Post on 06-Mar-2019
Alcohol, poverty and the South African city
Introduction:
Alcohol is a complex barometer of the urban. This is because, in many ways, our dealings (both real
and imagined) with drink, drinkers and drinking places force us to ask normative questions of what
we think that the urban should be. However, these interactions also ask us to confront the reality of
what the urban both is, and purports to be. Alcohol shapes manifold experiences of the urban: it
guides our city imaginaries; carves out geographies of safety and danger; offers excitement and
cosmopolitanism; marks out aspirations; offers conviviality and support; generates hopelessness;
and indicates despair. This brief introduction to this Special Issue asks what alcohol might tell us
about the changing nature of the South African city, the broader challenges of addressing urban
poverty and the variegated social relationships to alcohol that are often invoked as a barometer of
both. And in so doing, it contends that alcohol reveals a great deal about the relational complexities
of urban poverty not just in South Africa, but beyond. The relationships between the city, poverty
and the materialities, processes and politics that compose the experiential nature of alcohol are
deeply entangled by their multi-directionality and multi-causality. However, in exploring these
entanglements, the paper also asserts that urban geography may help deepen critical analyses of
alcohol itself, which, as an object of study, has held limited traction in the Global South outside the
biomedical sciences and public health. This introduction therefore aims to trace out what these
contributions might be as a way of contextualising the papers presented as part of this Special Issue
and the research agenda from which they have emerged.
Before turning to the present, however, it is helpful to first remind ourselves that alcohol has long
been an integral part of the South African economy as well as its state apparatus (Mager 1999;
Mager 2004; Mager 2010). The consumption and retailing of liquor was also a source of great public
dis-ease at the same time as it functioned as a form of social, economic and political control long
before current debates over alcohol control surfaced. From the 1928 Liquor Act prohibiting the sale
of ‘European Liquor’ to Africans, to municipal beer halls of the Rand mining communities in the
1930s, the rise of illicit brewing by women in the 1940s and the concomitant rise in township
shebeens in the 1950s; the provision and consumption of liquor in South Africa has been bound into
multi-scalar processes of social and urban change, as well as the active management of social and
political anxieties. By 1962, prohibition had been lifted giving coloured South Africans the same
rights as whites, but restricting Africans to buying ‘European liquor’ only from municipal-run outlets
(Mager 2010). The 1962 Sorghum Beer Act also gave the national government the monopoly in
brewing, distributing and retailing, consequently compelling municipalities to build bars and bottle
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stores in the rapidly expanding townships where SAB Miller’s own “European” clear beer was also
sold. In theory, revenues from these enterprises were to be invested in township amenities and any
surplus transferred to the Department of Bantu Administration. However, as Mager (2010) notes,
not all South African cities invested heavily in municipal beer halls. The municipal administration in
Cape Town, in particular, was strongly opposed the sale of liquor in black areas of the city, but was
forced to lift restrictions in 1961 in the townships of Nyanga and Langa. Yet, ‘despite the lifting of
prohibition, black sociability continued to be constructed within the frame of illicit drinking’ ( Ibid, p.
27). It is this discursive and legislative frame that continues to dominate the ways in which alcohol
and the urban entwine in South Africa. Indeed, the licit/illicit binary guides the social and spatial
imaginaries that sanction the increasing calls for greater alcohol control policies.
This is important as, over the past decade, the simmering public and governmental anxieties over
alcohol have taken on a new tone in South Africa and, with it, a revived sense of urgency. At present,
the national government – led by Health Minister Aaron Matsoaledi - is debating raising the legal
drinking age to 21 and a possible full-scale ban on all alcohol advertising (The Economist 2012). The
maximum blood alcohol concentration for drivers has already been reduced from 0.08g to
0.05g/100ml (Fell and Voas 2006). Combined, these measures would give South Africa some of the
toughest global alcohol control policies. Such concern is driven by global survey data which indicates
that while alcohol consumption may be greatest in high-income countries, rates of alcohol-related
mortality and morbidity (and therefore the burden of disease), are now greatest in middle-income
countries (World Health Organisation 2010a; World Health Organisation 2010b; World Health
Organisation 2011b). In particular, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has identified that this
burden is greatest among men in Africa (World Health Organisation 2009, 9) and that for middle
income countries, alcohol is the single most significant risk factor for Disability Adjusted Life Years
(DALYs). Thus, conditions of poverty within contexts of widening social and economic inequalities
create dramatic vulnerabilities to the effects of risky drinking practices. In 2010, the WHO’s Global
Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol added further impetus to the latent call to prioritise
alcohol control measures in countries of the Global South, especially in relation to the growing
burden of non-communicable disease (NCD), accidents and injury (Parry 2000; Caetano and
Laranjeira 2005; Yach, Kellogg et al. 2005; Boutayeb 2006; Nugent 2008; Bakke and Endal 2010).
