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lisa M. Glazer A study of beer and alcohol production and consumption can tell us much about gender, class, and political life in urban Zambia under colonialism and during the first decade of Zambia's independence. In fact, between 1900 and the 1960s, alcohol was one of the most salient issues defining the politics of inter- and intra-gender social and economic relations, the quality of domestic group interactions, and the political stability and class relations of the body politic. The changing relation between the genders and production in themodern state is well described in Etienne and Leacock's (1980) seminal anthology on women and colonization. The global feminization of poverty and characteristic disempowerment of women today is rooted in the political/ economic systems imposed by Europe throughout the world. Etienne and Leacock (1980) describe some of the different ways the colonial encounter with indigenous peoples began this process.1 Zambia provides yet another example of the progressive disempowerment and impoverishment of women under colonialism, since the state took over production of alcohol from women. A more interesting sociocultural process emerges when we look at patterns of alcohol consumption and its political consequences under colonialism and itsaftermath. Chapter 5 Alcohol and Politics in Urban Zambia: The Intersection of Gender and Class Introduction Beer in Traditional Society Among many of the seventy-three Bantu-speaking ethnic groups of the territory that became the Republic of Zambia, the social significance of beer is rooted in what contemporary Zambians refer to as "traditional" rural society . In the early days of colonial rule, Audrey I. Richards2 reported that beer was drunk "in large quantities when grain is available, but all feasting or festivity is reduced during the hunger months" (1964:113). Beer produc- tion was a wife's work, and the quantity was limited by grain supplies and reliance on an individual woman who had many other major chores to perform.3 Such is the longing for excitement after the monotony of village routine that many tribes go short of food in order to drink. Thus the importance of beer in the social life of most Bantu peoples, either as the "favourite pastime" . . . or as an essential accompaniment to religious rites such as burial or marriage, makes the supply of grain a great social asset. The rich man can drink beer, and provide it for others, long after the store-houses of the poorer members of the community, the monogamists usually, are bare. (1964:99) Zambian precolonial societies were mostly matrilineal, ranked as chiefdoms or based on egalitarian lineages, and they lacked the unequal access to strategic resources that promotes vastly differing lifestyles. Contributing to egalitarian relations was the linking of genders in economic interdependency as brothers and sisters and as husbands and wives. There wasno state policy concerning brewing because there was no state. The ethnic groups were neighbors—politically and, except for long-distance trade in luxury goods, economically independent of each other. Colonialism brought a cash economy concentrated in Lusaka, the capital, and in the copper-mining towns to the north that the British built in the 1930s along the railwayline used to export the copper to Britain. They recruited African rural men as miners and declared the migration of women to towns illegal. In the early years of colonial rule, young men worked on limited contracts and subsequently returned to the countryside to settle down and marry. Gradually the cash economy intruded into rural areas. Rural women brewed beer as before, but also, from time to time, for sale. Since cash in rural areas was in short supply, for a woman to brew for sale, she had to have a specific purpose (such asschool fees or a trip to town) and there had to be potential customers, such as a construction gang working on a government project.4 She would also have to find the time to brew beer, since under colonialism the rural woman's workload increased as most ablebodied men worked for wages and were unable to assist in farm labor. The urban situation was different. Bythe 1950s, so many women had migrated to town illegally that African town life had become firmly established , and the government subsequently changed its antifemale migration policy to one of "balanced stabilization" between town and country. However , colonial policies broke the dynamics of multiplex networks of gender interdependency by redefining economic relations. Modern technological development of mines and farms and the creation of urban settlements introduced class differentiation, empowering both European and...

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