‘Clean Spirit’: Distilling, Modernity, and the Ugandan State, 1950–86

Abstract

This article explores official attitudes to illicit distillation in Uganda in the mid-twentieth century. Tracing continuities in rhetoric which are strikingly revealed by two reports on the problem of illicit distillation, the article offers a discussion of the development of illicit distillation and argues that for officials in the late-colonial and independent state, this became a symbol of the potential dangers of modernity. Governmental schemes for the production of a ‘clean’ distilled drink, on the other hand, asserted the ability of the state to provide a safe route to modernity. The state was challenged in this field – with such challenges made possible by the patrimonial nature of authority, which has constantly subverted the pretensions of the state – yet policy on the production of spirits has remained an important area for the discursive creation of legitimacy.

In 1950, a committee of inquiry appointed by the government of the Uganda Protectorate produced a report on a ‘serious social problem’: the illicit distillation of alcoholic spirits for consumption. The report painted a gloomy picture of the consequences of such distillation: ‘excessive consumption causes cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the nerves, and lack of mental control, which have led in many cases to insanity, malnutrition, blindness, muscular weakness and wasting, homicidal impulses and death’.1 Thirteen years later, a committee of inquiry appointed by the government of the newly independent Republic of Uganda identified illicit distillation as the cause of multiple ‘social problems’ and noted that the ‘effects of excessive consumption of waragi [illicit spirits] include cirrhosis of the liver, inflammation of the nerves, lack of mental control leading to muscular weakness and wasting, and homicidal impulses’.2

The two reports shared more than their alarmist rhetoric. Each suggested that the only way to deal with the menace of illicit distillation was to provide a formal sector, bottled distilled liquor at a price which made it widely accessible. In 1950, this conclusion was distinctly radical, for it represented an almost complete reversal of former colonial policies; by the early 1960s it had become the established doctrine, which was central to a particular idea of state legitimacy. This paper suggests that policies towards illicitly distilled waragi reveal how much the late-colonial vision of the state's role in managing the engagement between the populace and modernity was carried over into the post-colonial state. Akyeampong has treated the post-colonial history of distillation in Ghana as a story of class struggle; an economic field in which the poor asserted their claims to resources and demonstrated the resilience of non-elite culture.3 This paper suggests that distillation has also been a symbolic, or discursive, field of contest, in which the state has sought to demonstrate its unique ability to mediate modernity. The state has been challenged in this field – with such challenges made possible by the patrimonial nature of authority, which has constantly subverted the pretensions of the state – yet policy on the production of spirits has remained an important area for the discursive creation of legitimacy.

A Brief History of Distillation

Distilled liquors were unknown in Uganda before the mid-nineteenth century. These drinks, and the practice of distillation, spread in association with the professional soldiery which the high tide of colonial conquest deposited in Uganda in the later nineteenth century: the motley array of individuals who were collectively known as ‘Sudanese’4. Until the 1920s, distilled spirits remained very much a drink of soldiers – in African society, that is – but from the 1930s, the manufacture and consumption of locally distilled spirits – widely known as waragi – came to be more and more common beyond the cantonments to which it had once been confined.5

The spread of these drinks was partly because they appealed to producers. This was a consequence both of a simple technical superiority, and of gender struggles over access to resources. Distilled spirits can be bottled and transported and stored for long periods, whereas the kinds of fermented drink which formed the ‘traditional’ beverages of Uganda – banana wine and grain beer – spoil soon after they are made and cannot be transported over any distance. Thus distilled liquors lent themselves particularly well to a furtive trade, a feature of considerable significance in urban areas in Uganda after 1917, with increasingly effective enforcement of colonial regulations which sought to control times and places of drinking, and to collect licence fees from those who produced and sold liquor.6 And where – as in much of Uganda – the principal fermented beverage was banana wine, produced by men, distilled spirits might also allow women the opportunity for involvement in the rapidly-growing cash economy of drink: in parts of the country, popular memories of the spread of waragi insist that this was a women's business.7

But there were other reasons for the popularity of these beverages, which had to do with the nature of demand rather than the interests of producers. These were not, in the way that they were consumed, simply a handy substitute for fermented beverages. The very way that distillates – both imported, and locally distilled – had come to Uganda made them a drink associated with a particular power derived from access to the coercive resources of the state. Locally distilled spirits were the drink of soldiers; imported distilled spirits were consumed by Europeans. The first recorded instances of distillation in Uganda established this linkage of distillates, individual power and association with the new power of colonialism: Speke and Baker produced spirits for Mutesa, king of Buganda and Kabarega, the king of Bunyoro.8 In the 1930s locally distilled spirits spread as the drink of chiefs, and of educated salaried workers: they were the spirit of a new world of power.9 In 1935, a man arrested for possessing a bottle of locally distilled spirits was fined seventy-five shillings, or six weeks in prison in default. He paid the fine – several months’ wages for most Africans at the time – on the spot.10