South Africa has heeded this global call and with it, finally engaged with the long campaign waged by
Charles Parry and colleagues at the Medical Research Council to take a more concerted stance on
alcohol control at a national, provincial and municipal scale (Parry, Bhana et al. 2002; Parry, Myers et
al. 2003; Parry, Plüddemann et al. 2004; Parry, Plüddemann et al. 2005; Parry 2005; Parry, Rehm et
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al. 2009). The National Liquor Act was amended in 2003 and, as a result, individual provinces were
mandated to update their own provincial legislation, with some municipalities developing their own
by-laws. This development has, unsurprisingly, not been free of controversy, contestation and
political largesse.
At root, the chief concern of and challenge to alcohol control policies in South Africa has been the
entrenched bifurcation (and co-existence) of the legitimate and illegitimate liquor trade, which has
persisted well beyond the end of apartheid, the active uptake of Black Economic Empowerment
(BEE) strategies within the alcohol industry and various experiments with legislation, regulation and
enforcement. This persistence can be read through a number of framings: as evidence of
entrepreneurial livelihood strategies; a sign of “problematic” cultural relationships to alcohol use
and abuse; apartheid legacies; the failure of the state to ensure citizens’ right to safe environments;
the limitations of police enforcement capacities and the criminal justice system; or as a supply-side
failure. These framings are overwhelmingly negative, with the exception of casting shebeens as
livelihood strategies and evidence of micro-enterprises in the “second” (or informal) economy
(Aliber, Kirsten et al. 2006; Skinner 2006; du Toit and Neves 2007), often (but not always) run by
women. In turn, these framings speak to a number of areas of urban geographical inquiry as well as
the study of poverty and its dynamics in urban environments, despite the fact that geographers have
been relatively slow to identify and explore these. Thus, while geographers in the Global North have
been actively contributing to the interdisciplinary Alcohol Studies literature (see Jayne, Valentine et
al. 2008a; Jayne, Valentine et al. 2008b; DeVerteuil and Wilton 2009; Jayne, Valentine et al. 2011;
Wilton and Moreno 2012 for helpful reviews), engagements in the South have been far more limited
despite presenting both a pressing need and great analytical opportunity. To explore these
contentions, the rest of the chapter will first consider the intersections of alcohol and the urban,
particularly within the Global South and, more specifically, the South African context. Second, it will
consider the intersections of the study of alcohol and poverty. This is not to suggest that alcohol is
only a problem of poverty, but rather that poverty has become a de facto explanation for many of
the problems associated with drink, drinkers and drinking places in the Global South. These
assumptions need further critical reflection for what they both tell us about urban poverty and what
they may divert our attention from. Third, and by way of conclusion, the paper considers important
future research agendas for geographers working on alcohol in cities of the Global South and
considers the ways in which the other papers in this Special Issue contribute to the initiation of such
a dialogue.
