Although the history is long and detailed, we can put it in just a few words: the white South African government of the 20th century funded their Apartheid regime by monopolizing tradtional African beer production and selling beer back to native Africans. Making Africans pay for their own brew then using those funds to further segregate natives has earned the name “the Durban System.” It was first legally enshrined in the South African city Durban in Natal.
The native peoples of South Africa had known sorghum beer long before the British and Boers came to their shores. Women brewed the acidic, opaque, and slightly pinkish beer in their homes. To the Xhosa and Zulu, the beer was Umqombothi. Once white colonizers arrived, they called the beer by a racial slur until 1962 when the government renamed it with a second racial identifier. To say that the Apartheid government stole the African cultural tradition of brewing is an understatement. They weaponized traditional sorghum beer against its rightful owners.
The story of white control over black alcohol consumption began in the diamond mines. These mines were boomtowns where several thousand opportunists could flood into an area within a couple of weeks of a discovery. This did not exclude Africans who quickly bivouacked in temporary labor compounds to contract themselves out for daily work. Where these camps were, there was inevitably beer.
The capitalist whites who owned the mines sought to control what they considered the troublesome native labor contingency. From the start, alcohol was considered both a means of and a threat to control.
By 1876, the British colonial government outright stated that they believed Africans moved to labor compounds for two things, work and alcohol. The early Proclamation No. 64 of 1871 attempted to impose penalties for the sale of liquor to “native” servants although it was not enforced (Hutchinson, note 17). By 1883, the Native Laws and Customs Commission outlawed canteens on districted “Native Lands.” 1897 saw the prohibition of alcohol sales to Natives in the Witwatersrand around the growing city of Johannesburg. Prohibition was not total, but was segregated and only applied to native Africans.
Despite the tee-total tendencies of the colonial government at the end of the 1800s, drinking was common in mining communities. A European man named Nellmapius who got his start bringing contraband liquor to mining camps won a state concession in 1881 which granted him a private monopoly over the spirits industry in the Transvaal. (Van Onselen) While this private monopoly was a harbinger of what would come, it also encouraged illicit liquor sales–a trend that would dominate the history of alcohol in South Africa.
Official prohibition and black market beer came to a confluence in mining towns. The wealthy white owners had drunkenness on top of their list of concerns. The Transvaal Mining Industry Commission conducted a questionnaire in 1897 in which 74 managers all reported illegal liquor sales continued to affect labor productivity. At the same time, African men migrated to work in mines. Managers acknowledged that beer drinking prolonged the tenure of their workers, as they spent money that they would have been saving to return home.
Ultimately, the diamond companies wanted total control. Rob Turell writes about the intentional labor manipulation of the De Beers company: “Closed compounds were self-contained institutions. Once an African entered a closed compound he lost all access to the surrounding town for the duration of his contract. Food was sold in the compound stores and, in time, alcohol was prohibited.” After their introduction in 1885, it took only 4 years for the majority of African laborers to end up in closed compounds. (Turell)
Segregated prohibition would reign in the Transvaal from 1897 until 1937 (and until 1962 for spirits). It is only a cruel irony that De Beers has the alcoholic beverage in its name. Their interest, of course, was control over the native labor population. While those in mining-focused Transvaal chose prohibition, the leaders of Natal in Durban to the Southeast sought the same control by a different policy, monopoly.
The regions of South Africa did not unify until 1910. Even after unification, the provinces had certain degrees of autonomy over their territory until more federal policies were implemented by the crown. All districts, however, were inheritors of the 1879 Native Location Act which ushered in legal segregation.
In the province of Natal, where Durban sits on the coast, the Native Beer Act passed in 1908. This law took the mining concession system used to privately monopolize the alcohol industry in Transvaal into the public sector. The government would now have a monopoly on all production and sale of native sorghum beer. It became illegal for African women, the traditional brewers, to perform their normal daily production. On top of this, the act funneled the profits from state-run beer halls into the National Revenue Account.
The system proved to be extremely lucrative. The government of Durban was able to reinvest its profits locally to deepen the capabilities of the segregation state. In 1916, the Native Affairs Department was created. It was housed in today’s KwaMuhle Museum, an administrative building which was constructed with the profits from monopoly beer halls. In 1923, the Urban Areas Act went on to use the same National Revenue Account funds to construct native hostels and compounds for native laborers. Such compounds would grow into the signature townships of urban Apartheid segregation. Perversely, native beer funded native oppression.
