OnTap Magazine

I used to follow my two youngest maternal aunties everywhere they went and learned about life from the sidelines of their scheduled chores and teenage shenanigans. One of my earliest memories is trailing behind them in a field where they collected cow dung, which they then smeared onto the floors of the mud houses that made up my grandmother's homestead in the Eastern Cape. I was born on one of those dung-smeared floors, and I loved lying on them during hot summer days as they kept my skin cool. My grandmother ingeniously took advantage of the natural cooling system when she made jelly and African Beer, or what we call umqombothi in my home language of isiXhosa. She used to pour warm maize meal, corn malt, and crushed sorghum malt porridge into wide, flat, large enamel dishes and place them on those refrigerating mud floors to cool the mixture. The back of the round mud houses was the best place for me–and the beer–to retreat from the heat of South African summers. The air would flow in from the tiny windows at the back of the house, blow over us and out the door. It carried with it a strong scent of burnt caramel and scorched corn. I used to help my gran scrape off the crust that formed on the top of the cooling porridge and proudly march down to the pig pens to toss it into their muddy troughs. This was one of the few tasks I could do independently of my chaperones, and I took my sweet time. I was the first grandchild gifted to a family of farm labourers and I lived on that farm guarded by my aunties while my mom worked a live-in domestic worker job in a nearby city. There was a time and place for women to drink alcohol on the farm and it was certainly not whenever, wherever and whatever they pleased My grandmother, the master brewer, only drank umqombothi and brandy, and she did not drink them outside the rituals of customary ceremonies held in honour of ancestors, to express gratitude, or in celebration of rights of passage. There was a time and place for women to drink alcohol on the farm and it was certainly not whenever, wherever and whatever they pleased. My aunties were once beaten black- and-blue when they were caught sharing a Black Label lager left-over by their uncle. My grandmother didn’t beat them because they stole, but because they had the audacity to drink from a brown quart bottle–as if they were grown men. CONSUMPTION ACCORDING TO CEREMONY During ceremonies, the community typically joins the host family and is divided by gender, age group, and social standing. They are then seated in different areas of the homestead. The alcohol and meat are prepared in the Kraal (the place where the main rituals are performed) and divided up by the married men of the host family, and then delivered to each group by the young unmarried men. Female elders are served first and given the lion’s share of meat, a few bottles of each kind of hard liquor, a 25L bucket of umqombothi , some soft drinks and only a couple of Black Label or Castle beers, which come in brown bottles. The female elders give the married mothers, the young married women, the young maidens, and the children their respective shares of drinks and food–but never the bottled beers. Those were reserved for the old ladies. In my community, there were two particular OGs who were notorious for sitting outside the main house while their peers were inside. They were spinsters who smoked pipes and sucked on tobacco that they marinated on the inside of their cheeks, in turn making them spit incessantly. The few beers in the consignment from the Kraal were reserved for them and no one else. They no longer had anything to prove and no one cared whether or not they preserved their reputations. I loved hanging out with the old spinsters, even though they were accused of being witches and alcoholics with no morals. They did nothing to disprove the rumours about them. Their house was next to the main path to my gran’s and I would slip onto their homestead whenever I was sent on an errand. I would find the infamous twosome drinking, smoking, cooking and telling stories. Seated on a grimy grass mat next to their door, the only place in the house with breathable air, I learned what happened to women who didn’t play by the rules of the majority. Their irreverence for custom disgruntled everyone and the elders said they acted like men. Acting like a man on the farm started with drinking out of turn. My aunties also started drinking outside the carefully laid seating plans of ceremonies and were chastised every time they were caught in the act. I think my grandmother feared that if they started drinking bottled beer casually, on a regular basis, they would not focus on their house chores or studies, would start disrespecting the community’s customs and begin living like the old spinsters. My aunts were great soccer fans and they formed a fan club for the farm’s team which was made up of guys BEER LIGHT COOL LIGHT BEER LIGHT BEER PREMIUM LIGHT BEER extra ontapmag.co.za | Winter 2023 | 19