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i. Alcohol and urban studies
The burgeoning of research and writing about alcohol within geography has crossed paths with what
McFarlane (2008) has described as a ‘Southern turn’ in Urban Studies. However, these paths have
largely headed in different directions, despite the clear conceptual, empirical and practical
potentiality inherent in bridging the gap. Shortly after the end of apartheid, Parnell argued that
South African cities offer a ‘fascinating laboratory for the study of urban culture and form’ and yet,
given their schizophrenic first/third world characteristics, theorists needed to think carefully about
the ‘geographical origins of their explanatory concepts’ (1997, 891). South African urban researchers
have, however, been critiqued for a tendency to ‘remain isolated from theoretical work in the
various relevant disciplines and [have] failed to locate their work in the comparative literature on
cities elsewhere in the world’ (Seekings 2000, 833). This distancing echoes critiques elsewhere of the
need for urban theory from the South, for the South (Robinson 2006; Watson 2009; Parnell and
Robinson 2012), given the particularities of urbanisation processes in the South that logically cannot
be explained by reference to theories from the North. Thus, there has been a concerted movement
within urban geography and urban studies arguing that the theoretical traffic needs a change of
direction (if not purpose). Urban theory needs to come from the South to explore urbanity in the
South and, in the process, find alternatives to the default position of framing poorer cities through
the lens of developmentalism (Robinson 2002). This call for a ‘change of geographical axis’ along
which ‘theory and practice is developed’ (Parnell, Pieterse et al. 2009, 240) that might start to
challenge the ‘epistemological dualism’ (Pieterse 2010, 208) that characterises the study of the
urban has started to have a profound effect at the level of debate (if not necessarily action). One
thing now seems certain: South African urban studies are no longer ’parochial’, nor ensconced in a
‘theoretical ghetto’ (Ibid, p. 892), especially given the clear role played by many South African
scholars in driving this debate forward.
These arguments, however, leave us in a somewhat fiddly situation with regards to research on
alcohol in cities of the South. On the one hand, scholars have argued that cities of the South exhibit
particularities that cannot be understood in regard to Northern urban theory, however on the other,
it seems clear to us that the issues raised by alcohol exhibit more similarities than they do
differences with those in the North. This assertion is important, if only to add flesh to Mcfarlane’s
contention that ‘the categorisation of poorer cities through a lens of developmentalism has often
meant that they are discursively constructed as a “problem”’ (McFarlane 2008, 345). This is
empirically true of the study of alcohol as a “problem” in the South African urban context, as risky
drinking practices and their consequences are most often cast as evidence of the broad failing of
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development. In turn, this points to a more systemic issue of urban scholarship producing ‘a skewed
reality of the production of knowledge about African urbanism’ (Pieterse 2010, 206) in which
scholars have largely focussed their attention on policy-orientated research, to the detriment of
deepening understandings of the state of African cities. Given that this policy-driven research,
Pieterse suggests, exhibits a profound faith in the existence of ‘rational fixes’ to the litany of social,
economic and infrastructural ‘crises’ South African cities; it has ‘fixated broadly in the domain of
urban developmentalism’ (Ibid). As a consequence, research on alcohol – despite being untidily but
indelibly woven into the fabric of urban life – is almost always considered from the standpoint of
policy failure/ fix in cities of the South. Rarely does it start from the position of what alcohol tells us
about urbanity and, even more rarely does it transcend its “problem” frame to consider the
ramifications of its complex and situated ambiguities. Such ambiguities may be untidy, but we would
also like to suggest they offer a way to move alcohol from out of the ‘shadows’ of urban research in
cities of the South (Ferguson 2006; McFarlane 2008).
South Africa’s failure to fulfil many of its post-apartheid promises of redistribution have allowed vast
gulfs in infrastructural resources and capacities not just to persist but actually, in many cases, widen
across urban space (du Toit 2005; Seekings 2006; du Toit 2011). In turn, this means that poorer cities
in the South African context are not cast as a “problem” tout court, but rather those specific
neighbourhoods or suburbs that have remained particularly impervious or resistant to the logic of
developmentalism are repeatedly cast as problematic. In such places, ‘what are ostensibly ‘service
delivery’ protests over housing, water, sanitation and electricity and so forth are simultaneously
expressions of betrayal – intensified and sharpened by obscene and escalating material inequalities,
and the crisis of livelihood confronting many in South Africa today’ (Hart 2011, 87). The betrayal
spills over into the governance of liquor and its associated risk as South African cities have become
Janus-faced spaces of deviance and luxuriant consumption, with only the former discursively cast as
a “problem” despite the supply of alcohol most often sharing common political economic
provenances across city spaces. For such reasons, alcohol reveals the deeper schizophrenia of South
African cities and the rationales that undergird their governance. Here, governance strategies are
variegated along lines that rehearse the same ‘deeply engraved legacies of urban segregation and
fragmentation’ (Pieterse 2006, 285), with the number of licensed premises dwarfed by the number
of unlicensed “illegal” shebeens in townships and informal settlements (PGWC 2003). In some
provinces, an aggressive policy of shebeen closure has consequently been sanctioned by recourse to
the arguments of (1) illegality and (2) their despotic and dangerous nature, in particular as conduits
for unsafe sex, violence and HIV/AIDS transmission (Oxfam 2005; Morojele, Kachieng'a et al. 2006;
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Kalichman, Simbayi et al. 2008). While this has a legislative logic and a public health imperative, it
makes little ethical sense when the social history of alcohol provision, consumption and control in
South Africa is considered.
