¹ See, for example, Ajayi, J. F.A., Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite (Evanston, 1969);Google ScholarKitching, Gavin, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petty-Bourgeoisie (New Haven and London, 1980);Google Scholar and Oppong, Christine. Middle Class African Marriage: A Family Study of Ghanaian Senior Civil Servants (London, 1981).Google Scholar

² On settler colonialism as a generic phenomenon, see Denoon, Donald, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford, 1983).Google Scholar

³ This phrase is generally attributed to Cecil Rhodes, one-time Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, diamond magnate, and the moving spirit behind the establishment of the colonies of Southern and Northern Rhodesia, for whom they were named.

⁴ While rejecting the notion of “European” liquor in the racially exclusive sense that it was used in Southern Rhodesia and elsewhere in colonial Africa, to avoid unnecessary cumbersomeness I have refrained from putting “European” between quotation marks, except in this instance and in the title.

⁵ Gann, L.H., A History of Southern Rhodesia: Early Days to 1934 (New York, 1969), p. 83.Google Scholar

⁶ Blake, J.W., European Beginnings in West Africa, 1454–1578 (London, 1937).Google Scholar

⁷ Hopkins, A.G., An Economic History of West Africa (New York, 1973), pp. 111, 129;Google ScholarPhilip, D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1975), pp. 318, 326;Google ScholarJoseph, C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capital and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, 1988), pp. 83–84.Google Scholar

⁸ Onwuka Dike, K., Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria (Oxford, 1956), pp. 105–106;Google ScholarRodney, Walter, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 177–181.Google Scholar See also Leroy, Vail and White, Landeg, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of the Quelimane District (Minneapolis, 1980), pp. 126–129.Google Scholar

⁹ See, forexample. Harrison, Brian, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (London, 1971);Google ScholarLilian, Lewis Shiman, Crusade against Drink in Victorian England (New York, 1988);Google Scholar and James, S. Roberts, Drink, Temperance and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Boston, 1984).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Pan, Lynn, Alcohol in Colonial Africa (Helsinki, 1975);Google ScholarOlorunfemi, A, “The Liquor Traffic Dilemma in British West Africa: The Southern Nigerian Example, 1895–1918”, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 17 (1984), pp. 229–241;CrossRefGoogle ScholarRaymond, E. Dumett, “The Social Impact of the European Liquor Trade on the Akan of Ghana (Gold Coast and Asante. 1875–1910)”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5 (1974), pp. 69–101.Google Scholar The anthropological literature, with its emphasis on the “functional” role of indigenous alcoholic beverages in precolonial African societies, as opposed to the “dysfunctional” influence of Western-type distilled liquor, tends to support the humanitarian argument. For a critique of the functionalist approach, see Charles, H. Ambler, “Alcohol and Disorder in Precolonial Africa”, Working Papers in African Studies, No. 126 (African Studies Center, Boston University, 1987).Google Scholar

¹¹ Pan, , Alcohol in Colonial Africa, pp. 31–40.Google Scholar

¹² Debates in the Legislative Council during the Second Session of the Seventh Council, 25th April to 27th May, 1921, cols 301–330, 361–405 (quotation on col. 374).Google Scholar

¹³ Harry, F. Walcott, The African Beer Gardens of Bulawayo: Integrated Drinking in a Segregated Society (New Brunswick, N.J., 1974), pp. 68–79;Google ScholarEileen, Jensen Krige, “The Social Significance of Beer among the Balobedu”, Bantu Studies, 6 (1932), pp. 343–357.Google Scholar See also Walter, H. Sangree, “The Social Function of Beer Drinking in Bantu Tiriki”, in David, J. Pittman and Charles, R. Snyder (eds), Society, Culture, and Drinking Patterns (New York and London, 1962), pp. 6–21.Google Scholar

