Liquor and Labor in Southern AfricaJonathan Crush, Charles H. Ambler In June 1976 political demonstrations in the black township of Soweto exploded into an insurrection that would continue sporadically and spread to urban areas across South Africa. In their assault on apartheid the youths who spearheaded the rebellion attacked and often destroyed the state institutions that they linked to their oppression: police stations, government offices, schools, and state-owned liquor outlets. In Soweto alone during the first days of the revolt protestors smashed and burned eighteen beerhalls and a similar number of bottle stores; as the rebellion spread more were destroyed. This study sets out to demonstrate that liquor outlets were not simply convenient symbols of oppression. The anger that launched gasoline bombs into beerhalls across South Africa had specific origins in deep and complicated struggles over the control of alcohol production and consumption in South Africa. Conflict over alcohol has continuously intruded upon the lives of the black residents of southern African towns, cities, and labor compounds and upon the rural communities to which these people traced their origins. Yet the subject has received little systematic scholarly attention until now. In Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa scholars explore the complex relationship between alcohol use and the emergence of the modern urban-industrial system. In examining the role of alcohol in social control and the state, they also reveal the vibrant subcultures nurtured in beerhalls and underground shebeens and expose the bitter conflicts over alcohol that run along the fault lines of age, gender, class, and ethnicity. |
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African drinking alcohol Basotho Basotho women beer brewing beer drink beer gardens beerhalls Botswana boycott Cape Town Central century Chibuku Chief Colliery colonial Commissioner compound manager consumption Copperbelt Council culture Director of Native diss District drunkenness Dundee Durban Durban system economic farm farmers February female GNLB halls Hausse Havelock homestead Ibid illicit liquor industry Inspector January Johannesburg June Kaffir Beer licensed Liquor Laws Location Superintendent Magistrate male miners mines Minutes of PHC municipal beer Native Beer Native Labour Northern Rhodesia November October officials police production profits prohibition raids Rand Daily Mail regulations Report residents retailing ritual Rogerson rural Secretary for Native September 1929 shebeens social sorghum beer South Africa southern Africa Swazi Swaziland tion token system Town Clerk township trade Transvaal Umtata University Press urban areas utshwala wages Weenen western Cape wine Witwatersrand workers WRDB