Colonial policy underlined the exclusive and desirable nature of distilled spirits of all kinds, by seeking to deny them entirely to Africans. The Brussels Act of 1890 had included a chapter on the suppression of the traffic in spirituous liquors to Africa. 11 It has been argued that this was no more than a negotiating ploy in colonial struggles over commercial access, or an attempt to ‘legitimize’ colonial expansion.12 The correspondence surrounding the act suggests a further explanation: that the restrictions on spirits were created as the result of a particular (and largely British) discourse on ‘demoralization’ – the social breakdown of African society in the face of commerce.13 Despite their devotion to the high Victorian ideal of commerce, British policy-makers were deeply uneasy about the nature of social change, and spirituous liquors became the focus for the fear that ‘the process of civilisation and demoralisation may be simultaneous’.14 Spirits were the essence of a modernity which Africans were not ready to imbibe, and ‘commerce in spirits’ would be the downfall of the ‘ignorant native’.15

After the First World War, the Treaty of St Germain-en-Laye had reproduced this particular notion of the danger posed by spirits16. In Uganda, after a brief flurry of confusion caused by a (not unusual) confusion amongst officials over what precisely distillation was, British accession to this treaty led to new legislation which formally banned the consumption of any spirits by Africans and ended the previous tolerance towards small-scale distillation by soldiers and ex-soldiers.17 African consumption or production of spirits was thereafter entirely illegal.

Extra-legal British practice further ensured that distilled spirits were associated with status in Uganda. In 1924, one administrator noted that ‘Whisky drinking among chiefs is a matter requiring attention’;18 however much attention it received, it clearly did not cease, although whisky was an expensive item. In the late 1920s, an African man who sold imported distilled liquor (which he had obtained by claiming that it was for his European employer) was sent to prison, but the authorities failed to identify the ‘natives of high rank’ to whom the liquor had actually been supplied; in the 1930s the governor turned a blind eye when the Kabaka of Buganda smuggled Scotch into his palace.19 While the Kabaka drank whisky, those a little lower down the social hierarchy relied on cheaper, local substitutes. In 1935 the Provincial Commissioner of Buganda, brandishing a bottle of illicit locally distilled spirits, publicly accused ‘a number of Buganda Government officials’ of setting an ‘extremely bad example’ through their partiality to such liquor.20 In 1943, the government of Uganda addressed the apparently growing incidence of illicit local distilling by passing a new Waragi Ordinance, which granted especial powers to deal with distillation (local distillation had hitherto been simply banned by ‘Rules’ introduced under Uganda's usefully elastic Liquor Ordinance).

But increased fines and prison sentences did little to discourage the growth of distillation; more and more people wished to try for themselves the exclusive spirit of the colonial age. This continued to be a distinctly different drink; grain beer or banana wine were the stuff of the convivial drink shared among men; they might be more often bought and sold than they once had been, but they still tended to be given and shared in the moment of consumption.21 Their status as a commodity was (as Appadurai would put it) only a phase in the social existence of these fermented beverages.22 Distilled drinks tended to be consumed differently; bought as individual tots and consumed by individuals, the mark of a claim to individual status rather than collective good cheer.23 Their very nature as a mark of status in the colonial context made the suppression of illicit distillates particularly difficult: the chiefs and policemen whose task it was to enforce the law were the most assiduous devotees of these drinks.24

The Spirit of Responsibility

By 1949, the government of Uganda was sufficiently concerned about illicit distillation to appoint a special committee of inquiry: the Cox committee. The suspicion of widespread complicity in the trade on the part of chiefs was such that there was no attempt to involve the African staff of the administration in collecting information for this committee: questionnaires on the subject were distributed to district commissioners, and the committee relied on these.25 Not all the reports sent in were particularly alarmist in tone, but the committee concluded that the problem was a grave one.26 When the report was completed, in 1951, Cox's identification of the nature of the danger posed by drink offered a radical synthesis of two distinct discursive strands. One of these, as suggested above, had identified all spirits (and sometimes all European drinks of any kind) as ‘demoralizing’ in their effect on African societies. Another had been concerned specifically with African consumption of spirits which were supposed to be ‘non-potable’ – that is methylated and other spirits which were intended for industrial or medical use, which Africans (like Europeans) sometimes drank. These drinks had been identified as a danger to individual health. Since the 1920s there had been some debate across East Africa as to how best their consumption might be prevented (the methods for doing so, rather contrarily, tended to focus on making them even more dangerous and unpleasant to consume).27 The report of the Cox committee drew on this idea that certain kinds of spirit were poisonous, and identified illicit distillates as particularly dangerous. And it expanded the concept of poisoning: the report argued that these drinks threatened the well-being of society as a whole, not just that of the individual. This entirely shifted the nature of European concerns about Africans and spirituous liquors. The problem was no longer one with all spirituous liquors; it was only local distillates which were, by the nature of their manufacture, poisonous. The solution, the report suggested, lay not in ever more draconian punishments for illicit distillation (though recommendations were made for the tighter control of black jaggery, widely used to produce a fermented base for distillation). A cheap spirit – rum was the obvious suggestion – produced under regulated conditions, was to be the real answer to the danger of poisonous illicit distillates.28 The Cox report was firmly located in a new debate about how the developmentalist post-war state should manage the African contact with modernity, in which alcohol played an important part.

