Drugs in Africa

Histories and Ethnographies of Use, Trade, and Control

G. Klantschnig, N. Carrier, C. Ambler, G. Klantschnig, N. Carrier, C. Ambler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137321909, 9781137321893
• eBook ISBN: 9781137321916
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

This cutting-edge volume is the first to address the burgeoning interest in drugs and Africa among scholars, policymakers, and the general public. It brings together an interdisciplinary group of leading academics and practitioners to explore the use, trade, production, and control of mind-altering substances on the continent

1

The Drug Empire: Control of Drugs in Africa, a Global Perspective

Charles Ambler

In May 1995 political and corporate leaders, including President Nelson Mandela, gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa, to mark the centenary of the South African Breweries (SAB) and inaugurate a permanent exhibition on the history of alcohol production and consumption in southern Africa.¹ In his brief comments, Mandela reminded his audience that the SAB had emerged in conjunction with the development of the mining industry in the early part of the twentieth century and that the “early history of liquor . . . was bound up with the fearful exploitation of the country’s mineworkers.” He noted as well the history of discriminatory legislation that until the 1960s prevented black South Africans from “acquiring certain types of liquor,” and then he quickly moved on to celebrate the vibrant counterculture of South Africa’s illicit drinking establishments, or shebeens, and their role as centers for black expression in the 1940s and 1950s. Given the occasion, the president emphasized the role of the SAB as “amongst those leaders of business who embraced the future, even when it was less fashionable to do so”—referring to the corporation’s relatively early promotion of political change.² Unmentioned was the critical importance of alcohol production and sales in financing the structure of apartheid. Also ignored was the involvement of alcohol in many of South Africa’s most serious social and public health problems.³ In fact, while noting that he was himself a nondrinker, Mandela called alcohol an “innocent pleasure . . . if used in moderation and by free choice.”⁴ Such a perspective was a far cry from the alarmist claims of the dangers of African consumption of alcohol that were commonplace at the time when the SAB was founded—or of the dire predictions of the dangers of the rising consumption of illegal drugs at the time President Mandela made his remarks.

With his comments, Mandela effectively consigned to history both the deep relationship between alcohol control and the oppression of the black majority and the dangerous effects of alcohol abuse. His remarks, like the SAB exhibit itself, erased from memory the global history of the struggle to control alcohol production and distribution, particularly in Africa, and drew a sharp distinction between alcohol and “other drugs.” There was certainly no chance that the president would suggest comparisons between the powerful alcohol industry and the illicit commercial organizations involved in the distribution of illegal drugs, or that he would extend his romanticized vision of shebeen culture to the emerging and often vibrant drug subcultures in South African cities at the time. There appeared to be no contradiction between Mandela’s embrace of the SAB and his simultaneous efforts to join forces with the United States to combat drug trafficking.⁵ Yet the founding of the SAB in the 1890s, and the subsequent introduction of repressive alcohol legislation in South Africa and across the continent, coincided with the emergence of the first international effort to combat a dangerous drug—the campaign against the “liquor traffic.” This essay begins with that campaign and traces the broad history of efforts to regulate and restrict the production and trade in drugs in Africa, south of the Sahara. The focus is on alcohol control, which has been the dominant regulatory impulse, but I place alcohol regulation within the larger global framework of drug regulation. The title, “the drug empire,” evokes both the intimate linkage between drug regulation and European imperial expansion (and the subsequent development of external regulatory bodies) and the globally expansive power of the drug economy—both legal and illegal.