¹⁴ “Black peril” scares seem to have been a conditioned reflex on the part of white settlers in southern Africa. See Etherington, Norman, “Natal's Black Rape Scare of the 1870s”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15 (1988), pp. 36–53;CrossRefGoogle ScholarCharles, van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914: New Ninevah, vol. 2 (London, 1982), pp. 1–73;Google Scholar and Pape, John, “Black and White: The ‘Perils of Sex’ in Colonial Zimbabwe”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 16 (1990), pp. 699–720.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁵ National Archives of Zimbabwe (hereafter NAZ), N3/6/3: South African Native Affairs Commission: Evidence of Asst. Native Commissioner, M'Toko, p. 129.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid.: Evidence of Native Commissioner, Umtali and Inyanga, p. 160.

¹⁷ South African Native Affairs Commission Report, 1903–05 (Cape Town, 1905), p. 75.Google Scholar

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¹⁹ NAZ, S235/477: Notes on Evidence of Enquiry into Bulawayo Location, 1930, p. 9. The “3 per cent allowed by law” refers to the alcoholic content of the traditional-type beer sold in the city-run beerhalls.Google Scholar

²⁰ Bantu Mirror (Bulawayo, hereafter BM), 28 06 1941.Google Scholar

²¹ NAZ, S1387sol;22: Chief Native Commissioner[?] to Sec. to Premier, 27 09 1924.Google Scholar

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²⁵ African voters comprised only a small fraction of the electorate. Unlike South Africa, with its whites-only “herrenvolk democracy”, the franchise in Southern Rhodesia was based on income (or property) and literacy qualifications. By restricting African social mobility and continually raising the income qualifications, however, Southern Rhodesia guaranteed white supremacy just as effectively as South Africa.Google Scholar

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²⁷ Debates in the Legislative Council during the Fourth Session of the Sixth Council, 11th April to 3rd May, 1917, col. 155. The “boys” in question were adult men, which was how most white settlers in Southern Rhodesia referred to all African males.Google Scholar

²⁸ The “skokiaan queens”, some of whom doubled as prostitutes, were very effective in competing with the municipal beerhalls, thereby incurring the wrath of officialdom. For a discussion of illicit female brewers in the mining districts, see Charles, van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933 (London, 1976), pp. 166–172.Google Scholar

²⁹ The elite African demand for separate drinking facilities received as much attention from the authorities as the one for European liquor. Thus, renewing an ‘old request”, in 1950 “progressive Africans” in Bulawayo became “indignant at the rough conditions and behaviour of their fellow Africans at the Beer Hall”, demanding that “better conditions be created by recognition of the City Council of the middle class African”. These “progressive” and “middle class” Africans wanted a private club, run on beerhall profits and controlled by a committee consisting of themselves, with membership restricted to “only those Africans who are prepared to be orderly and [to] behave themselves as provided by the rules of the Club”. See BM, 14 Oct 1950.

³⁰ South African Native Affairs Commission Report, p. 75.Google Scholar

³¹ In what would later become the Union of South Africa, the sale of liquor to Africans was first banned in 1896 in the gold-producing Transvaal Republic. This, however, led to the development of a highly lucrative illicit liquor business. See Charles, van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914: New Babylon, vol. 1 (London 1982), pp. 44–102; and The Illicit Liquor Problem on the Witwatersrand: Report of Unofficial Commission Appointed by the South African Temperance Alliance and the South African Institute of Race Relations (May 18th, 1935).Google Scholar

³² NAZ, S482/709/39, vol. 1: Town Clerk, Bulawayo to Sec. to Premier, 23 Jan 1934; BM, 3 July 1954, 29 Jan 1955; Vambe, Lawrence, From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe (Pittsburgh, 1976). pp. 216–217.Google Scholar

³³ Asians had been exempt from the prohibition all along, though they had to obtain a permit in order to purchase liquor.