The native Africans in Durban did not take this policy sitting down. From the beginning, natives, especially women, were outraged at the idea that they could not brew sorghum beer. Local beer halls went underground. Native Africans continued to brew beer and sell it within their communities in spite of the state.
In 1929, the local resistance to beer halls came to a head in Durban. A.W.G. Champion, an organizer for the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) helped to organize a boycott on Durban’s state-run beer halls which lasted 18 months. The following year, the government amended the Riotous Assemblies Act and Champion conveniently had to flee Natal.
Resistance considered, Durban managed to extract both wealth and control from the native population they sought to oppress. Most Africans considered the beer halls extractive and confining. At the same time, the police enforced the monopoly and regularly conducted raids on suspected bootlegging operations. At the end of the day, the system worked in favor of the white Durban government.
Outside of Natal, prohibition was the law of the land. Africans still made and sold illegal beer–they just didn’t have legal brewers to compete with like in Durban. In the Witwatersrand of Johannesburg, shebeens, the South African version of the speakeasy, abounded.
These beer establishments were operated by ‘kings’ and ‘queens.’ A large number were actually owned by the Syrian community in Johannesburg.(Rogerson) Shebeens were so widespread that the 1924 Slums Act attempted to eradicate them from the top down. Police cracked down on retail bottle stores from which shebeens themselves were buying alcohol. Instead of crushing the shebeen industry, the crackdown actually pushed ownership into the hands of African owners rather than white ones. (Rogerson)
Total prohibition of alcohol was not working for places like Johannesburg. The black market was massive and police efforts to intervene proved largely futile. A journalist commented on the issue, “Now the Africans are not only prohibited from drinking European liquor but their own beer with the result that they have invented poisonous concoctions that are not only injurious to their health but have created lawlessness that has no parallel in history.” (The Bantu World Johannesburg, Sat Jun 2, 1937 page 8) One of these concoctions was skokiaan, later popularized internationally by Zimbabwean jazz man August Musarurwa.
Looking to Durban, the 1937 Native Laws Amendment Act officially ended prohibition for Africans (but only for beer drinking). In its place, other provinces adopted Durban’s beer monopoly system. Johannesburg opened its first state-run beer hall in 1938.
One newspaper wrote about the expansion of the system, noting the monopoly’s arrival in Brakpan, “”Boys under the age of 18 years or women of any age are not allowed to enter or be in the male beer hall: and women under the age of 21 years or males of any age are not allowed to enter or be in the female beer hall.” (he Bantu World, Johannesburg, Sat April 1, 1939 page 5)
White South Africans monopolized brewing and selling sorghum beer to black Africans for decades. Shebeens quietly served Africans in their own communities and acted as places of solidarity and cohesion. Government beer halls, on the other hand, were restricting, unwelcoming, and overtly extractive. While shebeens always had their place in the alcohol landscape, the government succeeded in lining its pockets with beer money.
Back in Durban, women had had enough. In 1959, the women of Cato Manor in Durban attacked the beer halls, forcing out their male patrons and then dumping the beer. Thousands of women marched in protest–they wanted their men back, they wanted their right to brew beer back, they wanted their freedom back.
Beer hall monopoly across the country monopoly was increasingly untenable and the situation changed entirely in 1961 when South Africa officially became a republic. The new country no longer had duty-free access to the British Commonwealth and white farmers and distillers were concerned. Moreover, the police felt their efforts to curb shebeening were increasingly futile. With these pressures, liquor, still prohibited for Africans, was finally legalized on August 15th, 1963. The same year, the government took a small step in breaking up the sorghum beer monopoly, allowing some employers to brew beer and supply it to their workers.
In this post-prohibition, still-Apartheid era, Africans became increasingly accustomed to drinking liquor and European-style beer. Johannesburg built the country’s largest brewery at Langlaate in 1966. (Rogerson) Such large legitimate breweries plied African consumers with lagers in hopes of diverting them from the shebeen market. While lager consumption did increase, Mager reports that there were over 10,000 shebeens operating in Johannesburg’s native township Soweto at the end of the 60s.
