The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails Definition of ogogoro

ogogoro , also called ufofop, khaikhai, and “local gin,” among other things, is the national spirit of Nigeria, distilled from the sap of the raffia or oil palm (principally Raphia vinifera, but other species of Raphia are also used). Unlike in Asia, where palm spirits are of great antiquity, West Africa has no long-established history of distillation, and ogogoro is a fairly recent product. Its origins appear to lie in the early 1930s, when the deepening Great Depression, on top of paternalistic restrictions on cheap foreign spirits imposed by the British colonial power, led to a precipitous drop in spirits imports (Nigerian imports of gin, the preferred spirit around the Gulf of Guinea, fell from some 1.3 million liters in 1930 to 223,000 in 1934).

Popular history in Nigeria has it that the spirit was created—illegally, as the same 1919 treaty that limited cheap imports banned local distillation—by locals who had come back from the United States, where they had learned distillation from Prohibition-evading moonshiners. It must be noted, however, that (as Emmanuel Akyeampong pointed out in 1996) distillation already seems to have been known, if not widely practiced, among Ghanaian palm farmers in the nineteenth century, and if they knew it, Nigerian farmers probably did too. See akpeteshie. In any case, by 1932 the Niger Delta regions of southeastern Nigeria were a hotbed of moonshining. Ogogoro making spread widely during World War II and the years that followed, although it remained illegal even after Nigeria became independent in 1960. That finally changed in 1968, when the educator and activist Tai Solarin (1922–1994), a teetotaler, contrived to get himself arrested for possessing the spirit in order to dramatize the injustice of prohibiting a local spirit while allowing foreign ones.

As with many tropical spirits, a good deal of ogogoro production is local and unbranded. Sap is tapped from the raffia palm trunks, fermented in plastic drums for a week with environmental yeasts, and then run twice through clay or oil-drum pot stills (these last often take a unique form, with multiple vapor arms coming out of the same still top and running in parallel through the condensing tub). The resulting product, which generally runs around 50 percent ABV, is often adulterated with things such as methanol and can be lethal. Some of it, however, is further rectified and branded. While there have been attempts to export the spirit since the 1970s, only recently have artisanal versions begun to appear that might appeal to foreign consumers. These can also be viewed as a sign that the Nigerian urban elite is beginning to question its traditional preference for foreign spirits, much as the rise in artisanal cachaça in Brazil has shown in that country.

ogogoro

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