In 1947 the laws had been changed across East Africa to allow Africans to drink bottled beer, and by the early 1950s some European administrators were making it clear that they thought it actively desirable that Africans should drink such beer.29 ‘Traditional’ fermented liquors were unhygienic and belonged – in colonial rhetoric, at least – to the backward world of superstition. Bottled beer represented the future. But there was caution still. The circumstances under which Africans could drink beer were still closely circumscribed, and imported spirits such as whisky remained formally prohibited to Africans, although there had been some expansion of the charmed circle who were informally permitted to buy spirits.30 By the late 1940s, the governor of Uganda was asking for a change in the law to formalise this system of privilege.31 This was gradualism of a most cautious kind: only the most respectable of Africans, ‘whose style of living approximates to European standards’, might safely drink the spirit of modernity.32

The Cox report had identified a profound threat to this gradualism. The steady ascent of Africans to drinking maturity was apparently being abandoned in favour of a headlong rush down the slippery slope of illicit distillation. Such a precipitate rush would bring disaster. ‘It is most disturbing to find that the younger and better-educated Africans, who might be expected to be the leaders of the people, are the persons most addicted to this spirit.’33 The state could only regain control by radical action to ensure the safe provision of the spirit of modernity; if government did not provide spirits in a safe and regulated manner then society would face the danger of Africans seizing the future for themselves, with catastrophic consequences: ‘amongst the ranks of its consumers are young educated men who might be expected to lead their people and guide their destiny’, but ‘persons who cannot control their drinking are incapable of controlling anything else, and in particular their government’.34 As elsewhere in East Africa, while pre-Second World War colonial discourse had identified ‘European liquor’ of all kinds as dangerously disruptive for Africans because it embodied all the possibilities of ‘demoralization’, post-war discourse came instead to identify this liquor as entirely desirable, a drink which marked and created the ‘responsible’ African.35 Illicit distillation threatened that responsibility, and ‘those Africans who have become accustomed to drinking spirituous liquor should have a wholesome alternative to the nocuous waragi’.36

In January 1952 a new governor arrived in Uganda, Andrew Cohen, whose vision of political change went beyond gradualism. Cohen believed that it was necessary to rapidly increase the responsibilities placed on Africans; only thus could their cooperation in the late-colonial scheme of development be assured.37 Responsibility extended to the consumption of alcohol. Cohen reported privately to the Colonial Office that the idea of ‘drinking by permit’ was quite inadequate to the situation, and that he wished to see the end of all racial restrictions on the consumption of alcohol of all kinds;38 the kind of experiment with gradualism which the government in neighbouring Tanganyika was essaying, with selected individuals given the right to drink spirits, was quite inadequate, in Cohen's eyes.39 And Cohen was aware that really making spirits available to the majority of Africans would require more than an end to racial restrictions: import duties were such that spirits would anyway be too costly for most Africans.

‘A Clean Spirit at a Competitive Price’

Illicit distillation came to loom large in Cohen's concerns on this subject. Evidently much taken by the Cox committee rhetoric on the dangers to individual and social health which waragi presented, he reproduced this passage – complete with its dire warnings about ‘insanity, malnutrition, blindness’ and so on – from the report for the edification of the Secretary of State, as well as sending him the report itself. Cohen's understanding was clear: if whisky represented and facilitated the transition to ‘responsibility’ and the political path of moderate, controlled change, then local distillates embodied all that was dangerous about an uncontrolled African encounter with modernity. He wrote with alarm of the government's failure to secure the cooperation of ‘chiefs and leading Africans’ on this issue, and declared that the prohibition on spirits had ‘driven many people … to the consumption of waragi.’40

Cohen took up the suggestion that harsher penalties for illicit distillation were not enough to suppress it. All Africans should have not only the right, but the economic ability, to drink safe spirits; for otherwise, those excluded would succumb to the dangerous allure of illicit distillates. So Cohen supported the Cox report's radical recommendation, for the provision of a formal, legal alternative to illicit distillates, locally produced and sold at a price which would make it affordable to many.41 The answer to waragi was, as another Uganda government report was to insist, the provision of ‘a clean spirit at a competitive price’.42

Cohen's enthusiasm for an end to restrictions on African consumption of imported spirits was warmly received by his erstwhile colleagues at the Colonial Office in London.43 There was something of a hiatus before formal approval could be obtained for changes in the law (since the British government was for other reasons unwilling to draw attention to the largely-forgotten but still theoretically recognised ‘Congo Basin treaties’, of which Brussels and St Germain formed part)44 but in 1955 the law in Uganda (and elsewhere in East Africa) was changed to end all racial restrictions on drinking.45 Strikingly, it was the European members of Legislative Council who were warmest in their approbation for the end of this ‘discriminatory’ legislation. And the Acting Chief Secretary announced that ‘the new Bill would also make it possible to use local resources to produce spirituous liquor suitable for human consumption. He believed sufficient skill and capital could be found to distil such a liquor, saleable at a price which would compete with those ‘more deadly’ liquors now being distilled illegally.’46

This scheme was, however, to founder on the rock of Kenya government objections. Illicit distillation was also widespread in Kenya, but it had not reached quite the levels observed in Uganda, and a coincidence of fiscal pragmatism and a considerably greater enthusiasm for political and social gradualism led Kenya officials to question the wisdom of the ‘clean’ spirit approach. The Kenya government also passed a new law ending racial restrictions on drinking in 1955, but there had been reluctance to do even this.47 Some Kenya officials still felt that the consumption of spirits should be legally permitted only to those who had ‘reached a level of civilisation and behaviour comparable to those of other races’, and a number commented lugubriously on the lack of ‘responsibility’ with which Africans drank.48 Clearly, some officials hoped that even if the legal right to consume spirits were conceded, price would serve as an effective barrier preventing most Africans from drinking them.49

