Alcohol, poverty and the South African city

Introduction:

Alcohol is a complex barometer of the urban. This is because, in many ways, our dealings (both real

and imagined) with drink, drinkers and drinking places force us to ask normative questions of what

we think that the urban should be. However, these interactions also ask us to confront the reality of

what the urban both is, and purports to be. Alcohol shapes manifold experiences of the urban: it

guides our city imaginaries; carves out geographies of safety and danger; offers excitement and

cosmopolitanism; marks out aspirations; offers conviviality and support; generates hopelessness;

and indicates despair. This brief introduction to this Special Issue asks what alcohol might tell us

about the changing nature of the South African city, the broader challenges of addressing urban

poverty and the variegated social relationships to alcohol that are often invoked as a barometer of

both. And in so doing, it contends that alcohol reveals a great deal about the relational complexities

of urban poverty not just in South Africa, but beyond. The relationships between the city, poverty

and the materialities, processes and politics that compose the experiential nature of alcohol are

deeply entangled by their multi-directionality and multi-causality. However, in exploring these

entanglements, the paper also asserts that urban geography may help deepen critical analyses of

alcohol itself, which, as an object of study, has held limited traction in the Global South outside the

biomedical sciences and public health. This introduction therefore aims to trace out what these

contributions might be as a way of contextualising the papers presented as part of this Special Issue

and the research agenda from which they have emerged.

Before turning to the present, however, it is helpful to first remind ourselves that alcohol has long

been an integral part of the South African economy as well as its state apparatus (Mager 1999;

Mager 2004; Mager 2010). The consumption and retailing of liquor was also a source of great public

dis-ease at the same time as it functioned as a form of social, economic and political control long

before current debates over alcohol control surfaced. From the 1928 Liquor Act prohibiting the sale

of ‘European Liquor’ to Africans, to municipal beer halls of the Rand mining communities in the

1930s, the rise of illicit brewing by women in the 1940s and the concomitant rise in township

shebeens in the 1950s; the provision and consumption of liquor in South Africa has been bound into

multi-scalar processes of social and urban change, as well as the active management of social and

political anxieties. By 1962, prohibition had been lifted giving coloured South Africans the same

rights as whites, but restricting Africans to buying ‘European liquor’ only from municipal-run outlets

(Mager 2010). The 1962 Sorghum Beer Act also gave the national government the monopoly in

brewing, distributing and retailing, consequently compelling municipalities to build bars and bottle

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stores in the rapidly expanding townships where SAB Miller’s own “European” clear beer was also

sold. In theory, revenues from these enterprises were to be invested in township amenities and any

surplus transferred to the Department of Bantu Administration. However, as Mager (2010) notes,

not all South African cities invested heavily in municipal beer halls. The municipal administration in

Cape Town, in particular, was strongly opposed the sale of liquor in black areas of the city, but was

forced to lift restrictions in 1961 in the townships of Nyanga and Langa. Yet, ‘despite the lifting of

prohibition, black sociability continued to be constructed within the frame of illicit drinking’ ( Ibid, p.

27). It is this discursive and legislative frame that continues to dominate the ways in which alcohol

and the urban entwine in South Africa. Indeed, the licit/illicit binary guides the social and spatial

imaginaries that sanction the increasing calls for greater alcohol control policies.

This is important as, over the past decade, the simmering public and governmental anxieties over

alcohol have taken on a new tone in South Africa and, with it, a revived sense of urgency. At present,

the national government – led by Health Minister Aaron Matsoaledi - is debating raising the legal

drinking age to 21 and a possible full-scale ban on all alcohol advertising (The Economist 2012). The

maximum blood alcohol concentration for drivers has already been reduced from 0.08g to

0.05g/100ml (Fell and Voas 2006). Combined, these measures would give South Africa some of the

toughest global alcohol control policies. Such concern is driven by global survey data which indicates

that while alcohol consumption may be greatest in high-income countries, rates of alcohol-related

mortality and morbidity (and therefore the burden of disease), are now greatest in middle-income

countries (World Health Organisation 2010a; World Health Organisation 2010b; World Health

