| | Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times
by Ray A. Kea Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times. By Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong. (Portsmouth and Oxford: Heinenmann and James Curry, 1996. Pp. xxiii, 189. $60.00.) What does a study of alcohol consumption tell us about social history, power relationships, and cultural change in Ghana/the Gold Coast-Asante over a period of nearly two centuries? Emmanuel Akyeampong's book is an intellectually refreshing contribution to the historiography of Ghanaian social history and a fine example of the insights to be gained from examining the lived and spoken forms of alcohol consumption among Akan-speaking, Ga-Adangme-speaking, and Ewe-speaking peoples. This excellent book is very much a history from below, a study that seeks to make sense of subaltern collective experiences--struggles, expectations, and defeats--over an extended period of time. In this complex study, the author attempts a number of different tasks. The first three chapters, devoted to the precolonial and early colonial periods, examine the social and cultural roles of alcohol. Akyeampong considers alcohol in the context of gender relations and conflicts as well as social struggles between "young men," on the one side, and elders and other power-holders, on the other. Chapters four and five treat the politics of alcohol under the British colonial regime from the 1910s to the 1940s. Chapter six links the social and symbolic presence of alcohol with the politics of nationalism. The last chapter focuses on independent Ghana in the 1960s and 1970s and examines the political disillusion of the populace and the emergent complexities of alcoholism. An epilogue looks at alcohol in contemporary Ghana. The central data of the book include interviews carried out in Ghana, archival records, and published anthropological and historical studies. For Akyeampong, the politics and culture of alcohol was and continues to be an issue of class and gender relations, and these relations, in turn, were and are constitutive of what he calls a "culture of power." He maintains that alcohol's enduring legacy in Ghana is due to its connections with spiritual power. His intention is to specify the role of alcohol consumption in the formation and transformation of systems of inequality. He shows that, over the past two hundred years, commoners' access to alcohol has been controlled--in the precolonial period by laws and injunctions, in the colonial period by legislation, and in the postcolonial period by repressive laws. The common people used alcohol as a symbol of their resistance to colonial rule. Women's access to drink was controlled by men, and Akyeampong details how they sought to overcome this restriction and achieve their own autonomy in public space. The author discusses the strategies that were developed by commoners and women to counter such repressive and draconian impositions from "above." He draws attention to the intensity of class and gender-based struggles over social and public space. He shows that local and colonial elites' definitions of order and disorder were made at the expense of social subordinates--workers and women. This is a significant and ambitious book. The author casts his study of alcohol and alcohol consumption in a materialist and social-relational vein, an understanding of which he links to values, rituals, symbols, and beliefs. Ray A. Kea University of California at Riverside -1- | |
