In the June 1958 issue of the Nchanga Drum, Dominico Chansa, a social welfare worker on the Northern Rhodesian (Zambian) Copperbelt, asked readers the question, “Is Beer Drinking a Good or Bad Habit?”
The author claimed that there was “no subject on the Copperbelt today which draws more heated debate”—a surprising yet surprisingly accurate assertion. Surprising because this was a period of rapid and sometimes violent political change that would culminate in Zambia’s independence from Britain in 1964, and the question of who would rule was by no means settled. Surprisingly accurate, because the local press and official and corporate records are filled with discussion and debate over alcohol use and regulation (Zambia’s reputation would make it one of the case studies in the well-known WHO cross cultural study of alcohol use from the 1970s). Writers on this blog have focused a great deal recently on addiction and disease models—to stimulating effect. Yet I have been struck with just how Eurocentric these debates appear to be. Today’s post updates Mr. Chansa’s question, asking “was beer drinking a habit in colonial Zambia?”
Chansa himself concluded that there was nothing wrong with beer drinking, but that there was “everything wrong with the way it is drunk on the Copperbelt” – the mining zone that had made Zambia one of the most industrialized and urbanized territories in Africa by the 1960s. What is especially striking to me is that in the myriad articles and reports that examined the alcohol problem in Zambia during this period, including a series of four articles on “drunkenness” that appeared in mining company magazine, Mufulira African Star in 1960, excessive drinking is treated exclusively as a “social problem” not as a disease or addiction. Those four articles, for example, catalogued in great detail the damage done by excessive drinking, but betrayed no interest in the issue of why people drank.
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