What's in a drink? class struggle, popular culture and the politics of akpeteshie (local gin) in ghana, 1930–67

The Journal of African History

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 215-236

  Akyeampong, Emmanuel ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 85008571270     PISSN: 00218537     EISSN: 14695138     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700035209     Document Type: Article

References (128)

1. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak : Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), ch. 8.
2. The fermented palm wine or sugar cane juice was boiled with a coiled copper tube running from the boiling container through a receptacle filled with cool water or a stream and into an empty container. Steam rises from the boiling palm wine or sugar cane juice, condenses as it passes through the cool water and drips as gin into the empty container. The standardized alcohol strength of akpeteshie today is between 40 and 50 per cent by volume. Palm wine contains between 3 and 5 per cent of alcohol by volume.
3. See, for example, W. Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London, 1705), 189-90.
4. See, for example, John Mensah Sarbah, Fanti National Constitution (London, 1968 [1906]), 5-6.
5. See, for example, R. S. Rattray, Ashanti (Oxford, 1923), 97-8, and Religion and Art in Ashanti (Oxford, 1927), 148-50.
6. T. E. Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (London, 1966 [1824]), 277 and 293; and C. C. Reindorf, The History of the Gold Coast and Asante (Basel, 1895), 133. On alcohol's links to spiritual and political power, see Emmanuel Akyeampong, ’ Powerful fluids: alcohol and water in the struggle for social power in urban Gold Coast, 1860-1919’ (Paper presented at Northwestern University, Evanston, January 1994).
7. Raymond Dumett, ‘The social impact of the European liquor trade on the Akan of Ghana (Gold Coast and Asante), 1875-1910’, J. Interdisciplinary Hist., v (1974), 69-101.
8. Dumett, ‘Social impact of European liquor trade’, 80.
9. Although the Gold Coast was not declared a British colony until 1874, attempts by British administrators to tax Gold Coasters date from the 1850s. David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana 1850-1928 (Oxford, 1963), ch 4.
10. Dumett, ‘Social impact of European liquor trade’, 76.
11. G. E. Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana : Documents of Ghana History, 1808-195J (London, 1964), 428-30.
12. Emmanuel Akyeampong, ‘The state and alcohol revenues: promoting “Economic Development” in Gold Coast/Ghana, 1919 to the present’, Social History/Histoire sociale, xxvn (1994), 397. A similar situation developed in southern Nigeria before 1914. See A. Olorunfemi, ‘The liquor traffic dilemma in British West Africa: the Southern Nigerian example, 1895-1918’, Int. J. Afr. Hist. Studies, xvn (1984), 237-8.
13. Public Records Office (PRO), London, CO 96/597/15501.
14. See, for example, Charles Ambler, ‘Drunks, brewers and chiefs: alcohol regulation in colonial Kenya, 1900-1939’, in S. Barrows and R. Room (eds.), Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History (Berkeley, 1991), 165-83; and Michael O. West, ‘“Equal rights for all civilized men”: elite Africans and the quest for “European” liquor in colonial Zimbabwe, 1924-1961’, Int. Rev. of Soc. Hist., xxxvn (1992), 376-97.
15. PRO, CO 96/692/6571. See Appendixes II and IV of the 1930 Report of the Commission of Inquiry Regarding the Consumption of Spirits in the Gold Coast for the liquor duties and licensing ordinances in force before 1929.
16. Lynn Pan, Alcohol in Colonial Africa (Uppsala, 1975), 34.
17. Hereafter referred to as the colonial secretary.
18. For a summary of British liquor policy in Africa up to 1920, see PRO, CO 554/62/20621.
19. Pan, Alcohol in Colonial Africa, 41-5.
20. Magnus J. Sampson, Gold Coast Men of Affairs (London, 1937), 113-18.
21. Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815-1872 (Pittsburgh, 1971), 187. For a history of the prohibition movement, see A. E. Dingle, The Campaign for Prohibition in Victorian England: The United Kingdom Alliance 1872-1895 (London, 1980).
