Fancy a beer?

Shake Shake Maize beer

 The above is a discarded carton of maize beer, the local traditional brew of many of the Bantu tribes of southern Africa, this one called Shake Shake and colloquially known as that throughout Zambia.You see hundreds of discarded cartons in the storm ditches and drains lining the roads of Lusaka and anywhere else that rubbish accumulates. It is the cheapest and most accessible alcoholic drink for the poor and is sold by children at the side of the road and in the most basic of drinking establishments alongside a choice of maize or cane spirits in little plastic bottles made to look like classier glass ones.They can't be bought from supermarkets. Both taste, to  my palette, vile. Imagine if you are 16 again and are sick onto your clothes through your hands as the room the party is in spins around about you. You then wake up on the kitchen floor in the morning with the stale alcohol vomit odour of the night before. This is what it's like and the nearest to how I can describe the smell of warm Shake Shake. It is not, in my opinion, the nectar, of the gods. It remind me of an image I retain of a starving lone desert wolf turning his nose up and scampering off unfulfilled after sniffing the carcass of a long time dead, dried and rotting camel in the Sahara desert Libya. An acquired taste would be another description. and acquired it certainly is by a huge number of people.

If you were to visit a bar with say 4 of your pals, you would each buy one of these one litre cartons at about thirty pence each. After the first one was finished by passing it around the group, the bottom of the carton would be torn off to create a little beaker. This would subsequently be filled and passed round then refilled until all four were finished. The act is social and people talk a lot and laugh whilst drinking it. They tell each other stories, catch up on news of family and friends and reorganise the national football side into a thousand different formations. Women are often frowned upon for drinking this in a social situation dominated by men. The drink varies from 3%-5% proof with the stronger not necessarily the dearest. It shares a  gooey consistency and opaque appearance with vomit. I bought my first carton from a shack near Kampala market and sat down in the shade to drink it with my friend, Ben, outside the railway station, leaning on the council offices wall. He shook it in preparation more than I have ever seen anybody shake a drink ever and like someone who had done it before, until I had to ask him how long he was going to keep shaking it for. He said for a little bit more. I gave the significant rest to a man stood unloading things off the back of an articulated lorry, my friend explaining how, being a muzungu (white person), I hadn't yet acquired the taste. He looked right pleased and sat down, smiling, with his feet dangling over the side, to have a break. I also tried  cane spirit, tempered with pineapple to make it bearable. It didn't and had the opposite effect to the one intended. It tasted like something pineapple flavoured that you shouldn't drink and smelt the same, reminding me of sticking model planes together with Airfix glue. Students and drink shake shake and play pool out of the sun under makeshift roofs all round the city. The shake shake bars have crates and benches in shaded shacks behind scraps of hanging curtains and a bloke in charge of the crates. You have to drink them quickly otherwise they start to leak and if you've got one in your rucksack, you have to find a spot to sit it quickly before your bag  fills up with sick.

I don't know that much about the drinking habits of Zambians but it seems that a lot of people have the drinking habit or abstain totally and in line with the religious principles dominant in the country, particularly in the compounds.My friend, Kelly, will discuss the dangers of alcohol abuse with the academy children and doesn't drink at all. To many, drinking comes from the devil. There is not really the culture of social drinking. Zambians tend to go home in the evening and stay there. They rarely go out to meet in bars or go dancing. Their is only one nightclub and i haven't been to it yet. Most people in the compounds cannot afford to drink and eat so they avoid it or drinking quite quickly causes problems. People are known in the village, by whether they drink or not. I have been doing some preliminary work in Lusaka, with the blessing of FASAwareUk, a UK charity promoting information regarding Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. Through this I have learnt that, as with many things in Zambia, problem drinking of alcohol is likely to be higher than is officially recognised. Pregnant women, especially in rural areas are encouraged to drink in order to give their babies lighter skin and the problem in urban areas is certainly underrepresented. As with Aids, a blind eye is possibly turned, by those counting. Not everybody gets counted and in a way nobody really knows how many there are to count, unless, of course, it involves some commodity for the tourist or western world to see, like mating pairs of Black Rhinos or elephants.

Annie's Bar

If you have more money you can opt for a 60p bottle of Castle or deliciously cold in the heat of the summer, Mosi. They're more like the lagers you get here and all over the world. There is a little bar, without a name I can remember,  halfway along the main road to the village, with a tele' showing football or speakers blaring African chart music out on the radio or the apparently globally loved Daft Punk and high tables made of crates of beers, covered with easy wipe clean canvas cloths advertising Castle lager and dodgy bar stools, the seat bits of which are broken and just balance there on the welded frames. I used to stop off at this bar to get out of the heat, nurse an ice cold beer after rolling it around on my forehead for a while and write things down in my notebook both to the amusement of the locals who don't really do either. I met a lot of people here and spoke to them. They spoke to me. I learnt a lot of Nyanja in here, talked a lot of football, took a lot of phone numbers, arranged meetings and misunderstood a lot of English. It was a good simple bar and I felt welcome there quickly and look forward to going back. I got to know the owner, a woman of about my own age. The bar was managed by one of her sons, a kind man with a friendly face; hard drinkers at work, locals, China, the opportunist hard drinking young barber from the barbers shop outside the door and his cool kid friends and those, like me I suppose, just passing through - the clientele. She lived on a farm further away from the city and I visited there one day and ate cooked salted belly pork made by her daughter in some sort of sauce. I have photographs of it somewhere and of her impala hunting trophies up there on the wall of her porch.