Similar beer-laden stories and ceremonies recur across sub-Saharan Africa. At the southern tip of the continent, the king of the Zulus claimed in 1883 that “[millet] beer is the food of the Zulus; they drink it as the English drink coffee.” It was also the “food of the gods,” and, as noted by a seventeenth-century explorer, it was essential to feasts and honoring royal ancestors. Men of the Tsonga tribe, who were conquered by the Zulus, could spend a week away from home going from one beer-drinking session or “drink” to another.
The pastoralist Xhosas, the second largest indigenous group in South Africa (of which Nelson Mandela is a member), have much the same relationship with Bantu beer. It is made from millet or sometimes maize, which was introduced from the Americas. They drank it in such quantity and so incessantly that the British provincial administration in the early 1900s passed measures—ultimately unsuccessful—to control what were described as “nocturnal jollifications.” A frequent topic of conversation among the Xhosas was where the next beer was coming from and how good it might be. Beer also is imbued with powerful ritualistic and symbolic significance: the ancestors delighted in it when they were alive and expected their descendants to keep brewing and offering it to them “in spirit.”
Village women in Malawi make beer from sorghum, which provided the population with 35 percent of their caloric intake in the 1930s. The average consumption for men has held steady at five liters per day, though some of it is now commercially brewed. As Benjamin Platt, a nutrition scientist, stressed, “Records from several parts of Africa show that men will rarely drink anything but beer.” The Pondo, another Zulu people in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, rank beer feasts above meat feasts because beer lends a party atmosphere to the work involved in organizing the feasts. And the Suri of southern Ethiopia say, “Where there is no beer, there is no work.”
In Kenya, a Masai informant of Justin Willis, then director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, insisted that “if there is no beer, it’s not a ritual.” The Masai sometimes used other sacred fluids in their rituals—mixing mead and blood, sprinkling fermented milk, and spitting saliva—but only beer was versatile enough for every occasion and, as the “drink of the country,” was enjoyed by both the living and the dead.
A related group, the Iteso of Kenya and Uganda, believe that the ancestors are greedy for finger-millet beer. The dead must be placated by five funerals spread out over many years. For a child to be named and achieve personhood, the maternal grandmother must first dip her finger in beer and let the child suck on it. If the child swallows, the “sucking name” is accepted. Frequent beer drinking is governed by a specific protocol. In the hut of the hosts (husband and wife), the sexes are separated into two concentric circles around the communal beer jar; parents and children of the hosts sit to the right as one enters, and grandparents, grandchildren, and siblings, together with the hosts, to the left. Individuals on each side generally share drinking tubes, and drinking from a communal jar emphasizes familial bonds.
Many other rules apply, some of which have obvious rationales, such as removing the straw from the jar when sneezing, and not blowing air through it and bubbling the beer. Less obvious guidelines include not holding the straw in one’s left hand and not looking directly into the beer vessel. It is also forbidden for a husband and wife to share drinking tubes with their respective parents-in-law. This stricture can be rescinded only if the wife prepares a special brew for her father-in-law at the beginning of the drink and then presents him with the drinking tube and takes a drink herself at his request. An even more intimate exchange occurs between the husband and his mother-in-law: while standing in the thatched portico of the wife’s sleeping hut, each takes a mouthful of beer and sprays it on the other. Elders among the Iteso are least hemmed in by custom, perhaps because age is equated with wisdom and they are only a step away from becoming ancestors themselves. They spend afternoons wandering the village paths, toting long reed straws in special carriers like so many billiard cues, in search of the next serving of beer.
In eastern Uganda, fifty or more men might gather around the central beer pot to share a single drinking tube, each being allowed three minutes to draw from the pot. When modern culture intruded to suggest that more than beer might be shared by this practice—for example, a communicable disease—the men rented sterilized straws or brought their own specially decorated and labeled straws. The men probably should have held their ground, as the alcohol content of the brew makes it more hygienic than the local water.
From the highlands of Ethiopia, where mead is highly regarded as the “good one,” the Blue Nile flows through the Sudan and into Nubia. Here, in the eastern Sahel, the semiarid scrub grasslands south of the Sahara Desert, sorghum has been king for thousands of years. It remains the most important crop for all of sub-Saharan Africa, feeding hundreds of millions of people and providing three-quarters of the caloric intake, mostly as beer, in many areas. How did it become such a staple?