And Kenya, with its large white and Asian population, derived a very considerable income from import duties on spirits – more than £1 million a year in the mid-1950s.50 Imported spirits were expensive principally because they were subject to high import duties – this being, of course, a well-established revenue resource in European practice. A ‘clean’ alternative to waragi could only be sold at a competitive price if it were taxed at a very much lower rate. Officials in the Nairobi Treasury saw that a cheap, legal, spirit distilled in Uganda (which was in an effective customs union with Kenya) would rapidly become available in Kenya, and would drastically reduce sales of imported, dutiable, spirits. Suspecting that Uganda was trying to gain revenue at the expense of Kenya, they produced a lengthy and rather specious minute which argued that Uganda's plans to produce a ‘gin-drinking working class’ were morally deplorable.51 In the face of such objections, the Ugandan plan for a ‘clean spirit’ was abandoned – even though the Uganda government produced a special report on the ‘Sociological aspects of waragi drinking’ which insisted on the dangers posed to society by waragi and reproduced – again – the phrase about ‘insanity, malnutrition, blindness, muscular weakness.’52 Through the later 1950s the Uganda government maintained the unrealised dream of providing a ‘cheap, but pure’53 spirit for popular consumption, while pursuing an increasingly hopeless campaign against illicit distillation,54 aware all the time that there was widespread resentment against laws which were (correctly, at this stage) perceived by Africans as specifically intended to force them to buy highly-taxed imported spirits.55 And responsibility continued to be threatened: ‘It is clear’, it was noted in 1963, ‘that the Prohibition Ordinance is not respected at all by a substantial portion of the population including chiefs, policemen, doctors, teachers, civil servants and otherwise responsible citizens.’56

‘A Cheap Wholesome Drink’

Like their late-colonial tutors, the politicians and administrators of newly-independent Uganda believed that the legitimacy of the state lay in its ability to successfully manage modernity. This was the basis of their compact with society – a ‘hazardous moral bargain’ rather similar to that which Haugerud has identified for post-colonial Kenya.57 The future might offer escape from the triple evils of ‘poverty, ignorance and disease’, but this could only happen if the populace displayed ‘hard work, discipline, respect and obedience to the people's government’.58 Alcoholic drinks again provided an arena in which to manifest this compact, as the author of one letter to the newspaper suggested: ‘poverty, ignorance and disease still remain the staunch enemies of our young nation … Uganda does not need only practical and dynamic leaders she also asks for hard-working Ugandans with sober heads’.59 ‘Traditional’ fermented liquors were, in Uganda as elsewhere in East Africa, identified by the late-colonial and post-colonial states as unhygienic and particularly associated with the drunkenness that ‘could destroy a nation’: 60 the insistence that such drinks were a cause of ‘inefficiency’ and backwardness had suffused the rhetoric of the late-colonial state, down to its lowest levels.61 Bottled beer and formally-produced spirits, on the other hand, represented modernity, as was suggested both by the drinking habits of the successful and by advertisements of dapper suited men with bottles of beer.62 Taxed, uniform and clean, these should be the drink of those who had status in and through the state; illicit distillates, untaxed, irregular, but indubitably modern, subverted this identification of status, state and wealth.

Independence freed the Uganda government from the shackles of forced cooperation with the Kenya government, and immediately a new committee of inquiry into spirituous liquors was established. In line with the medical approach established by Cox, this was headed by Eriya Babumba, a medical doctor (who was to prove one of Uganda's greatest political survivors).63 Unlike Cox, Babumba displayed extraordinary energy in the collection of evidence; the committee whizzed frantically around the country interviewing witnesses and soliciting opinions, and still managed to turn its report in within the year.

Babumba was concerned with the way in which the law on waragi – perceived as unjust, and effectively unenforced – brought government into disrepute.64 Waragi poisoned the body politic, as well as the individual; it caused corruption and ‘general inefficiency’ as well as dealing death to the individual.65 Babumba expressed this in terms of ‘impurities’: waragi was said to be full of impurities, a result of imperfect production techniques. These, in combination with its uncertain strength, made it dangerous, the root of widespread social pathologies: ‘the disruption of the family, encouragement of crime, laziness leading to unemployment and irregular attendance at work, and social instability. All these problems have adverse effect [sic] on national productivity.’66 And like Cox and Cohen, Babumba was concerned that those affected were just those whom the state perceived as the proper standard bearers of responsible modernity. While ‘senior civil servants’ did not take waragi, Babumba wrote, ‘[c]onsumers include professionals, semi-professionals, chiefs, policemen, teachers, politicians and civil servants.’67 Illicit drink turned people into bad citizens, unsuited for the responsibilities of the modern world: ‘national degeneracy’ threatened should it be left unchecked.68

