A Social History of Alcohol in East Africa, 1850-1999/Alcohol in Africa: Mixing Business, Pleasure, and Politics

HISTORY

Justin Willis. Potent Brews: A Social History of Alcohol in East Africa, 1850-1999. Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa/Athens: Ohio University Press /Oxford: James Currey, 2002. xii + 302 pp. Maps. Tables. Figures. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $22.95. Cloth.

Deborah Fay Bryceson, ed. Alcohol in Africa: Mixing Business, Pleasure, and Politics. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heineman, 2002. viii + 305 pp. Index. $69.95. Cloth.

Alcohol has served as a social solvent in many countries and in many ways. The two books under review remind us of the varied approaches scholars take to serve up their own brews. Justin Willis examines alcohol use over 150 years in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika, while Deborah Bryceson and her contributors, participants in a 1997 seminar at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, survey all of sub-Saharan Africa over a slightly shorter period. As a single author, Willis can develop a complex approach to the social role of alcohol in a particular region, while the contributors to Bryceson's book (including Willis) are limited to a much shorter explication of a single aspect of alcohol's use.

Potent Brews breaks new ground in analyzing the very different functions of alcohol in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. Willis focuses particularly on alcohol's role in the making of authority, contending that "for people across East Africa, talking about 'proper' drinking and contrasting past drinking with present drinking, have been ways of arguing about proper behaviour within their own societies" (5). During the late nineteenth century in societies ranging from the acephalous to interlacustrine kingdoms, senior men bolstered their authority through a monopoly of access to locally brewed beer. In like manner, British colonialists reserved commercially distilled liquors for themselves; indeed, until the 1940s, they restricted access even to bottled beers. The transfer of authority to African elites can almost be measured by the acquisition of access to industrial brews and the limitation of that access to the mass of Africans. Ordinary Africans resorted increasingly to home brews. Rural Africans finally were able to buy industrially produced alcohols beginning in the 1970s when the governments needed the revenue. Willis's narrative concerns much more than life as seen through the brown lens of a beer bottle; it provides new insights into the nature of power relations before, during, and after the colonial interlude.

Bryceson's collection is of necessity more diffuse. Her own introductory and concluding chapters are a mixed success. Her modalities of alcohol usage come across as something of an omnium gatherum: precolonial, rural ceremonial, or gift exchange, rural commoditized drinking, urban working- and middle-class drinking, and urban elite drinking. More enlightening are her conclusions as to the causes and consequences of increased alcohol consumption by economically marginalized men and women in the 1980s and 1990s. These she documents from a number of chapters by her contributors. Justin Willis, for example, writes on the poverty of Nyakyusa beer sellers. Nite Baza Tanzam argues that the gin trade does not compensate the Banyoro for the loss of their lands. Michael K. McCall shows the extent to which home brews waste firewood. Jan Abbink describes how highlanders demonstrate their superiority over lowlanders in southern Ethiopia by the absence of drunkenness. Roy van der Drift hypothesizes the relationship between fermented cashew liquor and a 1980s military coup in Guinea-Bissau. Tuuliiki Pietila shows the effects of alcohol on gendered rivalries among the Chagga. And Emmanuel Akyeampong relates how young Ghanaians who are unsuccessful in the job market turn to heavy drinking. In addition to historical accounts by Jan-Bart Gewald on government efforts to control drinking in Namibia and Simon Heap on colonial Nigeria's reliance on taxes on distilled liquor, the collection includes essays by Sabine Luning and Rijk van Dijk on Burkina Christians and Malawi Pentecostals who avoid drinking.

These two books satisfy our thirst in different ways. We can decant Willis for a wide-ranging account of the social function of alcohol in a relatively small region. Or we can open Bryceson for a number of well-constructed case studies.

Bruce Fetter

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Copyright African Studies Association Dec 2003
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