I started writing a book. It became Muranga OS.

I did not set out to build a company.

I set out to write a book about plants. Specifically, about the medicinal plants of Southern Africa - what they are, what they carry, what they have to teach a person willing to sit with them. The book is called Resonance: The Plants, the Elements, and the Memory We Hold Together. The premise is simple, though it took me years to arrive at: plants are not magical substances or chemistry sets. They are stabilized pattern intelligence. Living libraries of wisdom encoded over millions of years.

I wrote about Warburgia salutaris - pepperbark, Isibhaha, Mulanga, Mananga. A tree that learned to live in sun-baked earth and encoded that lesson into the heat of its bark. I wrote about how a small piece on the tongue spreads warmth through the chest, and what that warmth has meant, for centuries, to people who knew how to read it.

The thesis of Resonance is a single sentence: they cannot remember us if we do not carry them in our memory. The plants carry us. We carry them. The memory is the ecosystem.

But the further I wrote, the harder it became to write.

Because every plant I sat with had three stories running underneath it, and only one of them was being told.

The first story is the plant's

This is the one I started with. The chemistry. The evolution. The encoded intelligence. The fact that a tree on a rocky hillside, over millions of years, solved a problem and stored the solution in its bark - and that we can still taste that solution today.

This story is beautiful. It is what makes the book worth writing.

But I noticed something while writing it. The plants I was writing about - pepperbark, African ginger, Natal lily, Siphonochilus, Clivia - were getting harder to find. Some are now critically endangered. Others have been stripped from the wild faster than they can be replaced. The libraries are burning. And almost nobody is keeping a record of which ones, or where, or by whom.

You cannot protect what you cannot see.

The second story is the knowledge holder's

Every plant in my book has a name in at least three South African languages before it has a Latin one. That is not coincidence. It is evidence. Behind every one of those plants is a lineage of people who learned its name, its uses, its dosages, its dangers - and passed that knowledge forward, in spoken word, in apprenticeship, in trust.

There are an estimated two hundred thousand traditional knowledge holders practising in South Africa. Tens of millions of people rely on what they know. This is not a niche. It is, for the majority of South Africans, the first line of healthcare.

And yet when one of these plants gets commercialised - patented, extracted, sold in a wellness store or a pharmaceutical formulation - the people who held the knowledge that made it possible see almost none of the return. Sometimes none at all. Their knowledge crosses an invisible border between traditional and intellectual property and they are not invited across with it.

This is biopiracy. And it is not historical. It is happening now.

The third story is the buyer's

I almost didn't see this one. I had to look from the other side.

A pharmaceutical company, a cosmetics brand, an ESG-conscious bank, a forestry business - they all want the same thing. They want to know that the ingredient they bought was harvested legally, sustainably, and with the consent of the people whose knowledge underwrites its commercial use. They want to be able to prove it to a regulator, an auditor, a board, a buyer in Frankfurt.

They mostly cannot. Not because they don't want to. Because the chain is invisible. There is no record. The harvest happens in a place nobody is watching. The knowledge transfer happens in a language nobody is writing down. The payment, if it happens at all, leaves no trace.

And so the buyer ends up doing the only thing they can. They estimate. They make a claim. They hope it holds up.

From 2026 onwards, hoping will not be enough.

The gap is between all three

I sat with this for a long time. Months. The book paused.

The plants were disappearing because there was no record of who was taking what, where, and how much. The knowledge holders were going unpaid because there was no record of whose knowledge was being used and when. The buyers were exposed because there was no record they could hand to a regulator.

Three problems. One missing thing.

A record.

Not a paper record. A living one - built at the point where the plant meets the harvester, the harvester meets the knowledge holder, the knowledge holder meets the buyer. A record that protects the plant by counting it, protects the knowledge holder by paying them, and protects the buyer by proving the chain.

I realised the book I was writing could not be the answer on its own. A book can change how you see. It cannot change what gets paid, what gets traced, what gets preserved. For that, you need infrastructure.

So I kept writing the book. And I started building the infrastructure.

What Muranga OS is, and why it is called that

Muranga is a name for the pepperbark tree - the same tree at the centre of Resonance. The tree that taught me what stabilized pattern intelligence means. The tree that is now critically endangered in the wild.

The platform takes its name from the plant because the plant is the point. Muranga OS is the operating system for the chain that surrounds a medicinal plant - from the living tree, through the harvester, through the knowledge holder whose knowledge gives it meaning, through the lab that tests it, through the pack that carries it to market. Every step recorded. Every claim provable. Every contributor paid.

Sensors on the trees so we know what is there. Certificates on the harvests so anyone can verify origin. Payments to the knowledge holders so their knowledge translates into something more than acknowledgement. One audit trail, tree to pack.

Resonance and Muranga OS are two voices of the same mission. The book says here is what we must remember. The company says here is how we keep the memory intact.

What I am asking for

If you are a company that touches this value chain - pharma, cosmetics, food, beverages, finance, forestry - your supply chain is already exposed to everything I have just described. You may not yet know it.

If you are a knowledge holder, a community, a co-operative - we are building this with you, not about you. Voice notes in your language. Royalties to your wallet. Recognition by the regulator. Your knowledge protected as your own.

If you are an investor, a programme officer, a regulator, an ally - we are looking for the first cohort of pilots. One value chain. One quarter. We will prove the model together.

You can find us at muranga.co.za.

I am Tsakani Mashaba, co-founder of Muranga OS. I started this because the plants asked me to.

I am building this with everyone who knows the plants are worth keeping. That includes you.