22. Pan, Alcohol in Colonial Africa, 25.
23. The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) West Africa Archives, School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), microfiche box 11, Gold Coast District Synod Minutes, 10.14.
24. See the ‘Notes of Evidence’ in the 1930 Commission Report.
25. See Emmanuel Akyeampong, ‘Alcohol, social conflict and the struggle for power in Ghana, 1919 to recent times’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Virginia, 1993), ch. 4, for a detailed discussion of the Gold Coast temperance movement.
26. Local African politics concerning liquor legislation and metropolitan temperance interests received a boost in the 1920s with the enactment of prohibition in the United States. The repeal of prohibition in the United States in the early 1930s deflated demands for prohibition in the Gold Coast. The onset of World War II further marginalized temperance politics in the Gold Coast.
27. See Gold Coast, Government Gazette, 29 Sept. 1928, for the stipulations of the Spirit License Amendment Ordinance.
28. Pan, Alcohol in Colonial Africa, 71.
29. Gold Coast, Government Gazette, 25 Oct. 1930.
30. WMMS (West Africa) Archives, microfiche box 11. The WMMS Synod Minutes for the years 1928-31 highlight the intense involvement of the mission in the Gold Coast ‘liquor question’. The Gold Coast Synod Minutes of 1931 justifiably claimed that ‘the principal recommendations made therein [The 1930 Commission's Report] accord with our own and we believe a notable advance in the cause of Temperance has been made’. The Methodist Missionary Society did successfully influence the agenda of the commission of inquiry.
31. Governor Shenton Thomas, Memorandum on Liquor Policy (Accra, 1934). Copy in PRO, CO 96/715/21702.
32. Thomas, Memorandum on Liquor Policy.
33. PRO, CO 96/681/6204.
34. PRO, CO 554/89/4495. Governor of Nigeria to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 22 Dec. 1931. It is strange that the Nigerian government regarded illicit distillation as a recent phenomenon. Colonial records indicate a proliferation of illicit distillation in Nigeria around 1910. Olorunfemi, ‘Liquor traffic dilemma’, 241.
35. PRO, CO 554/89/4495. Resident of the Calabar Province, ‘Memorandum on the illicit distilling in the Calabar Province’.
36. PRO, CO 554/89/4495. Governor Slater to the Colonial Office, 16 Jan. 1932.
37. PRO, CO 554/96/21446.
38. PRO, CO 96/708/1660.
39. See, for example, interview with Jeremiah Oman Ano, Sekondi, 15 Aug. 1994.
40. These impressions are based on the author's perusal of ADM 15 files (Law Officer's Department), the CSO 15/3 files (Criminal Investigations and Reports), and the Criminal Record Book of Nsawam District (SCT 38/5) housed at the Ghana National Archives (GNA), Accra. These ’ tribal’ categorizations, in the author's mind, were aided by the fact that Evveland was on the border of the colonial territory, hence Ewes were seen as being free of colonial restraints; by the prohibition of European liquor in the Northern Territories, hence the belief that European liquor was culturally and chemically powerful for northerners; and by the early establishment of mission schools in Fante territory, making educated Fantes the perfect perpetrators of fraud.
41. See Kenneth Little, Women in African Towns (Cambridge, 1973); and Luise White, The Comforts of Home : Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990).
42. ‘Popular culture’ is used here in the sense defined by Johannes Fabian, ‘Popular culture in Africa: findings and conjectures’, Africa, XLVIII (1978), 315. In particular, ‘it suggests contemporary cultural expressions carried by the masses in contrast to both modern elitist and traditional “tribal” culture’ and ‘it signifies, potentially at least, processes occurring behind the back of established powers and accepted interpretations.’. But the use of popular culture in this paper differs from Fabian's in that it posits no inherent tension between rural and urban culture. Areas of tension may exist, but popular culture also has the potential to link or integrate urban and rural social experiences.