Organisation 2011b). In particular, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has identified that this

burden is greatest among men in Africa (World Health Organisation 2009, 9) and that for middle

income countries, alcohol is the single most significant risk factor for Disability Adjusted Life Years

(DALYs). Thus, conditions of poverty within contexts of widening social and economic inequalities

create dramatic vulnerabilities to the effects of risky drinking practices. In 2010, the WHO’s Global

Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol added further impetus to the latent call to prioritise

alcohol control measures in countries of the Global South, especially in relation to the growing

burden of non-communicable disease (NCD), accidents and injury (Parry 2000; Caetano and

Laranjeira 2005; Yach, Kellogg et al. 2005; Boutayeb 2006; Nugent 2008; Bakke and Endal 2010).

South Africa has heeded this global call and with it, finally engaged with the long campaign waged by

Charles Parry and colleagues at the Medical Research Council to take a more concerted stance on

alcohol control at a national, provincial and municipal scale (Parry, Bhana et al. 2002; Parry, Myers et

al. 2003; Parry, Plüddemann et al. 2004; Parry, Plüddemann et al. 2005; Parry 2005; Parry, Rehm et

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al. 2009). The National Liquor Act was amended in 2003 and, as a result, individual provinces were

mandated to update their own provincial legislation, with some municipalities developing their own

by-laws. This development has, unsurprisingly, not been free of controversy, contestation and

political largesse.

At root, the chief concern of and challenge to alcohol control policies in South Africa has been the

entrenched bifurcation (and co-existence) of the legitimate and illegitimate liquor trade, which has

persisted well beyond the end of apartheid, the active uptake of Black Economic Empowerment

(BEE) strategies within the alcohol industry and various experiments with legislation, regulation and

enforcement. This persistence can be read through a number of framings: as evidence of

entrepreneurial livelihood strategies; a sign of “problematic” cultural relationships to alcohol use

and abuse; apartheid legacies; the failure of the state to ensure citizens’ right to safe environments;

the limitations of police enforcement capacities and the criminal justice system; or as a supply-side

failure. These framings are overwhelmingly negative, with the exception of casting shebeens as

livelihood strategies and evidence of micro-enterprises in the “second” (or informal) economy

(Aliber, Kirsten et al. 2006; Skinner 2006; du Toit and Neves 2007), often (but not always) run by

women. In turn, these framings speak to a number of areas of urban geographical inquiry as well as

the study of poverty and its dynamics in urban environments, despite the fact that geographers have

been relatively slow to identify and explore these. Thus, while geographers in the Global North have

been actively contributing to the interdisciplinary Alcohol Studies literature (see Jayne, Valentine et

al. 2008a; Jayne, Valentine et al. 2008b; DeVerteuil and Wilton 2009; Jayne, Valentine et al. 2011;

Wilton and Moreno 2012 for helpful reviews), engagements in the South have been far more limited

despite presenting both a pressing need and great analytical opportunity. To explore these

contentions, the rest of the chapter will first consider the intersections of alcohol and the urban,

particularly within the Global South and, more specifically, the South African context. Second, it will

consider the intersections of the study of alcohol and poverty. This is not to suggest that alcohol is

only a problem of poverty, but rather that poverty has become a de facto explanation for many of

the problems associated with drink, drinkers and drinking places in the Global South. These

assumptions need further critical reflection for what they both tell us about urban poverty and what

they may divert our attention from. Third, and by way of conclusion, the paper considers important

future research agendas for geographers working on alcohol in cities of the Global South and

considers the ways in which the other papers in this Special Issue contribute to the initiation of such

a dialogue.

