No pass, no beer …how shebeens shaped the liberation effort

17 Apr, 2022 - 00:04 0 Views
No pass, no beer …how shebeens shaped the liberation effort Mr Pathisa Nyathi

The Sunday News

Bruce Ndlovu , Sunday Life Reporter
THE coming of the Easter holidays, signals the arrival of good times for liquor suppliers.

Easter, just like Christmas, is a holiday that is supposed to be filled with religious significance for Christians across the globe.

The death and resurrection of Christ is supposed to bring about a spiritual awakening even for those who might have found themselves straying away from the light of the lord due to the pressures of everyday life.

Despite this, for a lot of people, the holidays mean that the good times have arrived, and what are good times without a taste of the wise water?

At this time of the year, the traffic through the doors of liquor suppliers and bottle stores increases tenfold as people stock up on the essentials.

One cannot walk a black’s distance in the Bulawayo CBD without coming across a bottle store or liquor.

While only the deepness of  one’s pockets might be the only thing that separates them from their favourite brew these days, there was a time when the average black African could not just walk into a store and grab their poison of choice at a whim.

In fact, during the bleak early years of colonialism, Africans were outrightly banned from consuming European liquor of any sort.

“Their attitude towards black men was that these are not civilised men,” historian Pathisa Nyathi told Sunday Life.

“Just like the franchise, the right to vote, it was extended to civilised men and the black man was never considered as a civilised man.

Black was seen as racially inferior and from that perception of racial inferiority we then have various statutes that effect that idea whose opposite was the racial superiority of white people.

“When we were shopping, we were not allowed to get into shops in the CBD like OK, Haddon and Sly or Woolworths. Where we were allowed, we were shopping through apertures, small windows and we were not even allowed to try on the clothes we would have bought. That’s how serious things were.”

According to Professor Michael O. West, the British imperial charter that provided the basis for the establishment of the colony in 1890 specifically prohibited the consumption by Africans of these forms of alcohol, a prohibition that was subsequently reaffirmed in various legislative measures, most notably the Liquor Act of 1930.

This prohibition, colonial officials and white settlers maintained, imposed no particular hardship on Africans, who could still drink the traditional maize- (or sorghum) based “kaffir” (roughly “nigger”) beer, regarded as both more nutritious and having a lower alcoholic content than European liquor.

“Initially the city council allowed Ndebele women to continue brewing because in our tradition beer brewing was a function for women.

That is what led to the naming of these beerhalls in Bulawayo after these women. Places like MaMkhwananzi, MaDlodlo, MaKhumalo.

They were the first people to brew that beer and then later on 1912 the city council stepped in and said we are now going to do the brewing ourselves.

At that time, they were still near the Big Bhawa in Makokoba. This is where the first brewing plant was before they moved to Steeldale where it still is right now,” said Nyathi.

As more Africans came to live in towns, where their skill and labour kept the engines of the colonial economy running, it gave rise to an educated black middle class that desired some of the “finer things” that were at that time a preserve of the white settler community.

For this rising class of Africans, drinking traditional booze in beerhalls seemed somewhat primitive. They wanted and thought they deserved better than the beerhalls whose operating times were restricted and the alcohol content of beer was not to exceed four percent.

In 1917, the Rhodesian Attorney General stated in 1917, on Sundays domestic servants and other workers in Salisbury “were apt to wander far afield to obtain beer, and there were all sorts of places within the vicinity of the commonage where they could go, and in many cases, they came home helplessly drunk-when they came home at all”.

The beerhalls were aimed at rectifying this unsatisfactory state of affairs, and employers “hoped and believed that the sale of beer [there] was controlled, and that when the boys were sent home, they were in a condition to reach home”. However, this did not deter Africans that wanted more.

“Because of these restrictions, we saw these illicit brews, Skokiaan, starting to come up. Beer gardens were established virtually in all townships, and as I have already alluded to they were being named after women.

Because we were not allowed to drink clear beer, some of us were drinking at Happy Valley Hotel and Marisha.

Members of the coloured community, because they were allowed to buy alcohol, would sell to black people so that they could also get a taste of clear beer,” he said.

As the taste buds of more and more affluent Africans craved clear beer, trade in illicit alcohol witnessed a boom.

“Where the supply of liquor to Natives has been prohibited”, the South African Native Affairs Commission of 1903-1905 had noted “difficulty has arisen, as was to be expected, in the detection of contraventions of the law.

The Natives are unwilling to give information against the dealers from whom they purchase illicitly.”

While arrests were made, this did little to deter buyers and sellers alike. In 1940, for instance, B.J. Mnyanda, then the chairman of the African section of the Bulawayo African Welfare Society, a group whose mandate was organising “safe” leisure for urban residents, and one of the most, was arrested on charges of possessing two bottles of beer.

A subsequent search of his house also turned up a bottle of brandy. After entering guilty pleas, both Mnyanda and his African supplier were each fined £5.41. By the mid-1950s, conviction for possession of European liquor usually carried a fine of up to £10.

Traffickers, on the other hand, could be fined up to £200 or imprisoned for up to a year. According to the late journalist Lawrence Vambe, drinking clear alcohol was now in those years “the very symbol of economic and cultural superiority”.

Top African businessmen and professionals Vambe said, “wanted regular supplies, especially at Christmas, Easter and other public holidays, and private celebrations. Even the dead were propitiated in gin, whisky, brandy and rum.”

It was amongst this group and class of Africans that the movement for the legalisation of clear beer, at least for some Africans grew.

In 1946, the African Voters’ League, a group representing enfranchised Africans in Harare and a few smaller urban centres, called upon the government to amend the law to give African voters the right to purchase and consume European liquor.

Solomon Dzwittie, a social worker and journalist, agreed, arguing that the government should become “realistic and face up to the fact that the [Liquor] Act has not succeeded and never will succeed in stopping Africans from drinking European liquors”.

All it did, rather, was to promote criminal activity by forcing “otherwise well behaved citizens to flout the law of the country”

With effect from August 1957, the liquor act was amended, with those Africans deemed worthy given a letter of exemption.

However, unwittingly, by excluding even those exempt Africans from certain places of leisure, the Rhodesians were sowing the seeds for a brewing liberation struggle.

“The fact that we were not allowed to drink alcohol at their hotels like Palace, Greys Inn and others, spawned a phenomenon known as shebeens.

These began illicit spots for drinking clear beer by Africans but on the positive side, in Bulawayo in particular, these shebeens ended up becoming political hotspots.

Remember Zipra was strong in terms of urban guerilla warfare in Bulawayo and Harare. But to wage a guerilla war you need logistical support, intelligence support from the local community.

That’s why they would meet in shebeens like koMahlabangana where they would be exchanging information and they would get what they needed.

You would get to a shebeen and see a woman carrying a child on her back without realising that between the child and the woman’s back, she has things that she is going to give to these urban guerillas,” said Nyathi.

According to Proffesor West, “The quest for legal access to European liquor, by contrast, was more symbolically important, both for elite Africans and white settlers, and it certainly generated more controversy within elite African circles helping to sharpen political skills that would later become extremely valuable.

A number of individuals who were closely identified with the European liquor issue went on to assume important positions in the nationalist movement that eventually led Zimbabwe to independence in 1980.”

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