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Organisations of Xhosa-speaking youth -predominantly boys and young men -in the 1950s and 1960s were critical spaces for the construction of masculine identities in rural Ciskei and Transkei. In the context of post-Second World War industrialisation, collapsing reserve agriculture and apartheid rule, these organisations were critical sites for filtering influences and fashioning values and lifestyles. While boys and young men constantly reconstructed a distinction between boyhood and manhood around the axis of circumcision, they reinvented notions of masculinity in the shadow of decreasing prospects of establishing themselves as men with rural homesteads and herds of cattle. Moreover, in the absence of migrant fathers, youth organisations operated with considerable autonomy in rural localities. Concomitantly, the terrain on which boys and young men constructed their identities was shaped more by inter-group rivalry, aggressive behaviour and control over girls than by generational conflict.

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The study of liquor provides an opportunity for re-examining relations between states and economies. Recent works in European social history have shown that liquor occupies an ambiguous space between economic, social and cultural production while studies of liquor in colonial Africa repeatedly raise the problem of how economic freedoms pertaining to liquor were constructed in relation to the perceived character of persons in society. More specifically, the notion of ‘European liquor’ in colonial discourse suggests that the liquor of colonial masters should be aspired to. ‘European liquor’ was repeatedly contrasted to indigenous brews of lower alcoholic content that were pronounced to be uncivilized and primitive. It implied that drinkers of sorghum beer, palm wine and other beverages fermented from African grains and fruits would progress to the ‘superior’ beverages of their colonial masters. Critically, it assumed that transition to the higher alcoholic content required the discipline of ‘European’ lifestyles. Gradualism, however, often gave way to expediency. Colonial regimes repeatedly set aside fears of the effect of ‘foreign’ liquor on African subjects in the interest of revenue and political gains. The importation of gin by the colonial authority in Ghana provided the regime with revenue for its administration; in colonial Nigeria and elsewhere, liquor was used by the state as a means of winning allies among chiefs.

The South African brewing industry experienced enormous growth in the apartheid era, following the lifting of prohibition on the sale of 'European liquor' to Africans in 1961. Successive international brewers and local entrepreneurs sought to benefit from increased demand in the 1970s but were unable to withstand competition from South African Breweries (SAB), the dominant player in the industry. A decade of intense competition in the brewing industry ended with the intervention of the cabinet of the Afrikaner Nationalist government. SAB's status as 'sole supplier to the industry' remained virtually unchallenged until the demise of apartheid and the end of South Africa's international isolation. The end of apartheid and changes in the global brewing industry brought renewed competition to the South African beer market in the late 1990s and early 2000s.beer industry, South Africa, competition, apartheid,