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i. Alcohol and urban studies

The burgeoning of research and writing about alcohol within geography has crossed paths with what

McFarlane (2008) has described as a ‘Southern turn’ in Urban Studies. However, these paths have

largely headed in different directions, despite the clear conceptual, empirical and practical

potentiality inherent in bridging the gap. Shortly after the end of apartheid, Parnell argued that

South African cities offer a ‘fascinating laboratory for the study of urban culture and form’ and yet,

given their schizophrenic first/third world characteristics, theorists needed to think carefully about

the ‘geographical origins of their explanatory concepts’ (1997, 891). South African urban researchers

have, however, been critiqued for a tendency to ‘remain isolated from theoretical work in the

various relevant disciplines and [have] failed to locate their work in the comparative literature on

cities elsewhere in the world’ (Seekings 2000, 833). This distancing echoes critiques elsewhere of the

need for urban theory from the South, for the South (Robinson 2006; Watson 2009; Parnell and

Robinson 2012), given the particularities of urbanisation processes in the South that logically cannot

be explained by reference to theories from the North. Thus, there has been a concerted movement

within urban geography and urban studies arguing that the theoretical traffic needs a change of

direction (if not purpose). Urban theory needs to come from the South to explore urbanity in the

South and, in the process, find alternatives to the default position of framing poorer cities through

the lens of developmentalism (Robinson 2002). This call for a ‘change of geographical axis’ along

which ‘theory and practice is developed’ (Parnell, Pieterse et al. 2009, 240) that might start to

challenge the ‘epistemological dualism’ (Pieterse 2010, 208) that characterises the study of the

urban has started to have a profound effect at the level of debate (if not necessarily action). One

thing now seems certain: South African urban studies are no longer ’parochial’, nor ensconced in a

‘theoretical ghetto’ (Ibid, p. 892), especially given the clear role played by many South African

scholars in driving this debate forward.

These arguments, however, leave us in a somewhat fiddly situation with regards to research on

alcohol in cities of the South. On the one hand, scholars have argued that cities of the South exhibit

particularities that cannot be understood in regard to Northern urban theory, however on the other,

it seems clear to us that the issues raised by alcohol exhibit more similarities than they do

differences with those in the North. This assertion is important, if only to add flesh to Mcfarlane’s

contention that ‘the categorisation of poorer cities through a lens of developmentalism has often

meant that they are discursively constructed as a “problem”’ (McFarlane 2008, 345). This is

empirically true of the study of alcohol as a “problem” in the South African urban context, as risky

drinking practices and their consequences are most often cast as evidence of the broad failing of

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development. In turn, this points to a more systemic issue of urban scholarship producing ‘a skewed

reality of the production of knowledge about African urbanism’ (Pieterse 2010, 206) in which

scholars have largely focussed their attention on policy-orientated research, to the detriment of

deepening understandings of the state of African cities. Given that this policy-driven research,

Pieterse suggests, exhibits a profound faith in the existence of ‘rational fixes’ to the litany of social,

economic and infrastructural ‘crises’ South African cities; it has ‘fixated broadly in the domain of

urban developmentalism’ (Ibid). As a consequence, research on alcohol – despite being untidily but

indelibly woven into the fabric of urban life – is almost always considered from the standpoint of

policy failure/ fix in cities of the South. Rarely does it start from the position of what alcohol tells us

about urbanity and, even more rarely does it transcend its “problem” frame to consider the

ramifications of its complex and situated ambiguities. Such ambiguities may be untidy, but we would

also like to suggest they offer a way to move alcohol from out of the ‘shadows’ of urban research in

cities of the South (Ferguson 2006; McFarlane 2008).

South Africa’s failure to fulfil many of its post-apartheid promises of redistribution have allowed vast

gulfs in infrastructural resources and capacities not just to persist but actually, in many cases, widen

across urban space (du Toit 2005; Seekings 2006; du Toit 2011). In turn, this means that poorer cities

in the South African context are not cast as a “problem” tout court, but rather those specific

neighbourhoods or suburbs that have remained particularly impervious or resistant to the logic of

developmentalism are repeatedly cast as problematic. In such places, ‘what are ostensibly ‘service

delivery’ protests over housing, water, sanitation and electricity and so forth are simultaneously

expressions of betrayal – intensified and sharpened by obscene and escalating material inequalities,

and the crisis of livelihood confronting many in South Africa today’ (Hart 2011, 87). The betrayal

spills over into the governance of liquor and its associated risk as South African cities have become

Janus-faced spaces of deviance and luxuriant consumption, with only the former discursively cast as

a “problem” despite the supply of alcohol most often sharing common political economic

provenances across city spaces. For such reasons, alcohol reveals the deeper schizophrenia of South

