THE RISE OF GIN IN AFRICA

The Fon in Benin used to place forged iron staffs (asen) on family shrines as memorials to the dead. One of such staffs, from the important former slave trading port of Ouidah and most likely dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, depicts a figure seated at a table arranged with containers of types that would normally contain imported liquor. The  gure probably represents Yovogan, a special minister appointed by the king of Dahomey to oversee foreigners and trading houses in Ouidah. There are numerous references to Western material culture: the central figure is seated on a chair at a table, wearing a top hat and holding a pipe. Behind him is a cross, and next to the table are flags. The containers on the table represent various types of imported drinks. The large vessel in the middle of the table has the shape of a demi-john: a large, small-necked bottle, usually cased in wickerwork.

General store selling a diverse selection of imported ware

In West Africa, demi-johns typically contained rum, even though they were also used for other products such as palm oil. The smaller containers arranged on the table around the demi-john have the characteristic shape of gin bottles, in West Africa called ‘square face’ or ‘four cornered’. The symbols on such asen are notoriously difficult to interpret, and it has been remarked that only the maker and the donor who commissioned the memorial staff understand all the references. Nevertheless, the prominent display of imported liquors, including gin, is striking. This asen is an elaborate example, but it is not unique: many artefacts originating from nineteenth-century coastal West Africa contained references to gin.
As such, these artefacts serve as powerful reminders of the importance that West Africans attached to rum and gin by the second half of the nineteenth century. They also indicate that imported liquor was only one amongst a range of foreign imports that achieved prominence in West African societies. Finally, the fact that the asen originated in Ouidah, reminds us that imported liquors reached West Africa as part of the transatlantic slave trade, and highlights that to understand the rise of gin, we need to consider the organisation of the trade in which rum and gin became important.
Wine, brandy, and rum have long been part of the trade between Europe and West Africa.2 When the French trader Jean Barbot visited Accra around 1700, he paid for slaves and gold with brandy, knives, cloths, guns, gunpowder and various beads. He also made payments in brandy to African leaders for the right of anchorage. However, when trading at Cape Coast, he was forced to sell his brandy cheaply, as English trading ships had been selling great quantities of rum and other spirits just before his arrival. During the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century, distilled liquors formed one of the main categories of goods imported into West Africa, alongside various types of cloth, iron and ironware, crockery, guns and gunpowder.
Liquors did not dominate the import trade, but they always constituted a substantial part of the parcel of goods exchanged. Rum was by far the most important liquor while, until the middle of the nineteenth century, gin did not figure prominently. I found no evidence in the sources for Emmanuel Akyeampong’s claim that ‘three centuries of Dutch-dominated liquor trade on the Gold Coast had definitely popularised Dutch gin labels over British labels. Eighteenth-century Dutch vessels carried French brandy as well as rum, but there is no mention of Hollands gin. British traders complained about unfair competition from those merchants who had cheap and easy access to American rum.

In an 1822 petition to the Governor of the Gold Coast, British traders claimed that the West African consumers preferred American rum ‘to any other in the proportion of four to five. Rum imports continued to be important until World War I, especially for the Gold Coast where the value of rum imports consistently represented between one tenth and a quarter of total imports into the colony. Nevertheless, the amount of Dutch and German gin that was imported into West Africa as a whole, increased rapidly, and overtook that of rum, in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the eve of World War I, Dutch and German gin had become so dominant, that contemporary observers of the trade tended to use the terms ‘liquor trade’ and ‘gin trade’ interchangeably, while merchants claimed that the gin trade was an essential prerequisite for the trade in other goods.
How can we explain this soaring of gin imports? Was it a specific feature of the product or of the way in which it was marketed that specifically appealed to West Africans? By the middle of the twentieth century, Hollands gin had acquired a special place in traditional ritual that set it apart from other distilled drinks. However, this does not yet appear to have been the case during the nineteenth century. To explain the rise of gin we need to consider a number of factors, including: the changes that occurred in the economy of West Africa around the ending of the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of the palm oil trade; the specific way in which gin was packaged and distributed; changes in the production methods and taste of gin around 1880; and the price of gin in relation to that of other drinks and other luxury goods.
I therefore start this chapter with a description of the spread and use of imported liquors in West Africa during the centuries before the spread of gin. In the next section I offer a discussion of the changes in the production of gin in Holland and Germany during the nineteenth-century that made the drink affordable to West African consumers. I then follow this by an analysis of the transformations that occurred in the West African economy following the abolition of the slave trade, which resulted in changing consumer demand for imported liquor. Finally, I address the question of how imported gin reached nineteenth-century African consumers in a brief section on the marketing of gin.

