This good-natured collection contributes several closely observed accounts of Africa's relationship with beer, focusing on Southern and West Africa. Despite this geographical focus, East Africanists such as myself – as well as social scientists studying stimulants and intoxicants more generally – will also find much of interest.
After a précis of earlier anthropological and historical work on alcohol, the introduction explains the volume's particular focus on beer. Beer is ‘part and parcel of popular culture in Africa and one of the few thriving industries on the continent … it cannot be ignored’ (p. 5). Although there are exceptions, it is hard to disagree with this broad statement. The introduction describes the ‘double focus’ of the chapters: seeing beer as a ‘marker of visible and invisible boundaries’ while also examining how these boundaries are negotiated, reaffirmed or challenged in its drinking rituals. The discussion becomes rather heavier here, and more clarity in explaining opaque notions like ‘heterotopia’ would have been appreciated.
The volume is divided into three sections. In the first section – ‘spaces’ – Roberts studies the Guinness advertising campaign based around a suave African hero called ‘Michael Power’. This campaign involved a feature film demonstrating Power's prowess in fighting evil within a non-country-specific representation of ‘Africa’. The campaign has been remarkably effective in promoting Guinness – once thought of as a medicine – by connecting it to notions of a modern, individualized African masculinity. Next, McAllister places a Durkheimian analysis of how beer rituals forge a ‘moral community’ for Xhosa within a critique of the widely promoted concept of ‘Ubuntu’: a supposedly African notion of humane interconnectedness. McAllister's ethnography of relations cemented through beer contrasts with the artificiality of ‘Ubuntu’, though the implications of this contrast could be more clearly defined. Van Wolputte's chapter on drinking in the Namibian town of Opuwo ends this section, and most easily slips into the category of ‘spaces’. It looks at perceptions of places within the town and the surrounding countryside as seen through their beer-drinking practices. His ethnography is excellent, especially a vignette of an encounter with a local healer, and the frustrations of a film crew who hoped to film him performing ‘tradition’. The ubiquity of beer in all these places and rituals, and the way its use includes some and excludes others, is well illustrated, although the accompanying theoretical discussion of heterotopia and so forth could once again be made clearer.
The second section – ‘states’ – begins with Heap's historical chapter on the evolution of beer drinking, import and manufacture in Nigeria, where beer is now the biggest non-oil industry. It draws out the ambivalences of colonial authorities, eager to raise tax through the sale of liquor, but concerned with the impact of its consumption by Africans. This theme resonates with histories of other substances – like khat in Kenya – that also led to colonial ambivalence for the same reasons. Röschenthaler's chapter is a fine ethnography of the social lives of palm wine and bottled beer in Cameroon, and the slipperiness of their meanings in rural and urban settings. Dobler's equally fine ethnography shows how beer acts as a social lubricant in northern Namibia, and makes good use of a 2006 controversy regarding government attempts to regulate shebeens. This provides a vivid example of how beer consumption can expose and be drawn into wider societal frustrations, in this case concerning the meaning of ‘liberation’ for Namibians.
Finally, the third section – ‘selves’ – begins with an examination of the economics of sorghum beer brewing in Burkina Faso, where this is an activity carried out, as elsewhere in Africa, by women. Helmfrid explores different categories of brewers and the strategies they employ to boost trade, the vulnerabilities they face from volatile markets, and how they negotiate the gendered structuring of society. Krige then explores beer drinking and class in Soweto, introducing us to the meanings of different types of beer, before contrasting two groups of drinkers and the structural forces that differentiate them and their consumption – one a working-class group of men whose drinking centres around a savings club; the other a group of young men within a new African elite. Finally, Fumanti takes us on a night out with some young, upwardly mobile Namibian men, showing how their conspicuous consumption of beer and associated sexual encounters help define their masculinity. Beer drinking is fun, but fraught with potential dangers: catching diseases from inebriated affairs, losing respectability should their comportment let them down. This gets to the heart of the ambivalence that surrounds intoxicants the world over: intoxication shared with others can lead to moments of convivial joy and help bond people together, but the risk of embarrassment and future hangovers (physical and social) are ever-present.
While an engaging entrée into the drinking cultures of a number of African societies, the book also offers a window into the drinking habits of the ethnographers themselves, as the epilogue makes clear, and demonstrates quite how insightful inebriation can be. A future volume concerning intoxication and the anthropological encounter would be interesting indeed.