African cities and the rationales that undergird their governance. Here, governance strategies are

variegated along lines that rehearse the same ‘deeply engraved legacies of urban segregation and

fragmentation’ (Pieterse 2006, 285), with the number of licensed premises dwarfed by the number

of unlicensed “illegal” shebeens in townships and informal settlements (PGWC 2003). In some

provinces, an aggressive policy of shebeen closure has consequently been sanctioned by recourse to

the arguments of (1) illegality and (2) their despotic and dangerous nature, in particular as conduits

for unsafe sex, violence and HIV/AIDS transmission (Oxfam 2005; Morojele, Kachieng'a et al. 2006;

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Kalichman, Simbayi et al. 2008). While this has a legislative logic and a public health imperative, it

makes little ethical sense when the social history of alcohol provision, consumption and control in

South Africa is considered.

To understand and engage with these dynamics, we need more than an Urban Studies prepped from

the South. Instead, such complexities require the scholastic energies of ‘new synergies emerging

from interactions between the disciplines’ (Parnell, Pieterse et al. 2009, 236), where Urban Studies,

Geography, Sociology, History, and Anthropology need to think across the divide to Political Science,

Environmental Studies, Planning and Public Health in its study of alcohol. This is necessary if we are

to reposition the study of alcohol outside the Public Health dominion and, in the process, open up

the debate on drinking and its effects in the Global South in ways that help us better understand the

fundamental urban process and experiences that may lead people to drink as a rational response to

an often unpredictably, irrational environment. In this reading, attention may be displaced from the

irrational or uneducated consumer back onto an environment in which irrationality is a way of life, a

form of coping and a driver of vulnerability that produces the need for short-term fixes in place of

long-term strategic solutions at scales from the individual to the municipal (Wood 2003). Alcohol

therefore indicates both what is wrong and right in urban space, what works, what does not and

where the disjunctures between aspiration and reality gain traction on the ground. To start to

understand these dynamics requires moving beyond the assumption of alcohol as a “problem” or

even a “policy challenge” to reposition discussions in ways that do not always start from the

assumption of ‘crisis’. Here, we find great inspiration in Pieterse’s notion of crisis as ‘enabling’ (2006,

285), where “solutions” (if we believe these to be necessary or possible) require ‘insurgent shoots of

experimentation across the city’ (Ibid, 300). The question that must be explored from here, is where

across the city such experiments need to take place. To do so requires critically exploring the related

assumption in alcohol policy and practice in South Africa that the effects of liquor disproportionately

affect the poor. This is, no doubt, a legacy of apartheid discourses of the meaning of alcohol in

which ‘alcoholic dependence and alcohol abuse were tied to ideas about racial difference’ (Mager

2010, 79), in which there was a clear race-income gradient. Thus, race was understood as shorthand

for delineations of relative poverty. However, in more recent years, this organisational scaffold has

ceased to operate with the same logic, leaving associations of alcohol, race and poverty in a more

complex situation than apartheid rationales of control assumed. These will be explored in the next

section.

Alcohol and poverty

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In discussing alcohol in South Africa, the fact that you are also talking about race and poverty is

assumed. This seems commonsensical given that in the past decade, democratic governance has

done little to make people less poor, even if it has set to work in blurring urban racial segregation by

replacing it with new forms of class-based segregation (Seekings 2008). Almost all survey data

collected in the post-apartheid state’s fetish for statistical information points to the fact that the

poverty rate and absolute number of poor has risen (Seekings 2006; Özler 2007). At the same time,

inequality has deepened as the number of rich (especially among black Africans) has also climbed.

This inequality is borne out most viscerally in the ways that daily livelihood and infrastructural

struggles intersect with debates posited by urban scholars about creative cities and economies

(Booyens 2012), gentrification (Visser and Kotze 2008) and heritage preservation (Ferreira and Visser

2007; Pirie 2007). While these spheres may seem diametrically (if not perversely) opposed, they are

bound into the broader questions of how we might best theorise and address poverty in South

African cities. However, it is important to heed du Toit’s (2011, 128) assertion that poverty is ‘an

essentially contested concept characterised by a ‘protean diversity and breadth of meaning, [which]

imparts to it a certain inherent “messiness”’. In turn, this messiness is shape-shifting, such that

‘poverty’ can be invoked as an explanatory category, unsatisfactory outcome or evidence of political

or developmental success/failure. In this sense, poverty is a trope and tool that can be mobilised and

put to the service of a host of competing agendas. As such, ‘discussions about what poverty is and

what it is not play a key role in highlighting (or in hiding) all manner of contentious social problems,

and in legitimating (or delegitimating) various political and economic arrangements’ (Ibid, 129).