The greatest genetic diversity of sorghum—some 450 local strains—occurs in the Sudan, and it has been proposed that Sorghum bicolor, which is closest to the wild progenitor Sorghum verticilliflorum, was domesticated here around 6000 B.C. and spread westward to the Atlantic coast. The key site is Nabta Playa in southern Egypt, deep in the eastern Sahara. Excavations here by Fred Wendorf of Southern Methodist University uncovered a series of hut floors, replete with fireplaces, numerous large storage pits, wells, and pottery. The settlement, dating back to 6000 B.C., then lay on the edge of a lake surrounded by relatively dry terrain and received much higher rainfall than today.
From tens of thousands of carefully collected archaeobotanical specimens, it became clear that the inhabitants of Nabta Playa had an intimate knowledge of the plant resources in their environs. They also fished and hunted hare and gazelle, but plants were their forte. Their storage pits held a plethora of wild seeds, fruits, tubers, and grains of some forty plants, which could have sustained them throughout the year. In addition to sorghum, there were several varieties of millet, bulrush, Rumex (an herb genus in the buckwheat family), legumes, Setaria (bristlegrass), mustard, caper, fruits and seeds of Ziziphus (a tree genus in the buckthorn family, which includes Chinese jujube), and various unidentified tubers. Such exuberant plant exploitation strikes one as remarkably like what was happening at Monte Verde in Chile at 13,000 B.P. (see chapter 7) and, no doubt, in many other parts of the world as the last Ice Age gave way to moister, milder climatic conditions.
The finding of bulrush (a related species was documented at Monte Verde), tubers, sorghum and millet, and very sweet Ziziphus fruit at Nabta Playa raises the intriguing possibility that one or more of these plants was made into a fermented beverage. No mortars for crushing the grains or rhizomes were found, but that does not preclude the possibility that they existed. The much earlier site of Wadi Kubbaniya near Aswan, also excavated by Wendorf, yielded numerous grinding stones, which have been radiocarbon dated to 16,000 B.C. Starch grains embedded in the stones’ surfaces show that more tubers were pulverized than other plants, just as at Monte Verde. Could it be that, in both areas, the people had happened on a particularly effective way of preparing wild roots for saccharification by crushing them first, to make them easier to chew and then ferment? Alternatively, a fermented beverage could easily have been made from the Ziziphus fruit at Nabta Playa.
Such hypotheses, however, need more direct evidence. In 1996, Fred Wendorf sent me some Nabta Playa pottery, recovered from several storage pits, for chemical analysis. They likely represented vessels that had been emptied of their contents and discarded into the pits. Because we had not worked out the chemical fingerprint compounds for any of the plants that we might likely detect, in particular sorghum and millet, I decided to delay any analysis. A scholarly furor over the dating of supposed domesticated plants at the two sites, including barley, lentils, and chickpeas, later shown to be intrusive and not good evidence for extremely early domestication, further dampened my ent
husiasm. As I was writing this chapter, my curiosity was once again aroused, and we tested the sherds. Unfortunately, they yielded no ancient organics, only calcium carbonate from the desert sands.
Although tubers might well have been ground and processed into fermented beverages during the Palaeolithic period, cereals took central stage during the Neolithic. Sorghum emerged as the most likely ingredient along the upper Nile and its tributaries. This grain, along with several others and Ziziphus seeds, was accidentally imprinted onto pottery jars at many Neolithic sites because of its abundance. The many thousands of grinding stones found at Kadero, Um Direiwa, and Khartoum in the Sudan are believed to have been used in processing sorghum.
At Nabta Playa, we can already see the pendulum swinging toward sorghum, whose grains have been directly radiocarbon dated to ca. 6000 B.C. and are unquestionably contemporary with the settlement. This cereal, unlike others at the site, was concentrated in large amounts in some huts and not intermixed with other grains or grasses. In other words, it was being processed en masse for a specific purpose—and that objective might well have been to make a fermented beverage.