To understand and engage with these dynamics, we need more than an Urban Studies prepped from
the South. Instead, such complexities require the scholastic energies of ‘new synergies emerging
from interactions between the disciplines’ (Parnell, Pieterse et al. 2009, 236), where Urban Studies,
Geography, Sociology, History, and Anthropology need to think across the divide to Political Science,
Environmental Studies, Planning and Public Health in its study of alcohol. This is necessary if we are
to reposition the study of alcohol outside the Public Health dominion and, in the process, open up
the debate on drinking and its effects in the Global South in ways that help us better understand the
fundamental urban process and experiences that may lead people to drink as a rational response to
an often unpredictably, irrational environment. In this reading, attention may be displaced from the
irrational or uneducated consumer back onto an environment in which irrationality is a way of life, a
form of coping and a driver of vulnerability that produces the need for short-term fixes in place of
long-term strategic solutions at scales from the individual to the municipal (Wood 2003). Alcohol
therefore indicates both what is wrong and right in urban space, what works, what does not and
where the disjunctures between aspiration and reality gain traction on the ground. To start to
understand these dynamics requires moving beyond the assumption of alcohol as a “problem” or
even a “policy challenge” to reposition discussions in ways that do not always start from the
assumption of ‘crisis’. Here, we find great inspiration in Pieterse’s notion of crisis as ‘enabling’ (2006,
285), where “solutions” (if we believe these to be necessary or possible) require ‘insurgent shoots of
experimentation across the city’ (Ibid, 300). The question that must be explored from here, is where
across the city such experiments need to take place. To do so requires critically exploring the related
assumption in alcohol policy and practice in South Africa that the effects of liquor disproportionately
affect the poor. This is, no doubt, a legacy of apartheid discourses of the meaning of alcohol in
which ‘alcoholic dependence and alcohol abuse were tied to ideas about racial difference’ (Mager
2010, 79), in which there was a clear race-income gradient. Thus, race was understood as shorthand
for delineations of relative poverty. However, in more recent years, this organisational scaffold has
ceased to operate with the same logic, leaving associations of alcohol, race and poverty in a more
complex situation than apartheid rationales of control assumed. These will be explored in the next
section.
Alcohol and poverty
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In discussing alcohol in South Africa, the fact that you are also talking about race and poverty is
assumed. This seems commonsensical given that in the past decade, democratic governance has
done little to make people less poor, even if it has set to work in blurring urban racial segregation by
replacing it with new forms of class-based segregation (Seekings 2008). Almost all survey data
collected in the post-apartheid state’s fetish for statistical information points to the fact that the
poverty rate and absolute number of poor has risen (Seekings 2006; Özler 2007). At the same time,
inequality has deepened as the number of rich (especially among black Africans) has also climbed.
