Life, death and alcohol in southern Africa

P.J. Tobia:

During my travels in southern Africa, there were times when I felt as if God had actively forsaken that part of the world. Death is everywhere. It stalks the land in the form of AIDS, malaria, and cholera. All day long they build coffins in the streets. Illiterate children, crippled by malnutrition or war, are ubiquitous, playing in filthy rags while their mothers prostitute themselves to feed large families.

At first blush, this place seems gripped in pandemic suffering. A closer look reveals the true nature of southern Africa: It is a drinker’s paradise. Hundreds of miles of beaches with names like Monkey Bay and Candy Beach line the eastern coast of Mozambique and the enormous lake Malawi, providing the perfect setting for canoeing, fishing, and drinking the hot days away. Homemade liquors and bottled beers are available at almost every roadside shack, some conveniently attached to rest houses where one can sleep off a particularly frightening bender in a cheap, clean bed. Pocket change will buy a round for the entire bar and, of course, the police have never, and I mean never, heard of a Breathalyzer.

Women do almost all the daily work in southern Africa: cooking, finding food, raising children, and tidying up around the hut, which leaves men free to spend the day pursuing more amiable interests, like drinking until they can barely stand or form sentences.

And because the possibility of finding a job is laughable and property ownership largely hereditary, there is no expectation that the people of this region become clock-punching cubicle drones or slaves to a mortgage. While they lack the amenities we Westerners couldn’t imagine living without—such as hot, clean water, electricity, or a life expectancy greater than 35 years—they do have the luxury of being able to relax with good friends and a few dozen drinks every single day of the year.

And, boy, do they drink. From the rooster’s first call to the hour when night descends—or until they collapse from drinking in the sun, which in that part of the world can burn like a death ray—Africa’s heaviest drinkers have it pretty good in both lifestyle and beverage selection.

In rural Malawi they drink kisasho and Chibuku, a popular brand of millet beer. In Northern Mozambique they imbibe sweet wine that comes in plump little plastic jugs with screw tops. And in the black-only townships of post-Apartheid South Africa, millet beer is passed around in smoky little shacks, everybody gulping greedily from the same big metal bucket.

No matter what you call it or how you make it, these home-brewed liquors are the respite of Joe Africa, not only allowing escape from the crushing poverty that defines his existence, but adding an opulence unheard of in the so-called modern world—the ability to consume alcohol guilt free, all day, every day.

AFRICA: Alcohol increases risk of HIV/AIDS

Law enrages Botswana bar owners

Africa's unborn alcohol victims

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome --- South Africa, 2001

Kenya: The Drinking Country

Bitter taste receptor gene and risk of alcoholism

Stainable hepatic iron in 341 African American adults at coroner/medical examiner autopsy

South Africa Woman Killed by Partner Every 6 Hours – Study Report

Alcohol abuse and the workplace