Along with the end of prohibition came a push for alcohol-focused public health. The 1963 Retreats and Rehabilitation Centres Act set up the National Alcoholism Advisory Board which allocated resources for white recovery from alcoholism. (Mager) No such funding existed for Africans. Not until 1969 did the first outpatient clinic for African alcoholics open. Of all places, the rehab opened in Durban where it served 400 patients its first year. (Mager) While white recovery was state-funded, the African rehab was the work of the non-profit SANCA, South African National Council On Alcoholism And Drug Dependence.Drinking, brewing, and even drunkenness were all still segregated. Africans could only buy spirits at state liquor outlets run by the Apartheid oversight bodies known as Bantu Areas Administration Boards (BAAB). Even though Africans could buy “European spirits,” a 1968 law made it illegal to transfer more than 9 liters across African township lines. (Rogerson) Only during the mid 70s did the public begin to discuss the legalization of African shebeens. In May 1980 the West Rand Administration Board took the first steps towards licensing shebeens.
For nearly a century, Africans were deprived of their cultural tradition of brewing sorghum beer. European colonizers, who had never brewed sorghum beer prior to their arrival in South Africa, found it to their advantage to control the consumption of alcohol by natives and to profit off of it. The governmental offices that oversaw segregation also oversaw the sale of liquor and funded Apartheid projects with that revenue.
South African Breweries, part of the largest brewer in the world, AB In-Bev, was founded in 1895 to serve South African miners. The brewery operated alongside 100 years of racist regimes and oppressive regulations. As an independent business interest, the brewery played both sides of alcoholic Apartheid. For many years, it sold beer illegally to shebeens, for many others, it abided by Apartheid law and even moved its headquarters from England to South Africa. Measuring the complicity of such a longstanding entity in Apartheid is difficult, but Castle Beer surely has a taint of this story too.
From the mines of De Beers, to the beer halls of Durban, from the protests of Cato Manor, to the crackdowns on shebeens in Johannesburg, native South Africans were made to drink their traditional beer from the cup of the colonizer. The white Apartheid government, in turn, enjoyed the control and revenue it gained from the law. At the end of the day, significant funding for Apartheid infrastructure came from the pockets of the very people it discriminated against. This was the cruelty of the Durban system–a system of cultural manipulation forced upon a people with violence and used to further oppress them.
“A Short History of Shacks & Shack Dweller’s Struggles in Durban.” Libcom.org, https://libcom.org/library/short-history-shacks-shack-dwellers-struggles-durban.
Chemaly, Frank. “Durban’s Bitter Brew.” Independent Online, IOL | News That Connects South Africans, 4 Dec. 2020, https://www.iol.co.za/ios/news/durbans-bitter-brew-eadfba89-58fe-45ee-8d59-fffddd4bf14b.
Control of African Leisure Time in Durban in the 1930s Goolam Vahed University of Durban-Westville
Hutchinson, Bertram. “Alcohol as a Contributing Factor in Social Disorganisation: The South African Bantu in the Nineteenth Century.” Revista de Antropologia (1961): 1-13.
Mager, Anne. “The first decade of’European beer’in apartheid South Africa: The state, the brewers and the drinking public, 1962-72.” Journal of African History (1999): 367-388.
Mager, Anne. “‘White liquor hits black livers’: meanings of excessive liquor consumption in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century.” Social Science & Medicine 59.4 (2004): 735-751.
Rogerson, C. M. “A Strange Case of Beer: The State and Sorghum Beer Manufacture in South Africa.” Area, vol. 18, no. 1, 1986, pp. 15–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20002250. Accessed 28 May 2022.
Rogerson, Christian Myles, and D. M. Hart. “The survival of the ‘informal sector’: the shebeens of black Johannesburg.” GeoJournal 12.2 (1986): 153-166.
Scholtz, A. P., and L. M. D. Vorster. “K**corn production and the Bantu beer industry.” Agrekon 6.2 (1967): 6-15.
Turrell, Rob. “Kimberley’s Model Compounds.” The Journal of African History, vol. 25, no. 1, 1984, pp. 59–75. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/181359. Accessed 9 Jun. 2022.
Van Onselen, Charles. “Randlords and Rotgut 1886-1903: An Essay on the Role of Alcohol in the Development of European Imperialism and Southern African Capitalism, with Special Reference to Black Mineworkers in the Transvaal Republic.” History workshop. Editorial Collective, History Workshop, Ruskin College, 1976.
Women’s revolts in natal: 1959. South African History Online. (n.d.). Retrieved June 16, 2022, from https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/womens-revolts-natal-1959
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