This inequality is borne out most viscerally in the ways that daily livelihood and infrastructural
struggles intersect with debates posited by urban scholars about creative cities and economies
(Booyens 2012), gentrification (Visser and Kotze 2008) and heritage preservation (Ferreira and Visser
2007; Pirie 2007). While these spheres may seem diametrically (if not perversely) opposed, they are
bound into the broader questions of how we might best theorise and address poverty in South
African cities. However, it is important to heed du Toit’s (2011, 128) assertion that poverty is ‘an
essentially contested concept characterised by a ‘protean diversity and breadth of meaning, [which]
imparts to it a certain inherent “messiness”’. In turn, this messiness is shape-shifting, such that
‘poverty’ can be invoked as an explanatory category, unsatisfactory outcome or evidence of political
or developmental success/failure. In this sense, poverty is a trope and tool that can be mobilised and
put to the service of a host of competing agendas. As such, ‘discussions about what poverty is and
what it is not play a key role in highlighting (or in hiding) all manner of contentious social problems,
and in legitimating (or delegitimating) various political and economic arrangements’ (Ibid, 129).
Alcohol is clearly one such ‘contentious problem’ and, when elided with poverty, in turn, serves to
legitimate (and delegitimate) not just a policy rationale, but also the political economic status quo.
It is true to say, as Seekings contends, that ‘there is no shortage of data on poverty and inequality in
post-apartheid South Africa’, but it is also the case that ‘statistics are deeply politicised’ (Seekings
2006, 32). We may know more than ever about the quantitative dimensions of poverty in South
Africa, but we know far less about its qualitative scope. This gap is important, especially in the study
of behavioural choices that can profoundly influence personal health and wellbeing. Du Toit argues
that the study of poverty has been depoliticised and technicised (thanks to the ubiquity of social
statistics), but in the process, this ‘vitiates the ability of participants in South African poverty debates
to engage effectively with the underlying causal processes and political dynamics that underpin
structural poverty and entrench inequality’ (2011, 128). This is, in part, because the statistics
themselves are often inconsistently collected through time (hindering longitudinal work), their
methodological foundations are shaky, they are not collected at sufficiently fine geographic scales
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and demographic detail is often restricted to apartheid racial classifications rather than more
representative class indicators (Seekings 2001; Seekings 2006). Even so, poverty discourses in South
Africa remain characterised by their lack of critical engagement with an ‘analysis of social relations of
power’ and, in even broader terms ‘the social’ itself (Ibid). Thus, du Toit argues, ‘the proper object
of study for those interested in chronic poverty, is not so much ‘the chronic poor’ but the chronicity
in poverty ...the real, social world in which people – individually and in groups – make their
decisions, enter into conflict, or make or break alliances’ (du Toit 2005, 23). This perspective is
essential for it highlights where social and economic agency may exist or may be lacking and,
therefore, where the poor may or may not find entry points into either the first (formal) or second
(informal) economies. In asking questions about the underlying causes of poverty beyond the
“ballpark” offered by statistics, we are also questioning the construction of vulnerability, coping and
meaning. This point is crucial to analyse the application of the two most prevalent tropes of poverty
in South African discourse - as morally charged or technically amenable (Ibid) – to narratives and
experiences of liquor. This will be further discussed below.
Poverty is most frequently presented either through a moral register or in developmentalist
language that suggests a technical ‘fix’ is possible and desirable. Alcohol straddles both these
domains. In the first case, a culture of excessive, hazardous drinking is not just immoral (for the
accidents, injuries and crimes it causes) but represents a particular immorality of the poor who
should (or so the moralising goes) be more concerned with addressing basic needs than buying
alcohol. This is a fear evidenced by the FAQ section of the ‘Basic Income Coalition’ website (a
campaign group arguing for a universal Basic Income Grant or BIG) which asks ‘how can you prevent
people from wasting the grant on alcohol’? (see Ferguson 2007; Ferguson 2011 for a critical
exploration of the BIG). The moral discourse now extends to current policy debates in Gauteng over
potentially banning alcohol sales to (poor) pregnant women (Laing 2012). Leaving aside the fact that
the South African Income and Expenditure Survey (Stats SA 2005) shows that expenditure on alcohol
(both as a percentage of household spending and in absolute terms) increases with income, there is
a residual assumption perpetuated by media accounts (and usually grounded in anecdotal evidence)
that when the poor drink, they do so in an uncontrolled, lawless and immoral manner. This is tied
into the idea of a ‘culture’ of drinking that has, notably, been used elsewhere as an explanatory
concept for what are perceived as fundamental differences in, for example, Southern European
“civilised” wine consumption and Northern European “binge” drinking of spirits and beer (Tierney
2006; Jayne, Valentine et al. 2008c). Discourses of morality also place the question of choice on
somewhat perilous ground. Are the poor irresponsible because they lack in choice? Or are they
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irresponsible because that is, ultimately, their choice? Here, accounts become hazier. If the poor do
choose to drink in an irresponsible way, are they ‘undeserving’ in a manner reminiscent of Victorian-
era narratives? Or are there fundamental, structural reasons which provoke these choices,
therefore, at a stroke, rendering the poor ‘deserving’? These are salient questions when we
consider du Toit’s assertion that ‘poverty is a concept that appears — on the face of it at least — to
be without politics: it is usually presented as a form of unnecessary human suffering all citizens
should be against. Though it carries a significant moral charge, the concept seems to be quite
amenable to use in apparently value-free, technical discussions that do not require participants to
subscribe to particular ideological and political positions’ (du Toit 2011, 127). Alcohol adds agency
and intent to the ‘unnecessary human suffering’ and, in the process, makes it virtually impossible to
argue for a technical fix for poverty in a way that shuns ideology or politics.
