<gwalsh@bu.edu>

Emmanuel Akyeampong. _Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social
History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times._
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann and Oxford: James Currey, 1996.
xxiii+189 pp. Map, photographs, notes, bibliography, and index.
.ISBN 0-435-08994-3.

Reviewed for H-Africa by Martin Klein (mklein@chass.utoronto.ca),
University of Toronto

This book is an important contribution to the increasing body of
literature on the history of alcoholic drink and popular culture
in Africa. In the first two chapters, Akyeampong sets his study
in an analysis of the role of water, blood and alcohol in the
traditional cultures of southern Ghana, arguing that the
symbolism of the three fluids is crucial to power and
spirituality. This provides a theoretical framework for the book,
but once done, he focuses not on the ritual uses of alcohol, but
on its social role.  Palm wine was originally the drink of choice
in southern Ghana, but during the slave trade period, it was
replaced by rum and schnapps.

This means that like the nations of northern Europe, Ghana was an
area where men drank hard liquor, seen as "hot" or "strong" and
clearly preferred it to palm wine or beer. It also means that as
in northern Europe, alcoholism has long been a serious problem.
Liquor was a prestige good in pre-colonial Ghana, and as such,
was controlled by the elders and the politically powerful.  Women
did not drink and young men rarely so, and then only as a result
of the beneficence of the rich and powerful. Palm wine and liquor
were central to the exercise of power.  There was, however, one
day during the annual Asante odwira festival when basins of rum
were laid out for the ordinary classes.  This was a signal for a
day in which people were free to act drunk and under cover of
inebriation to do and say what they wished, a ritual note of
rebellion against state and a rigid social order.

Akyeampong begins and ends with the ritual importance of blood,
water and alcohol, but the heart of the book is the social
history of drinking.  Once young men moved to the mines or the
cities, they were free to drink and had the money to pay for it.
Drinking, as in many other male cultures, became the basis of
peer group socializing.  Young men gathered after work to drink
together, and for some to escape the tensions of an oppressive
work situation.  Chapter Three deals with these young men's
drinking groups.  Chapter Four deals with the inevitable
response, a temperance movement, which was an alliance between
the churches and elders who feared that uncontrolled drinking
would lead to disorder and disrespect for authority.

The temperance efforts failed because liquor duties provided a
large part of the colonial state's revenues, up to 40% in the
pre-World War I years.  Chapter Five deals with two developments.
First, drinking underwrote the development of music, dance and
theatre. Second, increasingly, locally brewed gin called
akpeteshie replaced imported liquors, much to the distress of
colonial rulers unable to tax it. Chapter Six deals with many of
the political issues emerging from this drinking culture and the
way they were used by Nkrumah's Convention People's Party, which
mobilized support in the akpeteshie bars.  Finally, in Chapter
Seven he deals with alcoholism and despair in post-Nkrumah Ghana.

Throughout this, Akyeampong links the form and significance of
drinking to power and status. There are crucial differences in
what people drink, where they drink, and how they drink. Drink
involves markers of social status. In spite of the CPP's
patronage of the akpeteshie culture, the social divide grew after
independence.  The new elite drank at home and in comfortable
hotel lounges.  "For the winners," he writes, "alcohol has been a
prized commeodity; ironically, it has also been a consolation
prize for the losers." (p. 157)  The poor continued to drown
their sorrows in palm wine and at akpeteshie bars.  Akyeampong
also deals well with gender questions.  Though women produced and
sold alcoholic beverages, they rarely drank until recently.  The
drinking culture has been a male culture, for which women have
paid a high price.

All this is done with great skill.  He uses high life lyrics,
proverbs and interview data very well.  Akyeampong makes the
culture and politics of drink central to an understanding of
modern Ghana.  He is terse, perhaps too terse in places, and the
argument is well made.  If I have any criticisms, it is that much
of the discussion of the ritual importance of the three fluids is
irrelevant to his central subject.  He would have been better off
finding his theoretical framework in the comparative history of
alcoholic drink.  On the other hand, there are questions he could
have expanded.  I would have liked more on the relationship
between popular culture and the drinking culture that under-wrote
much of it.  I would have liked more on the importance of hard
liquor.  He mentions beer in many places, but it is rarely
discussed, though in much of Africa and elsewhere, beer is the
ordinary man's drink.  A man drinks akpeteshie, gin or vodka to
get smashed. A man can get drunk on beer, but it takes a lot of
work. Beer is a social drink.

Perhaps it is better to be terse and to leave us eager for more.
Emmanuel Akyeampong is a fine historian.  We can expect more fine
history from him.

Copyright 1997 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be
copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given
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