Alcohol and respectability: novelistic portrayals of 1970s Kenya

For almost half a century now, African brewed alcohols have been condemned and viciously fought in Kenya either directly by successive governments or indirectly by multinational breweries. Surprisingly, it is bottled beer, wines and spirits that the colonial government prohibited Africans from consumption or possession, right from 1900 to the end of World War II when neoliberal capitalism was gaining traction. The end of the prohibition marked the beginning of condemnation, criminalisation, and vicious attacks on the indigenous African alcohol industry. This article engages with historical constructions of bottled beer as the consumers' mark of civilisation and respectability and, conversely, consumers of traditional home-made brew as unrespectable, unpatriotic. The article reads Mwangi's Going down River Road and The Cockroach Dance and Mangua's Son of a Woman by foregrounding the colonial psyche that informed bottled beer's half-century-long ban on Africans' consumption or possession. It links the vacation of the bottled beer's racial prohibitions and its attendant onslaught on African home-made brews to the neoliberal capitalist strategies, especially the respectability ideals, which impacted on East African postcolonial identities.