The question of what a technical fix might look like has, however, proved elusive to those involved in
developing alcohol control policy. This is not least because restricting alcohol tends to be politically
contentious, economically dubious and publically objectionable. ‘Evidence of best practice’ is further
limited in its scale and geographic scope. This is compounded by a lack of research in countries of
the South evaluating the impact of (albeit limited) alcohol control policies. Thus the ‘evidence’ that
governments still crave tends to come overwhelmingly from Europe, North America and Australia
(World Health Organisation 2011a). As geographers, the gaps in cognition that such disembedded
processes of knowledge transfer might produce are all too clear. However, given the dominance of
the alcohol control field by public health, the recursive relationships between place and behaviour
have courted disappointingly little conceptual attention outside of geographical interventions.
Instead, the moral and technical fix approaches to poverty have been conjoined in a policy language
that views formalisation as the solution. This reveals the ongoing belief in development discussions
in the essential dualism of the first and second economies in South Africa, in which the former is
formal, developed, modern, and (largely) functional and the latter is informal, insecure, undeveloped
and marginal (Desai and Maharaj 2011). What is interesting about alcohol within the urban context
is the extent to which it empirically demonstrates the synergies between the first and second
economies. Shebeens, for example, theoretically inhabit the domain of the second economy by
virtue of being unlicensed, but their owners may buy liquor quite legitimately from wholesalers or
bottle shops in the first economy, and thus contribute to tax revenues through VAT and duty. They
may have amenities such as juke boxes and pool tables, branded furniture from liquor companies
and serve blue collar workers. The twain, hence, often meets in the shebeen. Their owners may also,
despite being in the second economy, earn respectable amounts of money, that meets and often
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exceeds earnings in the first economy (Collins and Morduch 2007; Mooki 2012). Such figures should
be treated with caution due to their largely anecdotal nature and a lack of systematic data collection
(a gap ironically perpetuated by shebeens’ illegality), however incomes will far exceed those
subsisting on government grant money. Shebeens in the Western Cape, for example, are now unable
to apply for a license if they are located in a residential area (which most are) and this legislation has
provided authorities with increased leverage to raid and close shebeens. We do wonder whether if
shebeeners sold a product other than alcohol, they would be hailed as entrepreneurial role models,
praised for employing local people and providing a community amenity, rather than being cast as
immoral and undeserving. While popular and media discourses on shebeens in South Africa tend to
differentiate between “bad” and “good” shebeeners, policy remain a blunt instrument in which all
shebeens in residential areas are de facto bad and are denied any mechanism by which to attain
formality and legitimation.
But here we must pause, and consider the idea that alcohol and poverty are often seen as symbiotic.