Alcohol is clearly one such ‘contentious problem’ and, when elided with poverty, in turn, serves to

legitimate (and delegitimate) not just a policy rationale, but also the political economic status quo.

It is true to say, as Seekings contends, that ‘there is no shortage of data on poverty and inequality in

post-apartheid South Africa’, but it is also the case that ‘statistics are deeply politicised’ (Seekings

2006, 32). We may know more than ever about the quantitative dimensions of poverty in South

Africa, but we know far less about its qualitative scope. This gap is important, especially in the study

of behavioural choices that can profoundly influence personal health and wellbeing. Du Toit argues

that the study of poverty has been depoliticised and technicised (thanks to the ubiquity of social

statistics), but in the process, this ‘vitiates the ability of participants in South African poverty debates

to engage effectively with the underlying causal processes and political dynamics that underpin

structural poverty and entrench inequality’ (2011, 128). This is, in part, because the statistics

themselves are often inconsistently collected through time (hindering longitudinal work), their

methodological foundations are shaky, they are not collected at sufficiently fine geographic scales

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and demographic detail is often restricted to apartheid racial classifications rather than more

representative class indicators (Seekings 2001; Seekings 2006). Even so, poverty discourses in South

Africa remain characterised by their lack of critical engagement with an ‘analysis of social relations of

power’ and, in even broader terms ‘the social’ itself (Ibid). Thus, du Toit argues, ‘the proper object

of study for those interested in chronic poverty, is not so much ‘the chronic poor’ but the chronicity

in poverty ...the real, social world in which people – individually and in groups – make their

decisions, enter into conflict, or make or break alliances’ (du Toit 2005, 23). This perspective is

essential for it highlights where social and economic agency may exist or may be lacking and,

therefore, where the poor may or may not find entry points into either the first (formal) or second

(informal) economies. In asking questions about the underlying causes of poverty beyond the

“ballpark” offered by statistics, we are also questioning the construction of vulnerability, coping and

meaning. This point is crucial to analyse the application of the two most prevalent tropes of poverty

in South African discourse - as morally charged or technically amenable (Ibid) – to narratives and

experiences of liquor. This will be further discussed below.

Poverty is most frequently presented either through a moral register or in developmentalist

language that suggests a technical ‘fix’ is possible and desirable. Alcohol straddles both these

domains. In the first case, a culture of excessive, hazardous drinking is not just immoral (for the

accidents, injuries and crimes it causes) but represents a particular immorality of the poor who

should (or so the moralising goes) be more concerned with addressing basic needs than buying

alcohol. This is a fear evidenced by the FAQ section of the ‘Basic Income Coalition’ website (a

campaign group arguing for a universal Basic Income Grant or BIG) which asks ‘how can you prevent

people from wasting the grant on alcohol’? (see Ferguson 2007; Ferguson 2011 for a critical

exploration of the BIG). The moral discourse now extends to current policy debates in Gauteng over

potentially banning alcohol sales to (poor) pregnant women (Laing 2012). Leaving aside the fact that

the South African Income and Expenditure Survey (Stats SA 2005) shows that expenditure on alcohol

(both as a percentage of household spending and in absolute terms) increases with income, there is

a residual assumption perpetuated by media accounts (and usually grounded in anecdotal evidence)

that when the poor drink, they do so in an uncontrolled, lawless and immoral manner. This is tied

into the idea of a ‘culture’ of drinking that has, notably, been used elsewhere as an explanatory

concept for what are perceived as fundamental differences in, for example, Southern European

“civilised” wine consumption and Northern European “binge” drinking of spirits and beer (Tierney