43. Jonathan H. Frimpong Ansah, The Vampire State in Africa : The Political Economy of Decline in Ghana (Trenton, 1992), ch. 4.
44. GNA, ADM 5/2/3. Gold Coast, Census of the Population, ign, 50; and A. W. Cardinall, The Gold Coast, 1931 (Accra, 1931), 158-9.
45. For the social life of railworkers and miners, see Richard Jeffries, Class, Power and Ideology in Ghana : The Railwaymen of Sekondi (Cambridge, 1978); and Jeff Crisp, The Story of an African Working Class: Ghanaian Miners’ Struggles, 1870-igSo (London, 1984).
46. Gold Coast Independent, 31 Aug. 1918.
47. GNA, Sekondi, No. 140 (‘Optimism Club’).
48. The striking similarities between the rural palm wine bar and the urban drinking bar as centers of social activity are apparent.
49. E. J. Collins, ‘Ghanaian highlife’, African Arts, x (1976), 62-8. Kofi E. Agovi, ‘The political relevance of Ghanaian highlife songs since 1957’, Research in African Literatures, xx (1989), 194, points to the greater significance of lyrics over instrumentation in highlife songs.
50. David Coplan, ‘Go to my town, Cape Coast! The social history of Ghanaian highlife’, in Brunno Nettl (ed.), Eight Urban Musical Cultures (Urbana, 1978), 100.
51. On comic opera, see E. J. Collins, ‘Comic opera in Ghana’, African Arts, ix (1976), 50-7.
52. Fabian, ‘Popular culture’, 317.
53. Coplan, ‘Go to my town, Cape Coast!’, 101.
54. Interview with Laurence Cudjoe, J. K. Annan, Joseph Ackon and Arhu, Sekondi, 27 May 1992.
55. David G. Mandelbaum, ‘Alcohol and culture’, Current Anthropology, vi (1965), 281, points out that in complex societies, ‘the drinking patterns of each subgroup or class may reflect its special characteristics as well as the cultural frame of the society’.
56. The guitar-bands became famous for their ’ palm-wine music’, a style of highlife that emphasized the trials of life in its lyrics. The lyrics of palm-wine music contrasted with the lofty images of love, comfort and happiness portrayed by dance-bands.
57. Gold Coast Times, 9 Aug. 1930.
58. See Gold Coast Independent, 10 and 17 Jan. 1925.
59. The close association between drinking places like Colombia Bar and prostitution in Sekondi and Takoradi was pointed out by interviewees like Anita Mensah, Takoradi, 16 Aug. 1994. In his social survey, K. A. Busia counted 127 known prostitutes in Sekondi-Takoradi in 1947-8. K. A. Busia, Social Survey of Sekondi-Takoradi (London, 1950), 107.
60. Interview with Anita Mensah, Takoradi, 5 Mar. 1992.
61. Interview with Novisi Segbedzi, Accra, 14 June 1992.
62. Helen Bradford points out the paradox that by sexist definition women could not be a threat to law and order. The arrest, manhandling and jailing of women during women's demonstrations against municipal beerhalls in Natal in 1929 had the effect of bringing their men into the struggle against the government. Helen Bradford, ‘“We women will show them”: beer protests in the Natal countryside, 1929’, in Jonathan Crush and Charles Ambler (eds.), Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa (Athens, 1992), 208-34.
63. Interview with Anita Mensah, Takoradi, 5 Mar. 1992.
64. Interview with Novisi Segbedzi, Accra, 14 June 1992; and interview with Tsotso Alice Akwei, 14 June 1992.
65. Interview with Anita Mensah, Takoradi, 16 Aug. 1994.
66. See, for example, interview with Adotei Akwei, Ntoaso, n July 1992; and interview with George Blankson, Ntoaso, 11 July 1992.