³⁴ An attempt two years earlier to give coloureds the right to purchase European liquor was unsuccessful, with opponents citing widespread drunkenness among South Africa's coloured population and expressing fear that Southern Rhodesian coloureds would suffer the same fate if permitted to drink. In 1938, in its successful petition to the Legislative Council urging repeal of the liquor prohibition as it applied to coloureds, the Coloured Community Service League drew a sharp distinction between coloureds and Africans. The former, unlike the latter, the petition asserted, could not “be described as being in the barbaric stage to warrant such a stigma being placed upon them”. Thus coloureds, like elite Africans, regarded legal access to European liquor as an important status advancement and public recognition of their place among the colony’s “civilized” community. See Debates of the Legislative Assembly, vol. 16 (Salisbury, n.d.), cols 3008–3158; Debates of the Legislative Assembly, vol. 18 (Salisbury, n.d.), col. 1673.

³⁵ Debates of the Legislative Assembly, vol. 18, col. 1488.

³⁶ Debates of the Legislative Assembly (unrevised), 23rd April, 1959, no. 60 (Salisbury, 1959), col. 3434. See also Legislative Assembly. First Report of the Select Committee on Supply of Liquor to Non-Europeans (11th March, 1959), and Legislative Assembly. Second Report of the Select Committee on Supply of Liquor to Non-Europeans (16th April, 1959).

³⁷ Debates of the Legislative Assembly, 23rd April, 1959, col. 3434.

³⁸ Ibid., col. 3446.

³⁹ Vambe, , From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, p. 217.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ NAZ, S482/709139, vol. 1: Clerk, Town, Bulawayo to Sec. to Premier, 23 06 1934.Google Scholar

⁴¹ BM, 28 Dec. 1940. See also BM, 23 Jan 1954, 10 Sep 1955.

⁴² Phimister, Ian. An Economic and Social History of Zimbabwe, 1890–1948: Capital Accumulation and Class Struggle (London and New York, 1988), pp. 219–296;Google ScholarMichael, Oliver West, “African Middle-Class Formation in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890–1965” (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1990), pp. 45–65.Google Scholar

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⁴⁴ West, , “African Middle-Class Formation”, pp. 338–345.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Between 1943 and 1948 the Bantu Congress, one of the leading African political movements during and after World War II, was under the presidency of the Rev. T.D. Samkange, a Wesleyan Methodist minister and noted opponent of liquor in all its forms. However, unlike the African Missionary Conference, which Samkange also served as secretary for a long time, the Bantu Congress was not dominated by clerics. Most of the other officers and the vast majority of its members were lay people. See Terence Ranger,“The Bantu National Congress of Southern Rhodesia, 1943 to 1948: A Revisionist Interpretation” (unpub. paper, African Research Seminar, St. Anthony's College, Oxford, 12 November 1991). On Samkange's attitude toward liquor, see NAZ, S235/477: Notes on Evidence of Enquiry into Bulawayo Location, 1930, p. 63.

⁴⁶ NAZ, S482/717/39: Pres., Af. Voters' League to Prime Mi (Mm. of Native Affairs), 2 Dec 1946.

⁴⁷ NAZ, S517: P/Det., Criminal Investigation Dept. to Provincial Criminal Investigation Dept., Mashonaland, 31 Aug 1949.

⁴⁸ BM, 2 06 1956.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ BM, 27 03 1954.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Concord (Salisbury), 05 1955, p. 20.Google Scholar

⁵¹ See, for example, the BM editorials of 10 Apr 1948 and 30 Mar 1957.

⁵² BM, 1 12 1956.Google Scholar

⁵³ BM, 23 02 1957.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ BM, 5 05 1956.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ BM, 23 06 1956.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ BM, 26 05 1956, 1 09 1956.Google Scholar

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⁵⁸ BM, 21 04 1956.Google Scholar

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⁶⁰ Keatley, Patrick, The Politics of Partnership (Baltimore, 1963).Google Scholar

⁶¹ With the coming of the Federation, a number of groups were formed to promote racial partnership, chief among which were the Capricorn Africa Society and the Inter-Racial Association of Southern Rhodesia. These groups and individuals associated with them organized a wide variety of multiracial activities, including social events where Africans apparently were served European liquor illicitly. See, for example, Shamuyarira, Nathan, Crisis in Rhodesia (London, 1965), especially the chapter entitled “Tea-time Partners”.Google Scholar

⁶² Concord, , 10 1956, p. 19.Google Scholar

⁶³ Debates of the Legislative Assembly (unrevised), 16th May, 1957, vol. 39, no. 36 (Salisbury, 1959), col. 1881.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Ibid., cols 1858–1888.