Alcohol in West Africa before the spread of gin

Before the arrival of imported distilled liquors, West Africans mainly enjoyed two types of alcoholic drinks: palm wine and pito, a beer made from millet or guinea corn. These drinks are still common in the region, and nowadays include variants of pito based on non-indigenous crops such as maize and plantain. They are produced through fermentation, and have to be consumed within days or weeks of production. Palm wine is consumed in the forest belt along the West African coast, as here is where the palm trees grow, the juice of which is used to make the wine. Pito is the drink of the savannah areas north of the forest zone. Imported liquor gained most of its popularity in the areas in which palm wine is drunk, but its spread has not been restricted to the palm wine areas.Furthermore, pito was not unknown in forest areas, and eighteenth-century observers reported the sale of pito beer in coastal markets.
While the production and sale of pito was often in the hands of women, the tapping, distribution and consumption of palm wine was the domain of males. Akyeampong has noted that in precolonial Akan, Ga-Adangme, and Ewe societies, male elders exercised a monopoly over palm wine. The elders incorporated the ritual use of palm wine in all important social contracts and occasions, and their use of palm wine in communication with gods and ancestors reinforced their secular power. Control over palm wine thus enhanced the social superiority and identity of male elders, who aimed to exclude women and young men from using alcohol. The ritual use included the consumption of palm wine, as part of yam festivals, annual customs, and funeral rites, as well as the libations needed when praying to gods and ancestors.
By 1900, in most of such instances, distilled liquor was used rather than palm wine, even though there were some ritual circumstances and deities (sometimes described as ‘old fetish’) for which palm wine was required. Our understanding of the earlier importance of palm wine in Ghana is therefore mainly based on the oral traditions told by the elders. Thus, while some evidence exists for similar links between palm wine and the authority of male elders in Nigeria and Congo, there is no documentary evidence that can support the assumption that the ritual use of palm wine actually preceded the introduction of rum and brandy into West Africa. This description of palm wine consumption as limited to the ritual domain and elite control re ects the consensus in alcohol studies. In this view, alcohol use in Africa has shifted from ‘integrated’ traditional drinking to become increasingly commoditised. According to Akyeampong and others, the move from the non-commercial exchange of alcohol in the past, to the present time of sale, was accompanied by increasing social dislocation.However, a number of transformations took place in African societies at the same time, and the process of commoditisation of alcohol was only one of many changes.
As these changes affected local and wider politics, religion, trade, labour, and the organisation of the economy, there are likely to have been multiple sources of social dislocation. Furthermore, Justin Willis has questioned whether such a straightforward transition from non-commercial traditional alcohol to commoditised alcohol ever really took place. He rather points to the situationality of commoditisation. He shows that this has allowed twentieth-century Maasai men to accept the sale of alcohol, while still asserting their authority over younger men and women through claiming privileged access to drink.
Thus rather than alcohol having been fully commoditised, it has become both a commodity and a ritual resource, and the boundary between the two aspects has remained continually contested. There are indications that situational commoditisation was equally a feature of African societies in the past. Palm wine was sold in Ghanaian markets around 1700, and Barbot observed that palm wine was brought to coastal markets for sale at the same time as fishermen arrived back. This indicates that palm wine at that time was not entirely captured by ritual use and the control of male elders.
The related matters of the uses of palm wine in traditional West African societies and processes of—partial—commoditisation of alcoholic drinks are relevant to our understanding of the rise of imported liquors. Did the introduction of imported liquors contribute to the commoditisation of alcohol, or were such imports rather de-commoditised in African societies? To what extent were palm wine and alcohol regarded as both belonging to the same category of ‘alcoholic drink’? And if the suggested link between palm wine and the power of elders is correct, how did this change with the advent of imported liquor?
Did access to rum or gin allow people to make the same claims to status? Also, what was it that de ned imported liquor as special? Was it the alcoholic content? Or was it the fact that it was imported, as Joseph Miller has suggested for Western Central Africa? Another question here is: when did imported liquors  rst reach African consumers? Discussions of historical shifts in alcohol use in Africa often equate ‘pre-colonial’ and ‘traditional’, but many societies had become accustomed to imported liquor long before the advent of colonial rule. The use of imported liquor was already widespread along the West African coast by the late seventeenth century. This included its use in African traditional religious practice and festivals. Around 1700, Barbot observed the practice of libation using brandy or rum, the function of which, he speculated, might have been to show respect to the dead. When he made enquiries into the meaning of this ritual, he found that ‘at present few or none understand why they do it; and only allege it is custom transmitted to them from their ancestors.’ Barbot also describes an alleged incident where he had to give brandy in compensation after desecrating a grigri:

