Central and East Africa , a vast and vastly diverse swath of territory stretching from Chad, Sudan, and Ethiopia in the north down to Angola, Zambia, and Madagascar in the south, is often considered one of the great blank spots on the world map of distilled spirits. In fact, the region is home to a number of distinct distilling traditions. If they are obscure, it is because very little of what they produce makes it abroad, the only notable exception being the significant amounts of rum exported by Mauritius and some of the other African islands in the Indian Ocean.
As with West Africa, the region has a long tradition of making beers and wines from a wide variety of starches and fruits but does not have an indigenous one of distilling them into spirits. But while West Africa participated in the Atlantic spirits trade from a very early date, it appears to have taken until the nineteenth century for distilling and spirits drinking to make any significant penetration into East Africa or any but the Atlantic Coast parts of Central Africa. In the north, the end of that century saw Ethiopia begin to make katikala and its more refined derivative, areqe, from various combinations of wheat, sorghum, and maize, flavored with the pounded leaves of the ghesho shrub (Rhamnus prinoides, or shiny buckthorn) and distilled once or twice in clay pot stills to as much as 70 percent ABV. Even before that, low-level distilling from dates or grain had trickled up the Nile from Egypt—a date and sugar-cane distillery was operating in South Sudan by 1840 and a grain one by 1868—and anise-flavored date
Distillation was slower to move upriver into Central Africa. In 1864 when the English explorer Samuel Baker set up an improvised distillery in the camp of Kumarasi, the king of Bunyoro-Kitara in western Uganda, to make sweet potato spirit for his daily medicinal Hot Toddies, it was treated as a great novelty. By the 1890s, however, European and local spirits were moving south through the region from Sudan. In the meanwhile—after Baker, but probably not because of him—the practice of distillation began spreading through the Bantu villages of the East African Highlands and the Congo Basin. Distillation may follow industrialization, as the drink historian’s rule of thumb holds, but it also follows certain other forces that break apart traditional societies, including colonization and war, two forces to which the region is unfortunately no stranger. There is still a great deal of unbranded, village-level distilling in the region, mainly the one known in various parts of the Congo as kwete, lotoko, or rutuku, made from maize and cassava chips, but also banana “gin” and a wide variety of other spirits. None are industrialized. See kachasu and kwete.
The former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique are also responsible for a good deal of small-scale, unbranded distilling, only there the raw materials are sugar cane and—as in Goa, another former Portuguese colony—cashew fruit. See feni. Most of the cane distilling in Africa, however, is done on islands, both the Atlantic ones and the ones in the Indian Ocean. Madagascar, the largest of them, had a working distillery as early as 1821 and imported a good deal of spirit for the consumption of the royal household (Amer Picon was a favorite), but its characteristic toaka gasy—cane juice rum, often flavored with tamarind or other fruits or herbs—appears to have arisen only after the French took over the island in 1895. See Amer Picon. The French had already turned the island of Réunion, which had begun making sugar cane “raque” in the early 1700s, into a high-volume sugar and rum producer to replace the supply lost with the Haitian Revolution. Today, its production, from three distilleries, has been eclipsed by that of Mauritius, which became a sugar island under Dutch rule in the early 1600s, albeit a struggling one. In the 1700s, under the French, Mauritius exported more rum than sugar; that proportion was reversed in the next century, with the British in charge. Today, the country’s six modern distilleries produce a good deal of rum (column still, from molasses) for export, but the industry is eclipsed in the local economy by tourism and financial services.
Mauritius is not the only country in the region with modern distilleries. East Africa has a belt of industrializing and urbanizing economies running south from Ethiopia through Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, and each has at least one modern, high-volume distillery, making spirits in various international categories, including gin, vodka, and blended whisky (where imported scotch whisky is mixed with local grain spirit in the Indian style). Some are entirely locally owned, but a number are partnerships with multinational spirits companies or brewers. In most cases, this sector of the industry serves as a sort of bridge between imported spirits and unbranded, local ones. Very little of what it produces is exported, except to other countries in the region. If history is any guide, however, it is only a matter of time before one of these companies succeeds in marketing a modernized version of one of the region’s myriad village spirits internationally; indeed, with products such as Kenya’s new, local-botanical Procera gin and Nigeria’s Pedro’s ogogoro, the process is already beginning. See ogogoro and spirits trade.
Baker, Samuel. The Albert N’Yanza, London: 1867.
Haworth, Alan, and Ronald Simpson, eds. Moonshine Markets: Issues in Unrecorded Alcohol Beverage Production and Consumption. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004.
Huetz de Lemps, Alain. Boissons et civilizations en Afrique. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2001.
Patrick, James. “The Bootleggers of Madagascar.” Roads and Kingdoms, March 5, 2018. https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2018/the-bootleggers-of-madagascar/ (accessed March 18, 2021).
By: David Wondrich