Chemical analyses also suggest that the sorghum seeds at Nabta Playa, although they externally resemble the wild type, have some traits in common with the domesticated bicolor subspecies. Whether sorghum was domesticated this early, or not until the first millennium A.D., as some argue, is not of critical importance. The wild species, which would have been abundant across the moister Sahara and the Sahel in the early Holocene, can be harvested simply by beating or shaking the grain from the heads into baskets. Unlike wild barley and wheat, whose brittle stems cause their seeds to be dispersed on the ground before they can be collected, wild sorghum was gathered for millennia. Its popularity was evident even in the heyday of the cosmopolitan Egyptian New Kingdom, when quantities were buried with Tutankhamun, perhaps to feed his animals in the afterlife.
Sorghum beer is certainly a great favorite in the eastern Sahel today. The grain is sometimes saccharified by women chewing and spitting it out, a technique unattested in ancient Egypt but widely used in the Americas in making corn beer and still found on some Pacific islands in making rice beer. More typically, the grain was made into a fermented dough, which can be further processed into a heavy porridge or dumplings but mainly goes into beer. Because sorghum lacks gluten, it is not made into bread; it thus distinguished the diet of sub-Saharan Africa from that of the Middle East until barley and wheat were introduced into Africa during Islamic times in the seventh century. Before then, the peoples of the eastern Sahel were apparently content with their gruels and beers. To judge from the distinctive tall-necked, globular jars that were deposited in Nubian tombs for millennia, sorghum and millet beers were also considered essential for the dead. Ethnographic studies of the Nuba, Nuer, and other Sudanic peoples show that ceremonial, social, and other uses of beer in this area closely resemble those elsewhere in Africa. Festivals to assure enough rain, initiations, work parties, beer drinks, and the installation of priests all require quantities of the brew.
Sorghum beer making probably progressed rapidly across the Sahel from east to west after 6000 B.C., because of the generally mild, humid climate that continued through the sixth millennium. At this time, a huge delta system extended inland more than 3,500 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Chad. Fishing was a major source of livelihood, dramatically illustrated when an eight-meter-long mahogany dugout canoe was found intact at Dufuna near Lake Chad. In the eastern Sahel, thousands of fish bones, representing some thirty species and including deep-water perch more than two meters in length, have been recovered from sites along the Nile and its tributaries.
Wherever one looks in the expanse of the Sahel and Sahara during the early Neolithic period, one is struck not only by the very similar lithics and pottery but above all by the prevalence of bone harpoons and fishhooks. Fishers were also joined by pastoralists, who had begun to move their flocks of Barbary sheep and unhumped cattle freely through the region. Both groups probably had a role in transmitting new cultural and technological ideas.
In the upper Volta River region, where I was taken aback to discover that brewers were still mashing and fermenting sorghum in facilities that resembled those of 5,500 years ago at Hierakonpolis and other Upper Egyptian sites, beer manufacturing likely arrived at a very early date. In Burkina Faso today, only red sorghum goes into the brew, and it generally yields a light, brownish-red beer with about 4 percent alcohol. Rarely, the alcohol is elevated by mixing in white sorghum, which contains more sugar, or boiling down the wort to half its volume before fermenting.
According to tradition, only women make sorghum beer, which accounts for half of the caloric intake in Burkina Faso. In 1981, 700 million liters of beer were made, equivalent to 236 liters per person. As women and children consume much less than men, each male likely drinks an average of a liter or two every day.
Rather than use a fermented dough as a starter, Burkina Faso beer makers first sprout the sorghum and make a malt. This procedure takes seven or eight days: the grain is submerged in water in large jars for two days, then allowed to sprout for another two or three days, and finally sun dried for several days, depending on the season. Mashing takes place over two or three days in the large jars of the special mashing facility. The resulting unfermented sweet wort is clarified by adding the bark of raisin bush (Grewia flavescens) and okra (Abelmoschus esculentus), and it is sometimes served to children, women, and Muslims before fermentation. The remainder of the wort is cooled in the mashing jars, and yeast gleaned from the jar bottoms of an earlier fermentation is added, recalling the bowls that were probably used to collect yeast from the Prehistoric Egyptian mashing vats. An initially pasty and milky substance is dried in the air and sun, yielding grayish crumbs of yeast.