"I remember a Black, from whose neck I pulled away a Grigri, or spell, made a hideous noise about it, telling me, that Gune had beaten him most unmercifully the next night; and that unless I would, in compassion, give him a bottle of brandy to treat Gune, and be reconciled to him, for having suffered me to take away his Grigri, he was con dent he should be infallibly kill’d by him".

Barbot explains that imported brandy was used for annual public celebrations and for festivities on the occasion of victory achieved in war, and that people at those occasions could become very drunk. Meanwhile, Barbot’s contemporary Van Nyendael reported a difference in alcohol consumption between the elite and the majority of the population in Benin: most people drank water and palm wine, while the wealthy preferred brandy whenever they could get hold of it. This observation, if correct, invites a further qualification of the connection between the power of male elders and the control of access to palm wine described earlier: perhaps around 1700 in Benin the status of palm wine had been degraded already as a consequence of the introduction of imported liquor, and brandy had taken its place as a signifier of social superiority? Barbot does not comment on the use of brandy in this way, but he, too, notes that the occasional use of palm wine was widespread, while the people did not use much European wine. Indeed, he describes Africans as considerably more moderate than the European traders and sailors, because not only did the latter spend most of their salaries on African prostitutes, they also habitually consumed so much alcohol that they ended up sleeping in the open air.26 African ‘fetish priests’, on the other hand, were ‘very serious people’ who led a prudent life and avoided alcohol.

Akan gold weight in the shape of a gin bottle. (Ghana) 

