Life was simple for people in Africa until the eighteenth century. Until they attracted attention from the West.
Those days, for merriness, tribals of eastern Africa only had to hang a bunch of bananas over a hearth or bury them in the earth. They waited patiently as the bananas ripened and the starches inside converted into sugars. The plantains were then mashed to exract their juices which would then be fermented. Don’t imagine the resulting liquid after mixing it with water would turn their sober world head over heals.
With a meagre alcohol percentage of 5, all that the drink could give the locals were a few moments of excitement.
From tribe to tribe, the habits varied. For some, the drink was a daily phenomenon and they drank copiously, elsewhere it was consumed only on occasions such as festivals and funerals. Rituals to appease God would not be complete without beer. Negations on marriages could be conducted only with the accompaniment of the drink.
Don’ t think it was pandemonium. The Africans knew how to take care of their drunkards. Those who got tippled and regularly went off the limits were punished by forcing more beer down their pipes to that point of drunkenness where out of shame and humiliation they would decide to kick the habit for a long time (What a punishment)!
But paradises cannot not hold it on forever on earth. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Africa attracted the Western attention with its bounty of gold, diamond, and ivory.
The first European settlers who came to the Afican coast didn’t like the meek drinks the locals were found enjoying themselves with. So they brought from their countries, stiffer drinks, drinks that could blow the last fuses of soberity. But, sadly, the new drinks that came to Africa did not stop with the colonisers. In 1895, a British colonial officer reported to his office in his homeland that trade was impossible in the dark Continent without spirits, as liquor was the only one thing the Africans understood and agreed to.
Thus began the notorious barter system - slaves for brandy and rum.
Greedy African kings began to round off their own people and helped the Europeans carted them off their homeland to work as slaves in barges and trade ships. All they wanted from the Europeans was their alcohol. No one now wanted to wait out for the old bunch of bananas hanging over some hearth turning slowly into some meek beer, where a bottle from the white people could give them ten times the excitement.
The enslaved natives were carried to Carribean countries where they worked to their bones cultivating sugar, making rum. Hear out the irony. Rum, fermented and made by the black slaves, was once again used by the planters for purchasing more slaves from the dark continent.
Wish they had hung on to that bunch of bananas over those hearths!
(Manu Remakant is a freelance writer who also runs a video blog - A Cup of Kavitha - introducing world poetry to Malayalees. Views expressed here are personal)
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