KAMPALA, Uganda — The club was exclusive and issued a list of edicts — 10 commandments, if you will, pinned to the wall as a sober reminder of the values the club stood for. A visitor couldn’t belittle another, for one. Fighting would not be tolerated between members was another. Issues concerning the club were to stay within its walls.
The club’s sole object? To drink.
On a Sunday morning this past spring at a shack in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, where the club is housed, members were passionately pursuing that goal with a head start.
Ten drinkers relaxed on benches around an earthen pot, stewing with a clouded brown broth of fermented millet , placed squarely at the center of the shack’s mud floor. Members sucked the mixture through straws — spindly hollow reeds — that reached out from the vessel like giant bicycle spokes.
“We come here to meet other people and exchange ideas,” says Frederick Ivan Mugaya, 28, a tax consultant, who started the club to create a drinking hangout for friends to gather at. The shack, made of eucalyptus trunks and papyrus sticks, offers a cozy secluded spot occasionally visited by a clucking hen or chick.
The group, called the United Club Kasangati, charges a subscription fee of 10,000 Ugandan shillings ($3) after which men pay 3,000 shillings (90 cents) for a drinking session. Women pay 1,000 fewer to achieve “gender balance,” as one tippler explained. So far, the club, which kicked off as a modest three-member group in 2014, has grown to 15.
And with good reason. A day’s unrestrained drinking is cheaper than most bottled beers. And no topic is taboo in this group: politics, policy, personal problems — it’s all slowly digested with the brew in their midst.
Illegal drinking clubs have sprouted up across Uganda and they’re stoked by equally illegal homemade alcohol, ubiquitous in this East African nation known for its hard drinking. These unlicensed shacks, often tucked into decrepit corners of the country, go by different names: “kafundas,” joints, or, simply, meeting places.
Depending on the amount of drinking in these clubs, the brew can be less social glue and more fuel for fights. And as the moonshine is unregulated, it can have dangerous levels of alcohol or, worse, be contaminated with chemicals.
Despite the potential harm, partaking in these groups has become a communal ritual and a vital facet of social life in Uganda. Patrons cut across class and status, and the clubs are such a fixture in both the rural and urban landscape that last December President Yoweri Museveni promised 2 million Ugandan shillings – about $590 – for the groups in each village during his election campaign. The move was testament to the growing political and economic clout of these illicit clubs, and a signal that they’re here to stay.
“They are illegal. But they are socially acceptable,” said David Basangwa, a senior government specialist on alcohol and drugs.
Indeed, it’s not unusual to find a government official or police officer quietly sipping the illicit alcohol that fuels these clubs.
Alcohol is abundant in Uganda thanks in part to the lush fertility of its soil. From sorghum and pineapple to maize and banana, each region has its own local brew depending on the grain or fruit it grows, and it goes by several names.
A millet based fermented beverage is called “malwa” or “marua” and it’s close to the beer family. Brews can be distilled to make a more concentrated spirit called “waragi,” a kind of gin popular throughout Uganda. In sugarcane belts, waragi is drawn from molasses.
While spirits are supposed to be sent to factories for purification, few in practice do.
Homemade brews and spirits are part of Uganda’s sprawling informal sector that account for about 60 percent of the alcohol produced, analysts say, which tap into a vast market in this nation. The annual per capita consumption of pure alcohol among Ugandans 15 years and older was 9.8 liters from 2008 to 2010, according to the latest figures available. Compare that to the average of 47 African countries monitored by the World Health Organization, which stands at 6 liters for the same period.
Boozing as banking?
At a shack in Jinja, the Ugandan city home to the historic source of the River Nile, the club’s 45-year-old chairman, Paul Nswanobe, carefully collects cash and keeps count: A non-member who slips in pays 3,000 Ugandan shillings. Members contribute a 30,000-shilling annual membership fee that offers them a discounted rate of 2,500 a day, with weekends and public holidays free of charge.
Whatever money is left after paying the overhead costs goes back to the group for whatever it needs. For many clubs, that means a splashy party at the end of the year.
The club, which attracts 24 to 30 people every day, also acts as a savings unit in a country where access to banks, particularly in rural areas, is limited. Each member chips in 10,000 shillings to the communal pot every week and, on Sundays, the total pot is given to one member by turn to use as they see fit. Members say the measure has helped them pay school fees and start businesses.
On an afternoon earlier this year, a soccer game blasted on the radio as 10 drinkers sipped the potted brew, which was filtered by a metallic sieve. One read a book while leisurely sucking his straw. Others played cards and chatted. Their postures were not unlike people smoking a communal hookah.
Festo Chelimo, 73, an amiable wheat and barley farmer, said he loves the local millet brew and usually eats hearty helpings of chicken curry after a drinking session. Chelimo, who has been drinking for 50 years, knows a thing or two.