Babumba, in support of his arguments about the ‘impure’ nature of waragi, adduced not only a litany of rumours (he rather lamely admitted that there was no actual evidence of any death from waragi, but said that ‘there is weighty evidence to make us believe that waragi has on many occasions caused death’69) but the results of chemical analyses of some sixty samples of illicit distillate. The text of the report highlighted the levels of methanol and furfural, in particular, in some of these.70 Examination of these analyses, alongside those conducted on imported spirits, suggests that levels of impurities in the illicit distillates were not so extraordinary; and it might be noted parenthetically that there is no particular reason to think of small-scale distillation as inherently dangerous: as the Kenya government had pointed out in 1955, the real problem with most illicit distilled drinks was their alcoholic strength, rather than the presence of ‘impurities’.71 Yet Babumba, like the Cox committee before him, believed that the regulating and cleansing processes of industry, managed by the state, could make this modern spirit safe for the populace: it was these that ensured the ‘greatly lowered toxicity of spirits such as whisky and brandy’.72

Babumba, like the Cox report, recommended the supply of a low priced alternative – a ‘cheap, wholesome drink’, as he rather curiously called it – and asserted that revenue might be lost by such a scheme but that this was of secondary importance compared to the nation's health.73 And he went further than Cox in his suggested solution. Both Babumba and the new government were keenly aware of the extent of popular feeling on this issue; and they knew in particular that the most politically active and articulate elements of the population were those most likely to be waragi drinkers, and that the economy of waragi had become vast, with very many involved in it. To attempt to replace waragi with a sugar-based distillate produced in an industrial-scale distillery would – however cheap the product – alienate all those who were involved in the making of waragi for sale and would lead to continued evasion of the law. Babumba's solution was striking: waragi itself would be made pure: ‘It is believed that waragi can be rendered suitable for human consumption by standardising at a safe level of alcoholic content and removing other impurities’.74

By this means, producers as well as consumers would be brought within the purifying processes by which made waragi safe for society. Some – but not all – small-scale distillers would be licensed and their production legalised; distillates would be collected from such small licensees over the country and would be brought to a central distillery where they would be redistilled and bottled before they were sent out again – after the levying of an appropriate tax – to be sold to the public.75

This was, in fact, not entirely a solution of Babumba's own devising; by his account, similar systems had been established in Ghana and Sierra Leone.76 There is some reason to suppose that the recommendations of his committee were a foregone conclusion in this respect: a major international distilling company, Gilbeys-Mathieson, had already been identified as a partner in the proposed new central distillery, and work on the site (at Luzira, a little way out of Kampala) had already begun before the report was published.77 Within a few months, a formal scheme of cooperation was worked out, and a new company was established, owned principally by the Uganda Development Corporation (a government body) with Gilbeys-Mathieson as a partner.78

‘Safe’ Drink

Babumba's report was delivered late in 1963; during 1964, the distillery was erected and new legislation was prepared; in January 1965 this was passed as ‘The Enguli (Manufacturing and Licensing) Act’. The Act enshrined a new linguistic distinction. Enguli, one of the many synonyms of illicit distillates, became the legal term for any informally produced spirits; the word Waragi acuired a capital W and became a brand name for ‘refined’ spirits.79 The Act created a Central Licensing Board (membership being by ministerial appointment) and a series of local subordinate boards to be appointed by the Central Board. The Central Board set the number of enguli manufacturing licences to be issued and the overall quantity of enguli which could be produced; the local board distributed these licences and quota among applicants. The government was to award an exclusive buying licence to one company to buy, redistill and market refined spirits; the government could also set both the price which this company paid to enguli producers and the price at which the refined spirit was ultimately sold. This was a comprehensive scheme for state management of distillation, in alliance with capital.

While these structures were put in place, there was a lull in the enforcement of the law. A few individuals suspected of dealing in large amounts of black jaggery for distillation (mostly Asians) were prosecuted, but the ‘raids’ which had characterised the late 1950s ceased.80 Meanwhile, official pronouncements in the press built up expectations of the new scheme, and continued to propagate the notion that state and capital together would turn the impure spirit of informal production into a ‘safe’ drink – ‘a very good, clean, spirit’ – suitable for modern citizens.81 The colonial metropole was ascribed particular power in this process: the manager of the factory told a visiting minister that samples of enguli had been sent to London and that ‘a selection of flavours as near as possible to the original but without the harmful ingredients would be sent back’.82

‘The Backbone of the Nation's Economy’

In April 1965 the distillery started collecting enguli, and in May the new drink went on sale, marketed as ‘The Spirit of Uganda’.83 The adverts emphasised health and individual potency, with pictures of boxers in action.84 At the same time, arrests of unlicensed distillers began again.85 The scheme for the provision of a cheap, ‘clean’ spirit which Cox had envisaged fifteen years earlier had finally been created.