⁶⁵ Ibid., col. 1858.

⁶⁶ Ibid., col. 1864.

⁶⁷ BM, 1 06 1957, 16 11 1957.Google Scholar

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⁶⁹ Leys, Cohn, European Politics in Southern Rhodesia(Oxford, 1959);Google ScholarMurray, D.J., The Governmental System in Southern Rhodesia (Oxford, 1970);Google ScholarJames, A. Chamunorwa Mutambirwa, The Rise of Settler Power in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), 1898–1923 (Rutherford, N.J., 1980).Google Scholar

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⁷⁵ BM, 30 03 1957.Google Scholar

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⁷⁷ Second Report of the Select Committee on Supply of Liquor to Non-Europeans, p. 7. See also Walcott, . The African Beer Gardens of Bulawayo, p. 188, who, on the basis of research done in the early 1970s, asserts that “certain members of the [Bulawayo African] township community who were especially visible as unique personalities or because of formal roles they occupied were conspicuous by their absence from beer- garden life. Perhaps beer-garden clientele includes individuals from all strata of township dwellers, but essentially the facilities catered to lower-class urbanites.”Google Scholar

⁷⁸ Founded in Salisbury in 1958. the Capital Club, an establishment aimed at providing “facilities [for dining, reading, lectures and entertainment] which can be used by all races”. was the only white-run club that accepted African members. However, only a small number of well-connected elite Africans in Salisbury belonged to this club, which did not serve alcohol of any kind, since its founding members included such staunch anti-liquor stalwarts as the Rev. Kachidza. See NAZ, H 15/squo;24/18: The Capital Club, Aug 1958: The Capital Club: Memorandum to Members. 22 Oct 1958.

⁷⁹ BM. 7 06 1961. For a brief discussion of elite she beens in a Salisbury African township in the early 1970s.Google Scholar see May, Joan. Drinking in a Rhodesian African Township (Salisbury. 1973). p. 66.Google Scholar

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⁸³ Reader, R.D. and May, Joan, Drinking Patterns in Rhodesia: Highfield African Township, Salisbury (Salisbury. 1971). a Debates of the Legislative Assembly (unrevised). 23rd 04, 1959, no. 60 (Salisbury, 1959), col. 3438.Google Scholar

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⁹¹ From an historical point of view, ethnicity (“tribalism”) and lobola (bridewealth) are perhaps the only other issues that were more internally divisive among the African petty bourgeoisie. On the ethnic and lobola issues, see Ian, Phimister and Charles, van Onselen, “The Political Economy of Tribal Animosity: A Case Study of the 1929 Bulawayo Location ‘Faction Fight’”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 6 (1979), pp. 1–43;Google ScholarRanger, Terence, “Missionaries, Migrants and the Manyika: The Invention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe”, in Leroy, Vail (ed). The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1989). pp. 118–150; and West, “African Middle-Class Formation”, pp. 111–121, 465–486.Google Scholar

⁹² This list includes, though it is by no means limited to, the current Foreign Minister, Nathan Shamuyarira, who strongly supported Stanlake Samkange's motion at the 1956 United Rhodesia Party congress; Leopold Takawira. who until the end of 1960 was executive officer of the Capricorn Africa Society and who, as a political prisoner in Ian Smith's Rhodesia, died a cruel death in 1970: and the first African advocate in Southern Rhodesia. Herbert (‘hitepo), who died in Zambia in 1974 under circumstances that an official Zambian commission attributed to inter-ethnic rivalry within his wing of the nationalist movement.