Each year when I return home for the holidays, I come back a little more burdened from the despair in witnessing the scale of alcohol abuse that accompaniesimigidi. What was once a celebration of homecoming is increasingly resembling social attrition, debauchery and alcohol abuse that masquerades as festivity. In my earlier research, I was inclined to read the anxieties of early black intellectuals about alcohol as puritanical.
While historians have rightly foregrounded labour control, racial segregation and land expropriation as the central pillars of black resistance in colonial SA, the black press of the early 20th century reveals another axis of concern — alcohol, and its corrosive social effects. Central to this conversation was the multilingual black press, particularlyUmteteli wa Bantu(The Mouthpiece of the Native People), which, from the 1920s onwards, provided a crucial forum for reflection on black social ills. Although initially established under the auspices of the Chamber of Mines’ Native Recruiting Corporation, it evolved into an outlet where both elite and grassroots contributors debated colonial legislation, labour conditions, urbanisation and the moral economy of black life under dispossession.
Although many issues remain unexamined, existing archival excerpts show that alcohol featured prominently in the paper’s broader discourse on morality, social hierarchy and communal survival. These discussions were not a narrow obsession with temperance, but a wider anxiety about social collapse in a context where land, autonomy and dignity had already been stripped away. One might hope that someone would convene animbizoon the subject today, one that links our current December crises to these earlier debates.
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Such a conversation would remind us that our present dilemmas are not without historical precedent. A notable preserved set of excerpts fromUmteteli wa Bantudates to 1922, where the editorial voice explicitly connects alcohol to social degradation. Alcoholism “in the slums” is framed as something beyond merely an individual weakness, but as a collective affliction and part of the oppressive colonial rule.
The language of that era is undeniably troubling, steeped in the racialised idioms of the period. Yet beneath its harshness lies a sophisticated social critique.
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