The system ran into difficulties from the start. The quotas for licence numbers and overall production were restrictive, and in some areas there seems to have been such widespread expectation that licences would be refused that hardly anyone bothered to apply.86 Where applications were made in large numbers, most were disappointed; as in Bunyoro, where the October 1965 meeting of the local board considered 201 applications from men and women, which sought permission for a total production of 2,262 gallons of enguli per month. The board had only 80 gallons of quota to allot; and they distributed this between six different applicants, all men.87 There were clear possibilities for favouritism in such a system – which evidently operated to exclude women from legal production – and illicit distillation continued alongside licensed production for sale to the Uganda Waragi factory. Many of those who did have licences began to produce more than their allotted quota, selling the excess illegally to their neighbours.88 Levels of tax, as well as the costly nature of the system, and the rigidity of prices fixed by ministerial edict, meant that Uganda Waragi was comparatively expensive to consumers, but that producers were paid little for supplying ‘raw’ enguli to the factory. Small-scale distillers could sell their enguli to their neighbours for four shillings a bottle, considerably more than the two to three shillings they would receive from Uganda Waragi, and yet still undercut the bottled final product of the Waragi system, which sold for ten shillings.89 The costliness of this system, as well as the gender bias in its operation, ensured that there were still clear incentives for illicit sale; producers, and women in particular, were not willing to lose this source of income.

Evidently, consumers were not persuaded by the argument that enguli was inherently dangerous and that Waragi was the pure alternative. And the post-colonial state found its policy undermined, just as had the colonial state: those who should have been enforcing the law were those who most wished to drink spirits, and they were driven by economic circumstance to the consumption of illicit distillates.90 The widespread advertising association between bottled beer and spirits, prosperity and modernity, and the increasingly evident disdain which the political and administrative elite showed for ‘traditional’ fermented brews – which, unlike enguli, could be legally made and bought and consumed – exacerbated this.91 Elite drinking practices were focused on bottled beer and imported spirits; those who could not afford such drinks but aspired to the power and lifestyle of modernity drank illicit distillates.

During the 1970s, these problems became more apparent. In 1971, a body which claimed to represent licensed enguli producers complained over the low prices they were paid, and over the unlicensed sale of enguli by others, but without apparent result.92 In 1975, a minister in Amin's government visited the Uganda Waragi plant and told the manager that Uganda Waragi was ‘the backbone of the nation’: effectively reiterating the message that refined and processed spirits were the desirable drink of nation-builders, even as his colleagues were warning the populace against the ‘laziness’ and ‘negligence’ associated with drinking – presumably of other kinds of liquor.93 But the nation's backbone was in increasingly poor shape. Distillates had always been consumed by soldiers in Uganda, and the increasingly large and unruly army consumed more and more during the 1970s; enforcement of the law against soldiers who bought distillates, or who protected illicit distillers, was impossible. At the same time, the increasing dislocation of the economy meant that more people turned to producing distillates; even male civil servants.94 By the early 1980s, production of Waragi had dropped considerably, and shortages of petrol and spare parts, as well as the continuing violent conflict, made the collection of enguli for the central distillery increasingly difficult. In 1989 the Waragi company ceased buying enguli, and began to produce drinks purely from industrially produced sugar-cane spirit.95 Under the Movement government since 1986, there has been little emphasis on controlling illicit distillation, which would seem to be widely tolerated; press coverage is humorous, rather than anxious, and in some towns wholesalers operate openly (and pay tax on their businesses) and pick-ups laden with jerricans ply the roads without pretence or disguise.96 The prosperous and well connected still prefer to drink bottled beer and spirits, but they tolerate the impure spirit of informal enterprise. In Hoima town, for example, there were no prosecutions under the Enguli Act between 1994 and 1998, despite the evident prevalence of illegal trade.97

Conclusion: The Spirit of Uganda

Yet despite this economic failure, the Spirit of Uganda was, and remains, a remarkable symbolic success. It captured the popular imagination in Uganda and elsewhere in East Africa in the 1960s;98 and a copy of the scheme was introduced in Tanzania, amid a similar rhetoric of the need to ‘protect the public from the danger of impure’ local distillates;99 this venture was to follow a similar trajectory of economic travails. At the end of the 1990s, the idea of the system still had a hold on the imagination, and there were still many Ugandans who believed that Uganda Waragi, the Spirit of Uganda, was made by official ‘refining’ of the raw product of small-scale producers. In Kenya, people still referred admiringly to the ‘success’ of this system when they debated the perceived problems of illicit distillation.100 The idea of the role of the state propounded in the Cox report has retained its allure: the state exists to manage the contact of the populace with modernity, and that is one, central, element of its claim to legitimacy.

Notes

1. Public Record Office [PRO] CO 822/630, ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Use of Jaggery’, with Cohen (Governor, Uganda) to Secretary of State, 20 Aug. 1952.

2. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 11.

3. Akyeampong, ‘What's in a Drink?’

4. Lugard, Rise of Our East African Empire, II, 210.

5. Uganda National Archives [UNA] A 46/1993 Chief Secretary to all PCs, 14 Feb. 1921; Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 2–3.

6. See the provisions of ‘An Ordinance Relating to Liquor, No. 9 of 1916’.

7. In interviews carried out in Bunyoro: for example, Int Nyoro25a, 6. Babumba emphasised this link between distillation and women's attempts to secure cash for their own use: Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 4.

8. Speke, Journal of the Discovery, 306–08; Baker, The Albert N'yanza, II, 468–69.

9. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 7.

10. ‘Possession of Waragi’, Uganda Herald, 3 July 1935.

11. Chapter VI of the General Act for the Repression of the African Slave Trade, reprinted in Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade, 361–62.