This may stem from narratives castigating the character of the poor, casting them as irresponsible
and thus uniquely susceptible to the attractions of liquor. It may also be a consequence of South
Africa’s urban form, in which previously white areas of the city of Cape Town held the majority of
liquor licenses. This legacy continues as only 11% of licenses issued in the Western Cape have gone
to Black or Coloured applicants (Charman and Pieterson 2010). Formal entry to the liquor industry
has long been denied the poor, despite BEE initiatives and the rewriting of the National Liquor Act,
leaving shebeening as a logical (if not legitimate) way of making a living in a context devoid of
substantial opportunity. However, the study of alcohol in South Africa, including some notable
anthropological accounts in which alcohol and its effects remains an implicit (if not ever rendered
explicit) theme, suggests that the daily, lived experiences of drink, drinkers and drinking in poor
parts of the city can be uniquely dangerous (Bank 2011; Harber 2011). The papers that follow
explore the micro-scale dynamics of some of these risks and experiences, but here we wish to briefly
hazard caution in ascribing all risky drinking practices to either the poor or poor parts of the city.
South African cities may remain deeply segregated, but aspiration and changing class compositions
provoke mobility in the consumption of alcohol. Many people’s lives are anchored to space by
poverty, but many others are not. People that have accumulated wealth and moved out of poorer
neighbourhoods may still return to the shebeen to drink. Thus we need to challenge the impasse in
the study of poverty that has allowed us to ‘talk about ‘the poor’ without discussing the wealthy’
(du Toit 2011, 134). To discuss one without reference to the other, as if they inhabit entirely
separate lifeworlds, is a fallacy. It also leads us to spurious “solutions” to dealing with poverty. The
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unassailable reality is that many South Africans drink too much, and the wealthy buy the most
alcohol. The poor, however, bear a disproportionate burden of mortality and morbidity from alcohol.
The question should therefore be “what processes generate this vulnerability”? It is not “how might
we restrict the poor from accessing alcohol” (which is at the heart of current policy thought in the
Western Cape). In the papers that follow, the contentions that we have raised in these introductory
paragraphs are taken up in various ways, through various means and to different ends. By way of a
conclusion, we will summarise the collective contribution that these papers seek to make, both to
the study of alcohol within geography, but also debates over South African urbanism more broadly.
Conclusion
The papers in this collection broadly fall into two thematics. The first is concerned with the
entanglements of alcohol with situated, lived experiences and the kind of methodologies that are
most able to examine these. The second concerns the realm of policy regulation and urban
governance strategies. In geographical terms, all papers are situated in the Western Cape and, more
specifically, the city of Cape Town. They therefore contribute a significant body of empirical research
to the debates on both the South African city and urban poverty discussed in this introduction. With
the exception of Charman et al, the papers arose from the coordinated work-packages of one
research project exploring the intersections of poverty, alcohol governance and development across
a number of case study sites in the city. This research is more fully elucidated in the paper by
Lawhon et al in their discussion of the substantial methodological and ethical challenges inherent in
conducting research on alcohol – as both a socially taboo and normalised practice and product - in
African cities. These challenges are important to note as they reveal much about the cultural
relationships to alcohol that define the lived experiences of drinking and its effects. These
relationships are far from simple, logical or predictable. They are also exceptionally hard to
understand as researcher-outsiders, even where such researchers may come from the same
communities or background. The paper asks how it is possible to interrogate the concept of ‘lived
experience’ of drink, drinking and drinkers in poor parts of Cape Town and dwells on the ethical
dilemmas raised by qualitative research on alcohol in general and in African cities in particular.
The four remaining papers on lived experience are each concerned with a very different part of Cape
Town and the issues raised by each. Brown-Luthango explores the recently upgraded site of
Freedom Park, in the Tafelsig area of the Cape Flats. Here she asks how violence intersects with the
built environment and how, over the course of upgrading the housing and infrastructure stock,
alcohol-related violence has changed in its locale and nature. She argues that violence has shifted
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from being largely gang-related, to being sheltered by (newly improved and expanded) domestic
spaces. The research shows a sensitivity not just to the lived experience of alcohol-related domestic
abuse, but also the importance of anticipating the unanticipated consequences of policy
interventions along one sphere of urban life. Blake’s paper departs from a very different part of the
city: Salt River adjacent to the CBD. Long a home to light industry, with a largely working-class
population; it has recently been subject to processes of gentrification and social change. However,
pioneer gentrifiers and the urban poor still reside cheek by jowl and the neighbourhood’s drinking
spaces have become microcosms of conflict and contestation, where meanings of place are invoked
and (re)created. Blake’s work draws on ethnographic methods to explore these processes of
meaning-making and, in so doing, helps deepen our engagements with the processes that
characterise drinking spaces and practices. Finally, Charman et al draw on research undertaken by
the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation in the informal settlement of Sweet Home Farm on the role
played by shebeens in the context of informality. Sweet Home Farm’s estimated 17,000 residents
have occupied a legal limbo where essential infrastructure and facilities have been denied because
of the settlement’s continuing informal status. In such circumstances, shebeens offer one of the very
few “public” spaces where people can escape their crowded and insufficient shacks to socialise. This
provides a very different reading of the shebeen to that found in and legitimating policy discourse.