2006; Jayne, Valentine et al. 2008c). Discourses of morality also place the question of choice on

somewhat perilous ground. Are the poor irresponsible because they lack in choice? Or are they

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irresponsible because that is, ultimately, their choice? Here, accounts become hazier. If the poor do

choose to drink in an irresponsible way, are they ‘undeserving’ in a manner reminiscent of Victorian-

era narratives? Or are there fundamental, structural reasons which provoke these choices,

therefore, at a stroke, rendering the poor ‘deserving’? These are salient questions when we

consider du Toit’s assertion that ‘poverty is a concept that appears — on the face of it at least — to

be without politics: it is usually presented as a form of unnecessary human suffering all citizens

should be against. Though it carries a significant moral charge, the concept seems to be quite

amenable to use in apparently value-free, technical discussions that do not require participants to

subscribe to particular ideological and political positions’ (du Toit 2011, 127). Alcohol adds agency

and intent to the ‘unnecessary human suffering’ and, in the process, makes it virtually impossible to

argue for a technical fix for poverty in a way that shuns ideology or politics.

The question of what a technical fix might look like has, however, proved elusive to those involved in

developing alcohol control policy. This is not least because restricting alcohol tends to be politically

contentious, economically dubious and publically objectionable. ‘Evidence of best practice’ is further

limited in its scale and geographic scope. This is compounded by a lack of research in countries of

the South evaluating the impact of (albeit limited) alcohol control policies. Thus the ‘evidence’ that

governments still crave tends to come overwhelmingly from Europe, North America and Australia

(World Health Organisation 2011a). As geographers, the gaps in cognition that such disembedded

processes of knowledge transfer might produce are all too clear. However, given the dominance of

the alcohol control field by public health, the recursive relationships between place and behaviour

have courted disappointingly little conceptual attention outside of geographical interventions.

Instead, the moral and technical fix approaches to poverty have been conjoined in a policy language

that views formalisation as the solution. This reveals the ongoing belief in development discussions

in the essential dualism of the first and second economies in South Africa, in which the former is

formal, developed, modern, and (largely) functional and the latter is informal, insecure, undeveloped

and marginal (Desai and Maharaj 2011). What is interesting about alcohol within the urban context

is the extent to which it empirically demonstrates the synergies between the first and second

economies. Shebeens, for example, theoretically inhabit the domain of the second economy by

virtue of being unlicensed, but their owners may buy liquor quite legitimately from wholesalers or

bottle shops in the first economy, and thus contribute to tax revenues through VAT and duty. They

may have amenities such as juke boxes and pool tables, branded furniture from liquor companies

and serve blue collar workers. The twain, hence, often meets in the shebeen. Their owners may also,

despite being in the second economy, earn respectable amounts of money, that meets and often

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exceeds earnings in the first economy (Collins and Morduch 2007; Mooki 2012). Such figures should

be treated with caution due to their largely anecdotal nature and a lack of systematic data collection

(a gap ironically perpetuated by shebeens’ illegality), however incomes will far exceed those

subsisting on government grant money. Shebeens in the Western Cape, for example, are now unable

to apply for a license if they are located in a residential area (which most are) and this legislation has

provided authorities with increased leverage to raid and close shebeens. We do wonder whether if

shebeeners sold a product other than alcohol, they would be hailed as entrepreneurial role models,

praised for employing local people and providing a community amenity, rather than being cast as

immoral and undeserving. While popular and media discourses on shebeens in South Africa tend to

differentiate between “bad” and “good” shebeeners, policy remain a blunt instrument in which all

shebeens in residential areas are de facto bad and are denied any mechanism by which to attain

formality and legitimation.

But here we must pause, and consider the idea that alcohol and poverty are often seen as symbiotic.

