In Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet”, Juliet says the following about her beloved Romeo’s name, “What is in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.” Unfortunately, Shakespeare did not leave us a profound poetic line about alcoholic drink but one can derive from the above quotation by the bard of Avon, the following wisdom: “By whatever name you call the booze, it would remain a synonym for lose.”
Humanity started producing and consuming alcoholic drinks thousands years ago. “Chemical analyses recently confirmed that the earliest alcoholic beverage in the world was a mixed fermented drink of rice, honey, and hawthorn fruit and or grape. The residues of the beverage dated ca. 7000-6600 BCE, were recovered from early pottery from Jiahu, a Neolithic village in the Yellow River Valley.” That is to say in ancient China.
According to another study that established the time line for the discovery and consumption of modern alcoholic drink says that, “In 1849, Swedish physician Magnus Huss coined the term alcoholism in his book Alcoholismus chronicus. Some argue that he was the first to systematically describe the physical characteristics of habitual drinking and claim that it was a mental disease.” Modern medicine has long established that excessive alcohol drinking is a mental illness. According to Wikipedia, “the modern disease theory of alcoholism states that problem drinking is sometimes caused by a disease of the brain, characterized by altered brain structure and function.”
The drinking culture in Africa is as old as society itself although it has undergone critical evolution in the modern era, particularly following European colonial rule in the last couple of centuries. “Unlike in some European countries, where alcohol use is part of the daily life of the people, or is used especially during meals, in Africa generally, alcohol is used mostly during rituals, marriage ceremonies, clan/family festivities.” For instance the French are known for drinking wine with their meals at any time of the day except in the morning.
Ethiopia cannot be an exception to the rule because the culture of drinking alcoholic beverages is embedded into the general social culture as a factor of both socialization and entertainment. It is a kind of “rite of passage” most youngsters go through to reaffirm their adolescence and youth. Like anywhere in Africa, cultural drinks in Ethiopia are processed from natural foods. According to one blog page, there are at least eight traditional alcoholic drinks that are categorized as follows: Tej or honey wine, Tella or traditional beer, Borde, or millet beer, Shamita or the homemade barley beer, Araki or traditional spirit, Birz or alcohol-free wine, and Qaribu or alcohol-free Tella.
The Ethiopian culture of drinking is also similar to the one prevailing in most African countries. Drinking culture is defined as, “the set of traditions and social behaviors surrounding the consumption of alcoholic beverages as a recreational drug and social lubricant.” As long as drinks are consumed within the boundaries of socially acceptable norms of behaviors, they may not cause a problem to families and societies. But as soon as they transgress the socially delimited boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not, well, they become intolerable.
Western drinking culture is obviously different from what prevails in Africa in general and in Ethiopia in particular. In the Western societies, drinking alcohol at any time is not only tolerable but also encouraged following the growth and envelopment of modern drinks producing enterprises that have developed since the Industrial Revolution in particular.
Like in Africa, traditional production of alcoholic drinks in Europe was first based on cottage industries or on family estates that were famous for producing a certain type of beer or spirits. This was the case in Germany for instance where the culture of drinking beer was established as a result of the proliferation of home-brewed quality beers that were produced at certain localities and later on started to be processed industrially.
Social attitudes towards drinking alcoholic beverages vary from country to country although all of them have invented different ways of producing these beverages. “Although alcoholic beverages and social attitudes towards drinking vary around the world, nearly every civilization has independently discovered the processes of brewing beer, fermenting wine and distilling spirits.”
Modern consumption of alcoholic drinks in Ethiopia is generally believed to have started during and after the Italian fascist invasion in 1935. Although the invasion was short-lived, its negative social consequences on Ethiopian society continued after the invasion was reversed. The Italian fascists are believed to have introduced prostitution or the brothel and modern alcoholic drinks in Ethiopia.
