A farewell to alcohol

Some are saved by Jesus and they are sober. For others, drunkenness is as natural as love-making, roasted meat and weekend football. In northern Kenya we brew a honey mead called muratina; then there’s a millet beer and strongest of all is a moonshine, changa’a, which you can smell from several huts away and it tastes like battery acid.

Booze soaks into the corners of life in the village or the slum. I’ve been in places, on paydays for example, where the scenes resemble Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s tableaux of peasants committing all the seven deadly sins. A changa’a drinker isn’t just drunk, he’s catatonic with the onset of blindness. Late on Saturdays in the middle of nowhere you’ll pass a man tottering about, quarrelling with the night air, pointing and stumbling. In South Sudan they make an evil spirit from cassava that turns a man’s eyeballs bright pink.