This may stem from narratives castigating the character of the poor, casting them as irresponsible

and thus uniquely susceptible to the attractions of liquor. It may also be a consequence of South

Africa’s urban form, in which previously white areas of the city of Cape Town held the majority of

liquor licenses. This legacy continues as only 11% of licenses issued in the Western Cape have gone

to Black or Coloured applicants (Charman and Pieterson 2010). Formal entry to the liquor industry

has long been denied the poor, despite BEE initiatives and the rewriting of the National Liquor Act,

leaving shebeening as a logical (if not legitimate) way of making a living in a context devoid of

substantial opportunity. However, the study of alcohol in South Africa, including some notable

anthropological accounts in which alcohol and its effects remains an implicit (if not ever rendered

explicit) theme, suggests that the daily, lived experiences of drink, drinkers and drinking in poor

parts of the city can be uniquely dangerous (Bank 2011; Harber 2011). The papers that follow

explore the micro-scale dynamics of some of these risks and experiences, but here we wish to briefly

hazard caution in ascribing all risky drinking practices to either the poor or poor parts of the city.

South African cities may remain deeply segregated, but aspiration and changing class compositions

provoke mobility in the consumption of alcohol. Many people’s lives are anchored to space by

poverty, but many others are not. People that have accumulated wealth and moved out of poorer

neighbourhoods may still return to the shebeen to drink. Thus we need to challenge the impasse in

the study of poverty that has allowed us to ‘talk about ‘the poor’ without discussing the wealthy’

(du Toit 2011, 134). To discuss one without reference to the other, as if they inhabit entirely

separate lifeworlds, is a fallacy. It also leads us to spurious “solutions” to dealing with poverty. The

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unassailable reality is that many South Africans drink too much, and the wealthy buy the most

alcohol. The poor, however, bear a disproportionate burden of mortality and morbidity from alcohol.

The question should therefore be “what processes generate this vulnerability”? It is not “how might

we restrict the poor from accessing alcohol” (which is at the heart of current policy thought in the

Western Cape). In the papers that follow, the contentions that we have raised in these introductory

paragraphs are taken up in various ways, through various means and to different ends. By way of a

conclusion, we will summarise the collective contribution that these papers seek to make, both to

the study of alcohol within geography, but also debates over South African urbanism more broadly.

Conclusion

The papers in this collection broadly fall into two thematics. The first is concerned with the

entanglements of alcohol with situated, lived experiences and the kind of methodologies that are

most able to examine these. The second concerns the realm of policy regulation and urban

governance strategies. In geographical terms, all papers are situated in the Western Cape and, more

specifically, the city of Cape Town. They therefore contribute a significant body of empirical research

to the debates on both the South African city and urban poverty discussed in this introduction. With

the exception of Charman et al, the papers arose from the coordinated work-packages of one

research project exploring the intersections of poverty, alcohol governance and development across

a number of case study sites in the city. This research is more fully elucidated in the paper by

Lawhon et al in their discussion of the substantial methodological and ethical challenges inherent in

conducting research on alcohol – as both a socially taboo and normalised practice and product - in

African cities. These challenges are important to note as they reveal much about the cultural

relationships to alcohol that define the lived experiences of drinking and its effects. These

relationships are far from simple, logical or predictable. They are also exceptionally hard to

understand as researcher-outsiders, even where such researchers may come from the same

communities or background. The paper asks how it is possible to interrogate the concept of ‘lived

experience’ of drink, drinking and drinkers in poor parts of Cape Town and dwells on the ethical

dilemmas raised by qualitative research on alcohol in general and in African cities in particular.

The four remaining papers on lived experience are each concerned with a very different part of Cape

Town and the issues raised by each. Brown-Luthango explores the recently upgraded site of

Freedom Park, in the Tafelsig area of the Cape Flats. Here she asks how violence intersects with the

built environment and how, over the course of upgrading the housing and infrastructure stock,

alcohol-related violence has changed in its locale and nature. She argues that violence has shifted

