Bridging the gap
By Blackness Team
Sodabi in Benin. Akpeteshie in Ghana. Ogogoro in Nigeria. Three names for one spirit, banned by a single text, made in the same decade. What changes from one country to the next is the name.
You could take them for three neighbouring liquors. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails files akpeteshie, sodabi, ogogoro and kai kai under a single entry: one palm wine spirit, found all along the West African coast since the 1930s.
On 10 September 1919, seven powers sign a convention in France on spirits in Africa. One document for the whole continent, requiring local production to be controlled. The tirailleurs had just come home. Sodabi did not exist yet. The text that would ban it was already signed.
The stated reason is health. The real reason is money. On the Gold Coast, before 1914, duties on imported liquor brought in up to 40 percent of the colonial government's revenue. Every bottle distilled in a village is a bottle of gin that does not sell and a tax that does not come in. In the middle of the 1930s crisis, the administration cannot allow it.
From 1931, Dahomey, the Gold Coast and Nigeria enforce it. Fines, prison, seizures. In Ghana, the ban entered the language: akpeteshie comes from Ga, ape te shie, they are hiding. The drink carries the name of the offence.
In Dahomey, the technique comes home from France with the tirailleurs, and the first distillation is dated 1926. In Nigeria, the story people tell speaks of men back from the United States, trained by Prohibition moonshiners. In Ghana, the Ghanaian historian Emmanuel Akyeampong thinks palm farmers probably already knew how to distil in the nineteenth century.
Three stories, no link between them. The historian Giovanni Tonolo, who went through the Dahomey archives, says it plainly: very little is known about how West Africans learned, and Dahomey is the only case that can be dated. Nobody taught anybody. And yet, the same decade, the same answer. Blacksmiths building stills. Farmers planting more palms because the tree was suddenly worth more. A drink that takes the place of gin, all the way into the ceremonies.
This is not an idea that travelled. It is the same refusal, arriving at the same place.
And that refusal was understood as such. By the 1940s, Akyeampong writes, akpeteshie had become in Ghana a symbol of African grievances under colonial rule. Legalising it would be one of the first acts of the independent country. Distilling was not only survival. It was already an act of resistance.
Today, all three have become the national drink of their country.
Sodabi started as a joke, tee-shirts with the name of a spirit on them. Then we read this story, and we saw that even alcohol was a way to resist.
Tirailleurs: soldiers recruited by the French army in its colonies, often by force. Convention of 1919: agreement signed at Saint-Germain-en-Laye by the United States, Belgium, the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan and Portugal, on the trade and manufacture of alcohol in Africa.
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