Fermentation takes place during a single night. Individual brewers have secret formulas of special ingredients, which might include bark of the whitethorn tree (Acacia campylacantha), the fruit of the soapberry tree (Balanites aegyptica), or grains of hallucinogenic jimson (Datura stramonium). Some groups add honey to the beer presented at funerals to bring the alcohol content up to 10 percent.
Secular and sacred uses of sorghum beer permeate traditional West African societies. The creator god is said to have told women how to make sorghum beer and porridge. When consumed, these staples caused humans to lose their tails and fur and become truly human, a motif that recalls the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh epic.
The memorial funeral for adult men (“lords of the earth”), which elevates them to the status of ancestors, exemplifies the centrality of beer in these societies. It takes place months or years after death because of the huge expense involved. On average, every adult at the funeral, which can encompass hundreds of people in a village, drinks ten to twenty liters of beer per day in the course of a week-long celebration. After the ceremony, gourds of beer, plates of porridge, and the personal effects of the deceased are placed on the grave. Then, as in an Irish wake, the music, dancing, and games begin. Without the drink, it is difficult to imagine where the energy and enthusiasm for this nonstop activity would come from.
As if the year-round cycle of celebrations and special ceremonies were not enough, everyone is guaranteed some fun on Thursday, the “day of the ancestors.” A sacrificial chicken is presented, along with a gourd of beer, and then rich and poor alike are proffered quantities of the beverage and encouraged to join in the festivities. Beer “drinks” in which the beer gourd is passed around are also very popular, and as women brewers are accustomed to open their huts early, patrons can start their day off with a liquid breakfast.
How the Upper Egyptian mashing techniques of 3500 B.C. reached the upper Volta region (Burkina Faso) is still an enigma. The technology had gone out of use in Egypt by the early Old Kingdom, so the transfer must have occurred earlier. Perhaps it made its way along the upper Nile into Nubia and Ethiopia. As the exploitation of sorghum spread across the Sahel, it might have been tr
ansmitted from one settlement to the next, eventually reaching West Africa. This scenario counters the widely held notion of very early independent domestication and cultural development in sub-Saharan Africa, divorced from any Afro-Asiatic migration or influence from Egypt. It does fit with a more nuanced version of diffusion in which the Neolithic period of the eastern Sahel was a hotbed of experimentalism, which had far-reaching consequences for the rest of Africa.
One clue that this reconstruction is not contrived comes from a rock shelter at 1,500 meters above sea level deep in the Tassili n’Ajjer Mountains in the Algerian Sahara, an area that teemed with life from the end of the last Ice Age until about 3000 B.C. According to its discoverer, Henri Lhote, the paintings on the walls of so-called Dr. Khen shelter are the “most accomplished” of the many thousands that his expedition located and recorded throughout the Sahara, and represent the “masterpiece of the Neolithic naturalist school.” Radiocarbon dates from encampments and nearby paintings suggest that the rock shelter was painted around 3000–2500 B.C. or earlier.
One painting in the shelter stands out for its sheer size (4.5 meters long by 3 meters high, covering an entire wall), its vivid colors, and its dramatic depiction of a drinking ceremony (see plate 10). We see a small encampment of tents, set amid sheep and cattle herds and surrounded by wild giraffes, antelopes, and ostriches. A woman sits at the entrance to each tent, her hair carefully coiffed and accented by a high barrette, dressed in a beautifully woven and flounced dress and shawl, and with a dark animal skin tied around her waist. Each woman looks every bit the Minoan “mother goddess” (see chapter 5). At one tent, which is somewhat set apart from the others, the woman drinks from a large, decorated jar through a long straw. She leans intently over the jar, one hand on the drinking tube and the other on what has been interpreted as an ostrich-egg stopper which is punctured by the tube, and sucks up the beverage. A male, carrying a similarly decorated and stoppered jar, exits to the left of the imbibing woman. He is preceded by three other men, each wearing leather breeches and shirts and with one or two feathers stuck in their long, loosely strung hair. They approach another male, who is kneeling and drinking from a decorated and stoppered jar in the same fashion as the imbibing woman. The male imbiber is assisted in holding his long straw by a second figure, whose fuller beard, prominent animal-hide vest, and a large pendant suspended from his neck torque mark him as older and of higher status.
Uncorking the Past Page 32