Here, the shebeen is a positive space, an amenity that provides something approaching a civic
function in a situation where civility is being formally denied by the municipality. Such counter-
narratives are essential in order to challenge the dominant ways in which alcohol has come to
characterise and demonise the poor urban spaces in the South African context.
The three remaining papers both adopt critical approaches to current policy debates in the Western
Cape, both directly and, in the case of Pirie, indirectly. Smit’s paper examines the regulation and
attempted governance of shebeens in the Western Cape Liquor Act and the City of Cape Town’s
municipal by-laws. In it he examines why the impact of such interventions has been and is likely to
continue to be limited. Herrick’s paper critically examines the perspective of policy stakeholders
involved in this process. Her paper compares and contrasts what is being done about alcohol in
policy in the Western Cape and what is said by policymakers about alcohol. In so doing, she argues
that the ways in which alcohol is discursively presented by stakeholder’s echoes Mariana Valverde’s
conceptualisation of ‘nuisance’ as both a contextual entity and a class project. Drawing on data from
semi-structured interviews, she argues that stakeholders often rehearse and repeat strikingly similar
narratives about alcohol as a “problem” due to the geographical and social distances between
themselves and their objects or targets of policy. However, any attempt at creative engagement is
12
thwarted by the quest for ‘evidence based policy’ (see Marmot 2004 for an interesting critique of
this) that takes as its talisman advice from the World Health Organisation concerning ‘what works’ in
general terms (World Health Organisation 2011a). The result has been a complete lack of investment
in and engagement with the need for education, despite the clear benefits that such tools of
empowerment would provide far beyond regulating shebeens. Pirie’s paper, by contrast, offers a
more philosophical approach to the sites and spaces that alcohol renders important and legible.
Drawing on ethnographic research on Cape Town’s public transport modes and nodes, he questions
where alcohol gets emplaced within these and, in which contexts it becomes visible and visible.
These questions provide an important adjunct to alcohol policy discourse that has tended to locate
its object of concern solely in shebeens and residential areas while under-theorising the importance
of flows, mobility and circulations in alcohol consumption and purchasing.
Together these papers provide an empirically rich, conceptually informed, interdisciplinary
compendium that has much to add to the very nascent field of geographic studies of alcohol in the
Global South. They raise (and answer) questions posed in this introduction and pave the way for
future research agendas on the contemporary landscapes of risk and vulnerability in the South
African city. More than this though, they should force us to reframe and decentre the debate around
alcohol. Yes, alcohol is deeply problematic, a governance challenge, a drain on state resources and a
source of misery and suffering for many. But, it is also a source of income, livelihoods, friendship,
sociability, informal and formal connections and escape for others. How it might be possible to
mitigate suffering, while enabling socialising, is a deeply nuanced concern that policy makers in
countries across the global North and South have struggled with. Here, more conceptual and
empirical exploration is needed and especially that which challenges dominant tropes that
characterise the poor as feckless drinkers frequenting ‘dens of iniquity’ that, by their very nature,
breed danger and vice. Such discourses do little to facilitate the integration of city spaces and its
citizens. They also do little to encourage self-reflection among the non-poor as to the riskiness and
consequences of their own drinking practices and habits. Ultimately drinking affects almost all South
Africans, whether at a distance or in close proximity, now or in the future. The conceptual and
pragmatic challenge may thus be to re-steer narratives of alcohol down a course in which all such
urban futures are entwined.
13
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