One century later, around 1800, a slightly different picture emerges from the writing of European observers such as J. A. de Marrée and Thomas Bowdich. They, like their predecessors, report widespread palm wine consumption. De Marrée is quite positive about palm wine and compares its taste to that of champagne, but he nevertheless informs that in those places where a particular type of palm wine was consumed, the men suffered from enormously swollen scrotums. Where Barbot had characterised Africans as essentially moderate drinkers, De Marrée suggests that coastal West Africans had an ‘insatiable desire for strong liquors’, and that they preferred imported liquor to locally produced alcohol.
Although this ‘insatiable desire’ is almost certainly an exaggeration, De Marrée offers numerous examples of the use of brandy or rum for public rituals, visits to shrines, and as part of local judicial procedures, that suggest that European liquors had become an important part of local African customs. He describes how, when an inhabitant of the area around Elmina was abused or insulted by someone, the victim would take one or two bottles of brandy to the elders, present the drink to them and explain his case. This would then lead to a public tribunal and, eventually, a fine for the insulter. De Marrée also specifies that those who visited a shrine—including ancestor shrines—brought with them a bottle of brandy, because ‘the Guinea gods do not drink water,’ and that the priests used brandy and rum for their prayers. By this time, coastal West African marriage customs included the transfer of brandy (in addition to tobacco, pipes and gold) from the groom to his in-laws.30 Public festivals involved the consumption of rum, as Bowdich witnessed during the 1817 odwira festival in Kumasi. He describes the ritual consumption of rum on the fourth day of the festival, when the Asante king ordered ‘a large quantity of rum to be poured into brass pans’ and the population—including slaves, women and children—were ‘drinking like hogs’. From these and other observations by European visitors it becomes clear that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries West Africans attached special significance to imported liquor. The ordinary social drinking of imported liquors was not often reported, and in those cases where this was mentioned, it was speci ed that this referred to a wealthy elite only. It was the ritual use of alcohol that caught the attention of observers, and most of these rituals involved the use of brandy or rum to connect with the ancestors and gods. This can be seen in the case bered in a familiar narrative known as the ‘Krobo myth’.
According to this tale, the Ghanaian Krobo and their neighbours had long been enemies. At some stage during the conflict, the Krobo had withdrawn onto Mount Krobo, which could be easily defended. They successfully resisted all enemy attacks on the mountain until their enemies made a deal with Dutch slave traders. The slave traders provided the enemies of the Krobo with bottles containing a mysterious and powerful drink, which was offered to the Krobo fighters as a gesture of reconciliation. Upon  nishing the bottles, the Krobo warriors fell in a drunken stupor. They woke up the next day on board of a slaving vessel sailing to the Americas. Later, when the remaining Krobo—the elderly, the women and the children—visited the site of the disaster, they found the bottles with a little liquor remaining in them. In recognition of the power of these bottles, and in order to avoid further disasters, they built a bottle shrine on Mount Krobo that still exists.41 The details of this story do not allow a literal interpretation. The bottles in the shrine and other bottles found on the mountain are Dutch (and probably also German) gin bottles that have been dated to the 1850s and later. During this period illegal slave traf cking was indeed ongoing in the area, but by then the Krobo were certainly no longer strangers to imported liquor. It is therefore likely that this story refers to an older, remembered connection between the slave trade and the spread of imported liquors. A similar event, dated 1856, is widely remembered among the Anlo Ewe of eastern Ghana. The details of the incident vary in different versions of the story, but the basic narrative is the same: a group of famous drummers were playing on the beach of Atorkor when a slave ship arrived. The slave traders offered the drummers barrels of liquor of libation, and in the use of alcohol when visiting shrines.
Liquor was also required for marriages and burials, events that impacted on the lineage and therefore had to be communicated to the ancestorsthrough alcohol. The ancestors might also be the reason why liquor had to be offered when applying to the elders to adjudicate. In such cases, according to elders I interviewed for this book, the liquor was needed so that the chiefs and elders could pour libation to tell the stool and the ancestors the outcome of the judicial case and how they had gone about resolving it.The odwira festival witnessed by Bowdich was also linked to the ancestors, as it was held to honour the dead Asante kings and to purify the nation. Thus imported liquor functioned as a medium through which the living could communicate with their gods and ancestors.
It is unclear what people used for these rituals before the arrival of rum and brandy. It would appear logical that this must have been one of the local alcoholic drinks, such at palm wine or pito. Indeed, Raymond Dumett has suggested that among the Akan, palm wine was used long before rum, while Chima Korieh argued the same for the Igbo. Ewe elders nowadays claim that before the coming of imported liquor they used liha, local ale made with maize, to pray to gods and ancestors.
However, Marion Kilson’s study of Ga libation indicated that libation is really about water, not alcohol, and that liquor, in the context of libation, is regarded as a powerful form of water. This would fit with the Ewe elders’ explanation that imported liquor had been introduced into ritual from the experience of the power of the drinks, caused by their alcoholic strength: they are the strongest, and therefore the most effective means of communication with the ancestors; they work fast. Also, the ancestors themselves had taken a liking to the drinks when they were first imported: ‘our grandparents tasted it to realise that it was pure and special, and they resorted to using it altogether. Other available evidence also suggests that imported liquor did not replace local alcoholic drinks. While early European travellers documented the consumption of palm wine, they did not mention its ritual use. Furthermore, the ritual use of imported liquor spread along the coast among a large number of different African communities, with otherwise differing rituals and worldviews. This suggests that the introduction and utilisation of rum and brandy in the ritual sphere may have represented an innovation related to the context in which this occurred: the trade in liquor commenced as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Akyeampong has noted that the well known economic connection between the liquor trade and the slave trade also acquired important socio-political and spiritual dimensions that resulted in the inclusion of imported drinks in African traditions.  The initial connection is remembered in a familiar narrative known as the ‘Krobo myth’.According to this tale, the Ghanaian Krobo and their neighbours had long been enemies. At some stage during the conflict, the Krobo had withdrawn onto Mount Krobo, which could be easily defended. They successfully resisted all enemy attacks on the mountain until their enemies made a deal with Dutch slave traders. The slave traders provided the enemies of the Krobo with bottles containing a mysterious and powerful drink, which was offered to the Krobo  ghters as a gesture of reconciliation. Upon finishing the bottles, the Krobo warriors fell in a drunken stupor. They woke up the next day on board of a slaving vessel sailing to the Americas. Later, when the remaining Krobo—the elderly, the women and the children—visited the site of the disaster, they found the bottles with a little liquor remaining in them. In recognition of the power of these bottles, and in order to avoid further disasters, they built a bottle shrine on Mount Krobo that still exists.The details of this story do not allow a literal interpretation. The bottles in the shrine and other bottles found on the mountain are Dutch (and probably also German) gin bottles that have been dated to the 1850s and later. During this period illegal slave trafficking was indeed ongoing in the area, but by then the Krobo were certainly no longer strangers to imported liquor. It is therefore likely that this story refers to an older, remembered connection between the slave trade and the spread of imported liquors. A similar event, dated 1856, is widely remembered among the Anlo Ewe of eastern Ghana. The details of the incident vary in different versions of the story, but the basic narrative is the same: a group of famous drummers were playing on the beach of Atorkor when a slave ship arrived. The slave traders offered the drummers barrels of liquor and invited them on board to play. The drummers got drunk, were taken away when the ship sailed, and eventually sold as slaves. This story again allocates a role to imported liquor, although the mention of barrels, and the identi cation of the ship as American, points towards rum, rather than gin. As in the Krobo story, although intoxication is thought to have allowed for capture, the situation is thought to be the result of local African rivalries; some versions of the story mention a dispute over a woman, while another version has it that the town of Atorkor was in debt to white traders and arranged to pay this debt by organising the kidnapping of the drummers.

