsules, and powders, the formats we map in our complete guide to kanna.

On legal status, kept neutral: in the United States kanna is federally uncontrolled and sold as a botanical dietary supplement; it is not a scheduled drug and is not FDA-approved to treat any condition. It is legal in most other countries and is not scheduled under any UN drug convention. As with any supplement, local rules can differ and can change, so verify your own jurisdiction.

So the arc is complete: a succulent chewed for centuries by the San and Khoikhoi, first written down at the 17th-century Cape, quiet for generations, then isolated, mechanistically characterized (Harvey 2011), standardized as Zembrin, and now sold worldwide. That documented lineage, tradition plus modern standardization, is exactly why kanna is worth understanding rather than dismissing.