“The class taking marua (the fermented beverage) has changed. Even elites are taking it now. Government officials, military persons, we meet together, we discuss,” he said, describing a jovial atmosphere where drinkers read newspapers and discuss world events. “We don’t fight. There are laws in the group. We have a chairman. We have controls.”
In these drinking clubs, members must abide by guidelines codified in the group’s “constitution.” But not all clubs are alike. And, members say, not all merit the same respect.
“In our group, we decide we’re going to start drinking at 5:30 p.m. There are other groups that start earlier,” says Nswanobe.
Ruth Nampeer, 27, who sells second-hand clothes at a market, is a regular at Nswanobe’s club. She says she likes the club’s brew and the roasted pork sold by the shack. She’s not a member yet but plans to join, preferring it to the other clubs in the dwelling.
“The people here who drink, they are responsible unlike other groups where they entertain anyone,” she says quietly. “They don’t behave well. They quarrel all the time.”
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As the afternoon wore on, many drinkers slipped into a dazed stupor, their eyes glazed and bloodshot. Babies and infants were held or crawled about as their mothers drank. Chelimo wryly noted that by the end of the evening, the drunks would need to be carried out.
Shrunken brains
In earlier decades, alcohol was distilled in factories. But during the murderous reign of Idi Amin in the 1970s, Uganda was slapped with sanctions. The country couldn’t import commodities, resulting in severe shortages. Factories broke down and drinkers switched to local brews, says Sheila Ndyanabangi, the principal medical officer of mental health and control of substance abuse at the health ministry.
Basangwa describes a Prohibition-like era with people drinking under cover and in their bedrooms during that period. “But now people are free to do what they want, alcohol is made more available,” he says.
That availability came with consequences.
“Waragi,” for instance, can have up to 80 percent alcohol that results in burns.
“They get terrible symptoms,” Ndyanabangi says, at her office in the health ministry. Above her desk, a poster on the wall displays some of its effects from swollen feet and impotence to shrunken brains and jaundiced eyes.
Health workers and analysts note that excessive drinking is linked to more absenteeism from work, domestic violence, increased risk for other diseases and chronic poverty. Bootlegged liquor in Uganda is also often cut with chemicals to make it more potent. Adding methanol — an industrial chemical used in fuel and antifreeze — destroys the optic nerve and damages the brain, resulting in blindness and, in some cases, death.
In perhaps the most notorious instance in Uganda, at least 80 people died as a result of methanol poisoning in 2010 from a spirit made from bananas.
Despite the failings of these drinking clubs, closing them would be a mistake, Ndyanabangi says, noting that such a move would force the groups underground and make it harder for the government to track them. Instead, she believes that the prevalence of these clubs and the social cohesion of members make them a good target for health programs.
So far, the policies related to the distribution and consumption of alcohol is outdated, riddled with gaps, or, in most cases, non-existent. WHO’s 2014 global health status report noted that Uganda lacked a national policy or plan and added that there weren’t any restrictions on the day or place alcohol is sold. The report stated that Uganda has no legally binding regulation on alcohol advertising or sponsorship, product placement, sales promotion or health warning labels on containers.
For the regulation that exists, Ndyanabangi acknowledges that enforcement has been weak and the penalties paltry for infractions. Even though distilling alcohol at home without a license is illegal, the law has rarely been applied. She says the health ministry is now drafting new policy. Measures include shortening drinking hours, restricting sale to minors and monitoring the alcohol content of beverages.
The economic role of these clubs also makes officials hesitant to shutter them.
A 2006 National Household survey of 738 homes not involved in agriculture in rural Uganda revealed that brewing “was the most important” enterprise as 29 percent of families were dependent on it. To compare, the next biggest business was owning a retail shop, but, at 14 percent, it accounted for less than half the share of houses brewing alcohol.
The Jinja shack, like most shacks, has a female brewer, one of the few avenues for work for Ugandan women outside of agriculture. Like most brewers hoping to earn a livelihood, Grace Tino, 45, doesn’t drink.
Tino learned the craft from her mother who spent decades brewing for all in her village. “When I grew up, I also wanted to do it. I want to get money to pay bills. It’s a good business,” she says. Through her earnings, she’s been able to put her four children — two boys and two girls — through school.
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Last time Tino got the club’s savings pot, she pumped the money into her business to boost her output of moonshine. She said she likes the clubs better than selling pouches of bootlegged liquor to individuals because it allows for such endeavors.
“When people drink a lot, I get happy. When they don’t drink, it means there’s not much money to go around,” she says.
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Spirits Are On the Rise in Uganda originally appeared on usnews.com