The international campaign against the liquor traffic has received little attention from scholars and has been almost entirely ignored in the scholarship on drugs, or has been depicted as an element of the international temperance movement.⁶ In the late nineteenth century, however, when the international efforts to restrict alcohol in Africa began, these efforts were very much seen by those involved as part of an antidrug campaign. The sharp distinction between the history of alcohol control and the control of “other drugs” is thus unfortunate, because the development and imposition of international controls on alcohol in Africa during the period from the 1890s to the 1920s represent a rich resource for understanding global drug regulation, and particularly the way such regulation has over time categorized psychoactive substances and formulated explanations of the dangers that such substances represent for human populations. In fact, the organizers of both the 1909 Shanghai Opium Commission and especially the subsequent 1912 Hague International Opium Convention—(agreements that are generally seen as the beginning point of international drug regulation)—modeled their efforts in part on the 1890 Brussels Convention that imposed international regulation on the liquor traffic to Africa.⁷

Linking the regulation of alcohol and other drugs also illuminates the important ways that global racial discourse continued to define the ideological premises of international drug control.⁸ Central to those debates have been evolving and sometimes contradictory ideas about the attraction of such substances and their impact on those who use them. What are the motivations that “drive people to drink” or to consume various other drugs; and more important in this case, how are those motivations perceived by those who are most influential in the design and application of regulation? How do regulatory regimes reflect perceptions of the nature of intoxication and addiction? Finally, as David Courtwright has reminded us in his influential synthesis of global drug history, liquor traffic and drug traffic are first of all global business enterprises and drugs are commodities. Thus, profit and revenue and the tension between imported goods and domestic have been fundamental in shaping control regimes.⁹ The ease with which Mandela dismissed the bitter heritage of alcohol regulation in South Africa obscures a complicated history in which the sharply drawn distinction between alcohol and “illicit” drugs fades. Moreover, just as the tendency today to lump all illegal drugs or “narcotics” together obscures distinctive histories for particular drugs, so too does the term “alcohol”—being a relatively recent invention in the sense that it is currently used. Whereas today “alcohol” is conceived in chemical terms, regardless of the particular drink, a century ago very sharp lines were generally drawn between natural lower alcohol content fermented drinks and manufactured distilled drinks.

The Rise of the Anti-Liquor Traffic Movement

The international campaign to protect “native peoples” from the deleterious effects of the consumption of distilled spirits emerged amid an international temperance movement and in specific response to the development of the industrial production of inexpensive gin in Germany and Holland.¹⁰ In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a loose alliance of temperance, humanitarian, commercial, and missionary interests in West Africa, Britain, the United States, and to a lesser extent Europe took shape that managed to build strong support for the argument that “aboriginal” peoples or “native races” should be protected from the dangers of liquor—made much more ominous by the growing availability of inexpensive industrially produced gin. At a time when cheap distilled liquor was often demonized as a distinctly dangerous and addictive substance, the anti-liquor-traffic forces systematically represented German and Dutch gins (and also cheap American rum) as “poisons” that not only had frightening psychoactive properties, but contained dangerous impurities.¹¹

Building the case for abolition of trade in these “drugs,” the anti-liquor advocates painted an ominous picture of the future, arguing that native populations in Africa and the Pacific and elsewhere would suffer the same supposed fate as aboriginal peoples in North America, South Africa, and Australia, who, it was argued, had been effectively destroyed by liquor. Working against the backdrop of rapid imperial expansion, the anti-liquor movement made the prohibition of the spirits trade and spirits production an element of colonial obligation. By the late 1870s the British government and major commercial interests paid at least lip service to the cause; and in the early 1880s the British negotiated the first anti-liquor traffic treaty, an agreement with Thailand that was aimed at excluding dangerous, cheap imported alcohol from that market.¹² The focus of the movement, however, very rapidly moved to Afri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   The Drug Empire: Control of Drugs in Africa, a Global Perspective
• 2   The Rise of Branded Alcoholic Drinks in West Africa
• 3   Histories of Cannabis Use and Control in Nigeria, 1927–1967
• 4   Alcohol Licensing Hours: Time and Temperance in Kenya
• 5   A Respectable Chew?: Highs and Lows in the History of Kenyan Khat
• 6   The Illegal Trade in Pharmaceuticals: Historical Cases from West Africa
• 7   Tanzanian Heroin Users and the Realities of Addiction
• 8   Out of the Shadows: Negotiations and Networks in the Cannabis Trade in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
• Bibliography
• Index