Drink for All

On the theory that hard liquor would only bring out the savage in the black man, South Africa's white bosses for years have sternly forbidden intoxicants to the Africans. All the natives are allowed is thick, weak "kaffir beer" sold for seven cents per pint at government beer halls.

But law or no law, the Africans seem to get all the liquor they want. The more opulent buy cheap South African brandy for $3 to $4 a bottle from white bootleggers who pick it up at $1.68 in the whites-only stores. The rest drink their troubles away at the illicit drinking parlors of "shebeen queens." wealthy black matrons who serve a throat-scalding, home-distilled brew made by boiling together potato peelings, berries and sometimes a dash of methylated spirits.

Since such skull-popping potions are occasionally fatal and almost always produce violence, the harried police spend much time raiding the stills, breaking up gang battles and arresting drunks. Some 25% of all arrests and prosecutions in South Africa are for liquor offenses; last year 312,520 liquor cases went to court, including 1,602 arrests of Africans for possessing yeast without a permit.

Out of the blue, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's government introduced a bill in parliament to open liquor stores to all natives over 18, and authorizing the establishment of cocktail bars in African locations. The police have long been urging the government to modify the antidrinking laws, arguing that a native allowed to imbibe openly might imbibe more moderately. But some observers concluded that Verwoerd was at last feeling the heavy pressure of African resentment at his harsh apartheid rules, and was trying a minor concession.

Grape farmers and distillers were delighted at the prospect of a vast new market, but most whites were shocked.

THE NATION GASPS AT WIDE CONCESSIONS, headlined the Rand Daily Mail, and the head of the temperance movement cried, "I can see only evil arising from this measure . . . Africans don't drink to enjoy it . . . they drink to get drunk." Angriest of all were the shebeen queens, whose brimming vats of fermenting rotgut would become unsalable when their thirsty black customers finally could walk around the corner and buy the real stuff.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.