67. Interview with Samuel Agbeve, Accra, 26 Feb. 1992; and interview with Sylvester Adenyo, Ntoaso, 26 Feb. 1992.
68. Interview with Jeremiah Oman Ano, Sekondi, 15 Aug. 1994.
69. Interview with Novisi Segbedzi, Accra, 14 June 1992.
70. Sampson, Gold Coast Men of Affairs, 114-15.
71. Cocoa seedlings had been introduced into the Gold Coast by the Basel Missionary Society in 1858.
72. Interview with Anita Mensah, Takoradi, 16 Aug. 1994. Anita is from a family of distillers, and she was recounting what her grandfather told her. Susan Diduk points out that ’ Basel missionaries came from rural areas of southern Germany and Switzerland where they were well acquainted with home brews like most, prepared from fermented apples’. Susan Diduk, ‘European alcohol, history, and the state in Cameroon’, African Studies Review, xxxvi (1993), 9.
73. Interview with Anita Mensah, Takoradi, 16 Aug. 1994.
74. See Asare Konadu, The Wizard of Asamang (Accra, 1988), 114-15.
75. Roger J. Southall, ‘Polarisation and dependence in the Gold Coast cocoa trade 1890-1938’, Trans, of the Hist. Soc. of Ghana, xvi (1975), 93-115.
76. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 317.
77. Interview with the Western Region Distillers Cooperative Management Committee, Takoradi, 16 Aug. 1994.
78. Interview with A. A. Amartey, Accra, 31 Aug. 1994.
79. PRO, CO 96/715/21702. Eastern Province Commissioner's Report, 28 Dec. 1933.
80. Co-op Distillers News, No. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1992).
81. Interview with Jeremiah Oman Ano, Sekondi, 15 Aug. 1994.
82. Interview with J. K. Annan, Sekondi, 27 May 1992.
83. Interview with Novisi Segbedzi, Accra, 14 June 1992.
84. Interview with Anita Mensah, Takoradi, 16 Aug. 1994.
85. PRO CO 96/708/1660. Thomas to Cunliffe-Lister, 7 Jan. 1933.
86. Interview with Jeremiah Oman Ano, Sekondi, 15 Aug. 1994.
87. PRO, CO 96/715/21702. Report of the Senior Commissioner of Police, Kumasi, 16 Nov. 1933.
88. PRO, CO 96/715/21702. Gold Coast, Correspondence and Statistics Relating to the Consumption of Spirits in the Gold Coast (Accra, 1934), 161. The Catholic Mission of Keta was the only mission in the Gold Coast that favored the reimportation of cheap gin.
89. PRO, CO 554/98/33522. Hodson to Cunliffe-Lister, 3 May 1935.
90. Thomas, Memorandum on Liquor Policy.
91. See the report of the Social Welfare Committee in the WMMS's Gold Coast Synod Minutes of 1946 (box 1241).
92. PRO, CO 96/715/21702.
93. PRO, CO 5S4/IO3/33522 (1936).
94. PRO, CO 554/119/33522 (1939).
95. PRO, CO 554/127/33522/B (1943), conveys the Foreign Office's acute embarrassment at having to seek unilaterally an amendment to an international liquor agreement.
96. PRO, CO 554/127/33522 (1942).
97. PRO, CO 554/127/33522/B (1943)-
98. On the ’ Durban System’, see Paul La Hausse, Brewers, Beerhalls and Boycotts : A History of Liquor in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1988).
99. PRO, CO 554/127/33522/B (1943). Resident Minister (Accra) to the Colonial Secretary, 24 Oct. 1942.
100. PRO, CO 554/127/33522/B. ‘Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Colonies’, dated 28 Apr. 1943.
101. PRO, CO 554/127/33522/B. T. Hoskyns-Abrahall, Nigerian Secretariat (Lagos), to Resident Minister (Accra), 9 Aug. 1943.
102. PRO, CO 554/142/33522 (1946).
103. For excellent studies of nationalist politics in Ghana, see Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana 1940-1 g6o (London, 1970); and Jean Marie Allman, Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana (Madison, 1993).