12. Pan, Liquor in Colonial Africa, 25–40; Olorunfemi, ‘The Liquor Traffic in British West Africa’, 220–42.

13. PRO FO 84/2010, Salisbury to Vivian, 12 Nov. 1889; Willis, ‘Demoralised natives’, 55–74.

14. Percy Anderson, quoted in Miers, ‘The Brussels Conference’, 83–117.

15. PRO FO 84/2011, draft text of Vivian's speech, nd (Jan. 1890).

16. Pan, Liquor in Colonial Africa, 41–45.

17. Liquor Rules, 4 Feb. 1921; and UNA A 46/1993, Chief Secretary to all PCs, 14 Feb. 1921. For the confusion over distillation, see UNA A 46/1993, Minute by Attorney-General, 29 Oct. 1920.

18. UNA Z/325 20, DC Busoga to PC Eastern, 17 Sep. 1924.

19. Gutkind, The Royal Capital of Buganda, 150; Police Annual Report for 1927, 32, UNA A 46/ 228.

20. ‘Birthday of the Kabaka’, Uganda Herald, 14 Aug. 1935.

21. See the description in Mair, An African People, 114 and 127, which stresses the commoditisation of banana wine in Buganda, but also 135–37, revealing the continuing non-commercial consumption and exchange of banana wine.

22. Appadurai, ‘Commodities and the Politics of Value’, 13–17.

23. Hoima District Archives [HAD] NAF 9, DC Bunyoro to PC Eastern, 30 Oct. 1950.

24. As is apparent from Southall and Gutkind, Townsmen in the Making, 60 and elsewhere.

25. PRO CO 822/630, ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Use of Jaggery’, 22 Nov. 1951, attached Cohen to SoS, 20 Aug. 1952.

26. For a distinctly unalarmed report, see HAD NAF 9, DC Bunyoro to PC Eastern, 30 Oct 1950.

27. Tanzania National Archives [TNA] SMP 12802 Vol. II, Chief Secretary Tanganyika to Chief Secretary Uganda, 19 Nov. 1936.

28. PRO CO 822/630, ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Use of Jaggery’, attached Cohen to SoS, 20 Aug. 1952.

29. HDA FIN. 7, DC Hoima to Verjee, 4 Dec. 1954 and Commodore, East African Railways and Harbours, Butiaba to DC Hoima, 8 June 1954.

30. Gunter, Inside Africa, 417.

31. As was explained to other governors of less liberal inclinations: PRO CO 822/630, Commonwealth Relations Office to Governor, Southern Rhodesia, 4 Apr. 1949.

32. PRO CO 822/630, Draft memo, attached, CO to FO, 19 May 1951.

33. PRO CO 822/630, ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry in to the Use of Jaggery’, 2-4, attached, Cohen to SoS, 20 Aug. 1952.

34. PRO CO 822/630, ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry in to the Use of Jaggery’, 5, attached, Cohen to SoS, 20 Aug. 1952.

35. Willis, ‘Demoralised Natives’.

36. PRO CO 822/630, ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry in to the Use of Jaggery’, 6, attached, Cohen to SoS, 20 Aug. 1952.

37. Apter, The Political Kingdom in Uganda, 264–67.

38. PRO CO 822/631, Cohen to Gorell Barnes, 12 Feb.1953.

39. For the Tanganyika experiment, see TNA SMP 20309, Minute, Solicitor-General, 17 Jan. 1953. A similar system was introduced in Northern Rhodesia: PRO CO 822/631, Governor, NR – SoS, 15 Apr 1953.

40. PRO CO 822/630, Cohen to SoS, 20 Aug. 1952.

41. PRO CO 822/630, Cohen to SoS, 20 Aug. 1952.

42. Kenya National Archives [KNA] MAA 2/5/212, ‘Sociological Aspects of Waragi Drinking’; paper produced by Uganda govt, nd, submitted to Kenya Government 1955.

43. PRO CO 822/630, Gorell Barnes to Cohen, 11 Sep. 1952.

44. PRO CO 822/630, Memo, nd 1952.

45. The crucial moment was in 1953 when the Secretary of State approved a principle of ‘quiet disregard’ towards the provisions of the Congo Basin Treaties, and asked that new legislation be prepared in all African colonies: PRO CO 822/631, telegram from SoS to Governors, 14 July 1953.

46. ‘Liquor Bill Passed with General Support. “Discrimination” gone’, Uganda Argus, 14 Jan. 1955.

47. PRO CO 822/1069, Ag Governor to SoS, 15 Apr. 1954.

48. KNA MAA 2/5/212, Officer in Charge, Nairobi to Secretary for Defence, 14 Sep. 1954; Ag PC Rift Valley Province to Secretary for Defence, 14 Sep. 1954.

49. KNA MAA 2/5/212, Minute 1/54, Coast DCs’ meeting, 22 Sep. 1954.

50. KNA MAA 2/5/212, Minute, Carey Jones, 8 Oct. 1955.

51. KNA MAA 2/5/212, Mackenzie, Treasury – Turnbull, Chief Secretary's office 22 Sep 1955; Minute, Carey Jones, 8 Oct. 1955.

52. KNA MAA 2/5/212, ‘Report on Sociological Aspects of Waragi Drinking’; and Attached, Asian MWP – Administrator, East Africa High Commission, 5 Dec 1955; PRO co 822/1069, Minute, 26 Sep. 1955.

