Pursuing Prohibition: Public Consumption, Policing, and the 1890 Cape Liquor Laws Commission

While the history of temperance and prohibition in South Africa has been well documented, especially in its twentieth-century connections to racialized systems of apartheid, this paper seeks to acknowledge the competing discourses surrounding prohibition and public consumption in the late nineteenth century. This paper will examine the 1889-1890 Cape Liquor Laws Commission, where a small group of colonial commissioners investigated the local sales, illegal trafficking, and public consumption of spirits by white and nonwhite actors. This involved soliciting the testimony of physicians, wine farmers, licensed merchants, temperance advocates, missionaries, nonwhite laborers, and indigenous peoples. Questions probed at the problematic existence of nonwhite peoples in white colonial spaces, whose participation in similar leisurely rituals as their white counterparts elicited widespread fear. The report also reveals increased efforts to police nonwhite peoples consuming alcohol, which would have contemporary ramifications in the Liquor Act of 1891, and long-term legacies in the twentieth century. This paper considers a more focused study of this document in particular, so as to center the voices of Black and indigenous persons of color. Their statements surrounding public consumption of liquor reveal competing ideologies about alcohol either as a form of leisure or a tool of colonial oppression. Though from a gendered lens, many nonwhite witnesses advocating for personal consumption of alcohol did not offer the same liberties to their female counterparts. Such discrepancies illustrate the persistence of patriarchal understandings of intoxication and participation in the public sphere. Moreover, in a colony where alcohol was readily offered as a form of wage for agricultural labor, it bears further study how colonial efforts persisted to prohibit nonwhite alcohol consumption within the public sphere. This analysis hopes to untangle these contradictions and provide a clearer image of how the ideas of racialized public alcohol consumption were pursued and negotiated.