Drinking cultures vary across countries, as do regulations over legal drinking age limits. Recently, the Canadian government updated its alcohol regulation with the publication of Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health Report. While drinking regulations continue to generate debates among researchers, the general public, and even political circles, scholars have cited concerns over neurological development in adults, other health risks, and social deviance to validate government policies. What does this tell us about drinking cultures in colonial Africa? How did the production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol by colonized Africans shape the interpretation of colonial power and official control of informal economies?
To begin, alcohol production in Africa was not a colonial invention. Communities had mastered the craft of beer brewing centuries before colonial conquest and even ritualized alcohol as a religious symbol and an element of social cohesion. Alcohol was also considered a status symbol in most African societies, with its use masculinized, and regulations framed almost exclusively by male elders. Emmanuel Akyeampong’s seminal study has shown ways in which control over alcohol use by Ghanaian male elders enhanced their identity and social superiority. However, with the advent of colonialism and the development of the colonial economy, consumer preferences became more diversified with the introduction of new varieties of alcoholic beverages.
With increasing demand for foreign and local gin came a slew of government regulations to restrict its use among Africans. These regulations were not necessarily driven by familiar concerns over health risks and social behavior as officials claimed. Rather, they reflected the racial attitude of colonists in some areas, sheer colonial paternalism in other instances, and a general official focus on monopolizing the lucrative alcohol industry to support dwindling resources in colonial metropoles during the World Wars, inter-war years, and the Great Depression. Thus, anxiety over alcohol consumption is not a novel phenomenon. In fact, in much of colonial Africa, alcohol regulation was considered part of the so-called native problem – colonial concerns over the control of indigenous groups. Restricting access to alcoholic beverages in local communities became the cornerstone of government policy for much of the colonial period. Local brewing was strictly prohibited and very often defaulters faced imprisonment and their products confiscated. Almost across the continent, indigenous neighborhoods and social spaces were regularly raided for “illicit gin.” A recent study on policing in apartheid South Africa by Gary Kynoch historicizes the fatal outcome of a liquor raid in Cato Manor, a settlement in KwaZulu Natal.
Given this backdrop, it is not surprising that pioneer scholarship on the social history of alcohol in Africa focused on the resistance framework, citing the ban on locally brewed gin as evidence of imperial hegemony and unfettered colonial control. Local contests of official policy on alcohol consumption are easily seen from this purview as resistance to European presence. Alcohol becomes a “metaphor for power,” and a “symbol of protest.” These characterizations, of course, did not occur in a vacuum. Colonialism was doubtless imposed by violence and maintained by the threat of violence as Elizabeth Isichei has argued. However, local response to colonial policies on alcohol was more complex than the dominant narrative admits.
Historians Lynn Schler and Dmitri van den Bersselaar provide illuminating perspectives on alcohol regulation in colonial Africa by showing the contingency of official policy and the resilience of local drinking cultures in southern Ghana and southern Cameroon through the lens of popular culture. Bersselaar and Schler privilege a bottom-up approach to the social history of alcohol by showing the everyday lived experiences of Africans within stringent, yet fragile colonial economic protocols. Their studies reveal the often overlooked angle of local agency in defining drinking cultures, public space, and popular culture within shifting colonial boundaries. They consider alcohol as also a space of control, contest, negotiation, and struggles over the terms of society. In Bersselaar’s southern Ghana, British attempts to restrict local consumption were frustrated by an intricate web of gin smugglers comprising chiefs and local entrepreneurs. In Schler’s account, the social landscape was racially segregated with stricter regulations in the European quarters of Joss and Akwa, and an increasingly lax control in the African-dominated “Strangers’ Quarters” or New Bell in colonial Doula, southern Cameroon.
Scholars have argued that popular struggles related to alcohol and mass protest are linked to the nationalist movement of the 1940s and 1950s in Ghana for instance, where the elimination of colonial control over alcohol became a central issue in the independence movement. But that would be after 1945. As Schler notes, it would be more accurate to view the history of alcohol in New Bell as elsewhere in Africa as reflecting a community life that was generally transitory, spontaneous and creative, and as such, uncaptured by the colonial regime.” In Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria as elsewhere, local actors (female brewers, young men, smugglers, chiefs, and local retailers) leveraged the changing colonial policies on alcohol use to construct “safe spaces” for drinking, debates over power hierarchies, colonial control, popular culture, and anti-colonial activism. While we cannot rule out the fact that gin smuggling in southern Ghana for instance, was a direct response to an invasive colonial presence, or that covert production in the Strangers’ Quarters of Cameroon indicates struggles against colonial and local hierarchies of power, it is also important to view these actions as illustrative of the limits of colonial “boundaries” and the ability of Africans to construct new forms of identities and social spaces irrespective of intrusive and restrictive colonial policies.
Photo by ELEVATE