53. Uganda Argus, 17 Jan. 1958.

54. ‘House Told of Waragi Increase’, Uganda Argus, 18 Jan. 1958; ‘29 Stills Smashed by Police’, Uganda Argus, 10 Jan. 1959.

55. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 4.

56. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 17.

57. Haugerud, The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya, 81.

58. ‘Socialism Must Govern’, Uganda Argus, 8 Jan. 1964.

59. Letter, O. James, Uganda Argus, 2 Mar. 1965.

60. ‘West Mengo Regulates Drink Hours’, Uganda Argus, 8 Feb. 1968.

61. HDA NAF 9, Katikiro Bunyoro to Chiefs, 14 Aug. 1947, and Sabairu Buyenje to Supt. of Railway Landies, 10 Dec 1951.

62. For examples of the numerous advertisements, see Uganda Argus, 9 Jan. 1962; 11 Jan. 1965; 6 Feb 1967.

63. For Babumba, see Iliffe, East African Doctors, 139–40, 154.

64. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 7, 17.

65. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee. 7, 11–12.

66. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 17.

67. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 7.

68. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 1.

69. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 11–12.

70. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 11.

71. KNA MAA 2/5/212, Director of Medical Services, Kenya, to Asian MWP, 29 Dec. 1955; small-scale distillation was long tolerated and regulated in France, apparently without widespread poisoning: Sournia, A History of Alcoholism.

72. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 11.

73. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 18–19.

74. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 11.

75. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 20–21.

76. Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 20, 21. Akyeampong's description of the Ghanaian system does not reveal whether a central distillery played any role: Akyeampong, ‘What's in a Drink?’, 233–35 and Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change, 144.

77. The report coyly noted that an ‘outside firm’ had been identified as a partner; the list of witnesses to the Committee reveals that this was Gilbeys-Mathieson: Babumba, Report of the Spirituous Liquor Committee, 22, and Appendix 1.

78. Uganda Development Corporation owned 51 per cent; and Gilbeys-Mathieson 26 per cent; the Development Finance Corporation of Uganda (largely owned by the Commonwealth Development Corporation) held the remainder of the shares.

79. Sec. 19, Cap. 96, Laws of Uganda.

80. ‘Jaggery Fines’, Uganda Argus, 11 Jan. 1963; ‘Charged with Bribing Police’, Uganda Argus, 26 Jan. 1963.

81. ‘Waragi, Waragi’, Uganda Argus, 14 Apr. 1965.

82. ‘Waragi on Sale in April’, Uganda Argus, 19 Jan. 1965.

83. ‘Collection of Enguli’, Uganda Argus, 24 Apr. 1965.

84. See, for example, Uganda Argus, 7 Jan. 1965.

85. ‘Women Sold Enguli Without Licence’, Uganda Argus, 11 Jan. 1966.

86. ‘Few Seek Enguli Licences’, Uganda Argus, 7 Apr. 1965.

87. HDA, Minutes of meeting of Bunyoro Enguli board. 6 Oct. 1965.

88. ‘Enguli Excess Denied’, Uganda Argus, 7 Feb. 1967; HAD ADM 5, Bunyoro District team Minutes, 31 July 1965.

89. For these figures, see ‘Enguli Export Ban’, Uganda Argus, 25 Jan. 1965, and advertisement in Uganda Argus, 7 Jan. 1966; a similar picture emerges from Heald, Controlling Anger, 87–88.

90. For evidence of chiefs’ continuing involvement in abetting distillation, see HDA JUD.3, Kihika, Magistrate Grade II to Admin. Secretary, Bunyoro District, 20 Mar. 1971.

91. From the 1950s, newspaper advertisments for beer and bottled spirits were commonplace, with solgans like ‘Live Well, Drink Tourell’, and ‘Uganda's Proud Brew’; see Uganda Argus, 7 Jan. 1965, 7 Feb. 1968. When Amin overthrew Obote, he adduced the drinking patterns of the political elite as evidence of their distance from the rest of the people: ‘Miria Can Go to Dar’, Uganda Argus, 18 Feb. 1971.

92. ‘Enguli Producers’ Memo’, Uganda Argus, 12 Dec. 1971.

93. ‘Col. Sabuni Tours Industries in City’; ‘Okuda Orders Arrest of Offenders’; ‘Governor Ozo on Role of Chiefs’, Voice of Uganda, 2, 18 and 19 July 1975.

94. Int Nyoro25b, 5.

95. For this information, I am indebted to Mr Sentamu of Uganda Waragi.

96. For news items which reveal the openness of – and police complicity in – illicit distillation, see ‘Residents Cry Foul on Malwa Ban’, and ‘Lira Lira Blast Rocks Nakawa’, New Vision, 7 and 9 May 1998.

97. Willis, ‘The Only Money a Woman Can Claim’, 1–16.

98. ‘Waragi on Sale in April’, Uganda Argus, 19 Jan. 1965; Letter, Daily Nation, 26 Jan. 1966.

99. ‘Tanzania to Make Konyagi’, Standard, Tanzania, 8 Jan. 1971.

100. ‘For Many Drinkers, There Are No Choices’, East African, 31 Aug. to 6 Sep. 1998.