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from being largely gang-related, to being sheltered by (newly improved and expanded) domestic

spaces. The research shows a sensitivity not just to the lived experience of alcohol-related domestic

abuse, but also the importance of anticipating the unanticipated consequences of policy

interventions along one sphere of urban life. Blake’s paper departs from a very different part of the

city: Salt River adjacent to the CBD. Long a home to light industry, with a largely working-class

population; it has recently been subject to processes of gentrification and social change. However,

pioneer gentrifiers and the urban poor still reside cheek by jowl and the neighbourhood’s drinking

spaces have become microcosms of conflict and contestation, where meanings of place are invoked

and (re)created. Blake’s work draws on ethnographic methods to explore these processes of

meaning-making and, in so doing, helps deepen our engagements with the processes that

characterise drinking spaces and practices. Finally, Charman et al draw on research undertaken by

the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation in the informal settlement of Sweet Home Farm on the role

played by shebeens in the context of informality. Sweet Home Farm’s estimated 17,000 residents

have occupied a legal limbo where essential infrastructure and facilities have been denied because

of the settlement’s continuing informal status. In such circumstances, shebeens offer one of the very

few “public” spaces where people can escape their crowded and insufficient shacks to socialise. This

provides a very different reading of the shebeen to that found in and legitimating policy discourse.

Here, the shebeen is a positive space, an amenity that provides something approaching a civic

function in a situation where civility is being formally denied by the municipality. Such counter-

narratives are essential in order to challenge the dominant ways in which alcohol has come to

characterise and demonise the poor urban spaces in the South African context.

The three remaining papers both adopt critical approaches to current policy debates in the Western

Cape, both directly and, in the case of Pirie, indirectly. Smit’s paper examines the regulation and

attempted governance of shebeens in the Western Cape Liquor Act and the City of Cape Town’s

municipal by-laws. In it he examines why the impact of such interventions has been and is likely to

continue to be limited. Herrick’s paper critically examines the perspective of policy stakeholders

involved in this process. Her paper compares and contrasts what is being done about alcohol in

policy in the Western Cape and what is said by policymakers about alcohol. In so doing, she argues

that the ways in which alcohol is discursively presented by stakeholder’s echoes Mariana Valverde’s

conceptualisation of ‘nuisance’ as both a contextual entity and a class project. Drawing on data from

semi-structured interviews, she argues that stakeholders often rehearse and repeat strikingly similar

narratives about alcohol as a “problem” due to the geographical and social distances between

themselves and their objects or targets of policy. However, any attempt at creative engagement is

12

thwarted by the quest for ‘evidence based policy’ (see Marmot 2004 for an interesting critique of

this) that takes as its talisman advice from the World Health Organisation concerning ‘what works’ in

general terms (World Health Organisation 2011a). The result has been a complete lack of investment

in and engagement with the need for education, despite the clear benefits that such tools of

empowerment would provide far beyond regulating shebeens. Pirie’s paper, by contrast, offers a

more philosophical approach to the sites and spaces that alcohol renders important and legible.

Drawing on ethnographic research on Cape Town’s public transport modes and nodes, he questions

where alcohol gets emplaced within these and, in which contexts it becomes visible and visible.

These questions provide an important adjunct to alcohol policy discourse that has tended to locate

its object of concern solely in shebeens and residential areas while under-theorising the importance

of flows, mobility and circulations in alcohol consumption and purchasing.

Together these papers provide an empirically rich, conceptually informed, interdisciplinary

compendium that has much to add to the very nascent field of geographic studies of alcohol in the

Global South. They raise (and answer) questions posed in this introduction and pave the way for

future research agendas on the contemporary landscapes of risk and vulnerability in the South

African city. More than this though, they should force us to reframe and decentre the debate around

alcohol. Yes, alcohol is deeply problematic, a governance challenge, a drain on state resources and a

source of misery and suffering for many. But, it is also a source of income, livelihoods, friendship,

sociability, informal and formal connections and escape for others. How it might be possible to

mitigate suffering, while enabling socialising, is a deeply nuanced concern that policy makers in

countries across the global North and South have struggled with. Here, more conceptual and

empirical exploration is needed and especially that which challenges dominant tropes that

characterise the poor as feckless drinkers frequenting ‘dens of iniquity’ that, by their very nature,

breed danger and vice. Such discourses do little to facilitate the integration of city spaces and its

citizens. They also do little to encourage self-reflection among the non-poor as to the riskiness and

consequences of their own drinking practices and habits. Ultimately drinking affects almost all South

Africans, whether at a distance or in close proximity, now or in the future. The conceptual and

pragmatic challenge may thus be to re-steer narratives of alcohol down a course in which all such

urban futures are entwined.

13

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