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Black South Africans have a long, long (1000 year) tradition of drinking -- originally sorghum beer. Beer was absolutely central to the indigenous diet (brewing added vitamins that the plain grain lacked) as well as to culture, marriage, economics and politics.
When the Europeans established the mines, they tried to attract black mine workers by offering lots of beer, and at first it worked. Then they discovered that the miners, not surprisingly, were often drunk.
They tried banning beer and rationing it, and only allowing Africans to drink traditional beer which has a lower alcohol content than European drink. Women came to the mines and set up many brewing places and informal bars. Black South Africans adopted the Irish word for an informal bar, "shebeen", as the name for these black woman-run drinking establishments (there were lots of immigrant Irish on the mine fields).
By the apartheid era, the government tried to monopolize the sale of drink to Africans. Supposedly, black South Africans could only legally drink at government sponsored beer halls, but the shebeen business was always booming in the black townships. Also, supposedly, black South Africans were not legally allowed to drink hard liquor.
Black South Africans developed a culture of drinking beers aimed at the white South African market and hard liquor almost as a form of protest. If memory serves me, the 1976 Soweto uprising had a significant "beer" component, and I think the government beer halls were vandalized.
When I lived there I was often shocked and amused at the strange places my friends would take me to drink beer -- shebeens in shacks on the tops of luxury white apartment buildings, shebeens in homes in the township, shebeens in shacks in tiny homelands villages.
So I guess my rambling point is that alcohol has been a significant arena of struggle and symbolic meaning in colonial situations, with whites trying to control the consumption of subject people, and subject people using consuming choices as a political statement.
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