Drunk in Africa
March 7th, 2006
In my daily reddit check, I found a great article. The author wrote down the same thing I experienced in november 2004 when I was in South Africa.
As often in SA we were in the middle of nowhere, just relaxin’, fishing, watching animals, eating, … We stayed a weekend at a hunting ranch in Rustewinter, about 50 km outside pretoria. No no, not for hunting, just for heaving fun. Closeby there was somekind of town, it was actually more a collection of a few shacks. A friend of us worked sometimes with the people that lived there. We went for a drink in the local “shebeen“. A shebeen is nothing more then a small shack where they sell beer. There were like 20 people sitting outside in a circle, we just joined the circle and ordered a beer. I’ll never forget you had to buy the beer in a 1 litre bottle, so we got drunk in no time. After my first bottle of “black label” under the afternoon sun, I felt already dizzy drunk but it felt great:
I spotted almost only men in our cosy circle, there was one elder women. She was definatelly the village oldest and was constantly drunk as hell. She had a small plastic cup and everyone who opened a bottle needed to give her a sip. That was the courtesy of the shebeen. I still remember she was constantly talking to us in a very strange language we couldn’t understand. But she seemed very friendly so I tried to talk to her, but I’m not sure she understood any word of my english. With the younger men we talked about a lot of things, we asked if they solded sigarettes and from the moment we said the word ’sigarettes’. We saw a man rushing away to the neighbour village to get us some sigarettes, about half an hour later we got our sigarettes! My friends called it the bush radio. Before we got our sigarettes, our shebeen friends helped us out with rolling some “tobacco” (?) in newspaper paper. I remember a big guy lighting the funny sigarette and passing it to us, it tasted like BBQ.
I think we sat there the whole afternoon, just doing nothing besides drinking beer and it was so fun. I think it was one of the best experiences I had in SA. Just talking, making jokes and doing nothing ! I wish we had bars like that in Europe… Those people have almost nothing, no money, no tv, no cellphone, no work. They don’t complain and keep smiling, they have beer and eachother, that helps them trough the day. I wouldn’t like to be in there place, but if I was, I would do exactly the same…
The article made me very nostalgic …