When we look at the Ethiopian context to know about the social attitudes towards drinking alcohol, we realize that drinking is not a problem as long as it is done within acceptable limits. Most people who argue in favor of “knowing one’s limits” as the rule of “responsible drinking” maintains, refer to Biblical passages to justify their solidarity with alcoholic beverages. They refer to Jesus Christ who changed water into wine or the unwritten law that the church does not condemn drinking as long as it is done within the bounds of “Christian morality”. However, the rule is often broken and people are furious about it when they see drunken churchmen misbehaving in bars and alehouses. They often portray them “playthings of the Devil.”
The same attitude defines the prevailing tolerance towards drinking. It is okay to drink without becoming drunk and without causing social, familial and community disturbances. This kind of tolerance was behind the proliferation of alcoholic drinks, particularly among the younger population in both urban and rural areas. Both in the collective social conscious and cultural lore, drinking within limits is often considered as something masochistic that reinforces male domination in society while women were expected to abstain from drinking alcoholic beverages.
Critical voices against too much drinking are often raised during church gatherings or in popular literature. Tebeje, the main character in the short story entitled, “The Drankard of Gulele” by Temesgen Gebre is a fictional portrait of the evils of drinking too much both to the drinker and to society. By the way “The Drunkard of Gulele” is the first Amharic short story in the history of Ethiopian literature. The story was translated into English by this columnist back in 1998 and still remains unpublished.
He, Tebeje, had thought many times about quitting booze. After every evening of a drinking spree, he vowed not to drink again. However, he drank more the next day and got even drunk than his previous indulgence. He drank in the belief that he would feel happier intoxicated than sober. He drank to overcome his feeling of anger and despondency.
That was Tebeje’s habit.
“I will not be your spiritual father anymore unless you stop boozing!” The priest had one day told him and disowned him with a curse.
Housekeepers refused to work for him because they considered working for a drunk to be humiliating. The Women he asked to marry him refused unless he stopped drinking. His neighbors barred him from membership to the religious association because of his drunkenness and consigned his soul to oblivion.
He did not mind about all this. He did not care about what they were saying. He had money. He was rich. Only the rich could indulge in drunkenness. Only the poor are teetotalers. Why then did they consider his habit an act of rebellion?
His case was different. He got drunk many times and was run over by cars. He had often found himself in prison as he woke up from his stupor in the morning…
At last, Tebeje became the victim of a car accident and at the end of the short story we hear him lamenting about the loss of one of his legs:
A doctor suggested to amputate one of Tebeje’s legs from his knee down.
Another surgeon decided to amputate his leg from his thigh down so that he would not go out and drink again. They amputated him from his thigh. The same doctor ordered the nurses to weigh the amputated leg on the scale and put it between Tebeje’s arms.
The nurses weighed the amputated leg and put it between Tebeje’s arms. At that moment, the dogs that were fighting over a bone came and fought to take his amputated leg away. They scared him so much that he came out of his slumber although it was difficult for him to remember all that happened in his dream.
He jumped out of his bed and cried in terror. He asked his servant how many legs he had.
“How many legs did you have usually, sir?” His servant asked him.
“I had two!” He repeated three times.
“Three times two are six!” The servant said.
“I’m serious!” Tebeje shouted again, shaking all over in anger.
“You have two legs indeed, sir!” The servant said.
Tebeje tried to bend and kiss his leg but he could not reach it. He turned his eyes to the sky and lamented, “Drink for me is as bad as death!” He said. It was night time.
“This vow will also be forgotten soon!” His servant answered.
This rather witty short story was written at a time when too much public drinking was something that was condemned by society. In the following decades, drinking or drunkenness was comfortably established. The short story has a vital lesson to teach: boozing is self-defeating.
Perhaps it is time to read Tebeje’s story again because the individual and social impacts of boozing have long become social and economic malaises with no remedy in sight. Suffice it to see the annual statistics of deaths from car accidents that are caused by drunken driving. The early warnings against too much alcohol consumption seem to be justified indeed, even if the appeals continue to fall on deaf ears.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
The Ethiopian Herald December 3/2023