Unlike the Krobo, who live in the interior, the Anlo live on the coast and their leaders had long been involved in the transatlantic slave trade when the incident occurred. Even though the remembered incident can be precisely dated, the significance of the story appears to be about a more fundamental transition in Anlo society from a middlemen role in trading people from the interior, towards the enslaving of people from their own community. Anne Bailey notes in her analysis of the story that one effect of the slave trade was to corrupt indigenous legal institutions, and that ‘the story thus appears to be the community’s way of grappling with their involvement in the trade. Partly as a consequence of the slave trade, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the reorganisation of West African economies and societies.Many historians have focused on the slave trading and slave raiding states that emerged in this period, assuming that these states emerged on the basis of older, existing kinship structures. However, Peter Ekeh has shown that these slaving states grew along with kinship systems, and that on the periphery of such states, unilineal kinship emerged as a social formation of the slave trade. Understanding kinship systems as a creation of the slave trade period makes sense, as both inside and outside the slave trading states, kinship could offer the individual protection against the dangers of the violence created by the slave trade, or, as Jean-Pierre Warnier has illustrated, could provide a means to regulate and disguise the sale into slavery of younger males.  This same transatlantic slave trade introduced distilled liquor, which was then used ritually to strengthen the new institutions of kinship. Thus within the kinship systems that had emerged to mediate the effects of the commoditisation of human beings, the ritual consumption of one particular commodity became crucial for defining belonging and power: imported liquor. This sounds paradoxical, yet follows the logic of Daniel Miller’s observation that kinship and consumption are each other’s context, as both operate as domains through which diverse projects of value are objectified.Thus, following the logic of the system, the African traders who sold slaves on the coast for European liquor distributed these same drinks to those within their own social groups to secure clients.
Akyeampong observed that in this way, the recipients were bound socially and spiritually to those who distributed the liquor, and that this constituted ‘a complex manipulation of the concept of wealth in people. Imported liquor became the central commodity in this, embodying at the same time the link between the living and the ancestors, and, among the living, either the belonging or not-belonging to the community, as well as wealth and power relations. These observations cannot be generalised for the whole of West Africa, as at the beginning of the nineteenth century, three zones of alcohol use can be discerned in the region: a coastal strip where imported rum and brandy had become an essential element of many rituals and transactions; a zone beyond that, about which we do not have much information apart from oral traditions, where palm wine—and to an extent pito—were drunk; and the area further inland where pito was used, and where the prevalence of Islam restrained the spread of strong liquor.  The alcohol imported at this time was predominantly brandy and rum, with much smaller quantities of liqueurs, wines, and gin.

The rum was imported in casks, and used mainly for public festivals, where a larger number of people would partake in the drink. Brandy was often mentioned as imported in bottles, and we  nd many examples of brandy being used for more personal rituals and transactions. Of course, one or two bottles of brandy were more easily affordable than a cask or a demijohn of rum, and it is quite possible that the different uses of rum and brandy stem from such pragmatic financial considerations. It was within this context that gin from Germany and the Netherlands gained in popularity so rapidly from the mid-nineteenth century.


By Dmitri van den Bersselaar in the book "The King of Drinks" Schnapps Gin from Modernity to Tradition- volume 18, African Social Studies Series, Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2007,excerpts p.35-48. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.