104. Examples of such highlife songs include Kumasi Dramatic Choir's ‘CPP wobedzi kunyim’ (’ CPP will emerge victorious’); and Kojo Bio's ‘Ko hwe CPP Assembly ho’ (’ Go and look at the CPP in the Legislative Assembly!), composed after CPP's 1951 election victory.
105. Collins, ‘Ghanaian highlife’, 67. Albert Ocran, one of the Sekondi Railwaymen who supported the CPP in its early days, emphasized the relevance of these plays in explaining the nationalist ideology to illiterates. Interview with Albert Ocran, Sekondi, 15 Aug. 1994.
106. See Akyeampong, ‘Alcohol, social conflict and the struggle for power’, ch. 6, for a detailed study of popular culture and nationalist politics in Ghana. For a study of the political relevance of drinking bars in nationalist politics, see Charles Ambler, ‘Alcohol, racial segregation and popular politics in Northern Rhodesia’, J. Afr. Hist., xxxi (1990), 295-313.
107. Interview with Revd. Col. Kofi Asare, Accra, 30 June 1992. J. D. Wireko (MP) would remind the CPP government of these electoral promises in 1958. Ghana, Parliamentary Debates, 23 July 1958.
108. See, for example, Richard Rathbone, ‘Businessmen in politics: party struggle in Ghana, 1949-57 J. of Dev. Studies, ix (1973), 391-401.
109. See, for example, Spectator Daily, 14 Sept. 1939; Gold Coast Observer, 5 Mar. 1943; and Sunday Mirror, 4 Apr. 1954.
110. Interview with Anita Mensah, Takoradi, 16 Aug. 1994.
111. Interview with Albert Prempeh, General Secretary of the Ghana Cooperative Distillers Association Limited, Accra, 29 July 1992. 115 Zonophone JLK 1015.
112. Zonophone JVA 160. Interview with A. A. Amartey, Accra, 31 Aug. 1994.
113. Gold Coast, Legislative Assembly Debates, 25 Mar. 1955.
114. PRO, CO 554/1302/235/251/04 (1956).
115. Mandelbaum, ‘Alcohol and culture’, 282, accurately points out that: ‘Among other symbolic uses of drink are its diacritical functions, as when one group or class within a larger society follows drinking patterns that serve as a badge marking them off from others’.
116. Legislative Instrument 239, ‘Manufacture and sale of spirits regulation, 1962’.
117. Ghana, Parliamentary Debates, 23 July 1958.
118. GNA, Accra, ADM 13/1/26. Cabinet Minutes of 12 Mar. 1957; and GNA, Accra, ADM 13/1/27. Cabinet Minutes of 23 May 1958.
119. On the eve of independence, British Togoland (now part of Ghana) was threatening to secede and join French Togoland, Asante was in a state of political unrest, and the Ga Standfast Association had raised the banner of opposition in the capital of Accra.
120. Gold Coast, Legislative Assembly Debates, 2 Nov. 1955.
121. Interview with the Western Region Distillers Cooperative Management Committee, Takoradi, 16 Aug. 1994; and interview with Anita Mensah, Takoradi, 16 Aug. 1994.
122. See E. P. Thompson, ‘Eighteenth-century English society: class struggle without class’, Social History, in (1978), 133-65.
123. Jeffries, Class, Power and Ideology in Ghana, 78.
124. Class, Power and Ideology in Ghana. 181.
125. Or as Ivan Karp would put it: akpeteshie-drinking became the ’ social theory’ of the working class, ‘expressing ideas about the nature of their social world and their experience of it’. Ivan Karp, ‘Beer drinking experience in an African society: an essay in formal sociology’, in I. Karp and Charles S. Bird (eds.), Exploration in African Systems of Thought (Bloomington, 1980), 83.
126. Interview with P. K. Hormeku, Accra, 8 Sept. 1994.
127. Ghana, Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Manner of Operation of the State Distilleries Corporation (Accra, 1968), 6-7.
128. Interview with Albert Prempeh, Accra, 29 July 1992.