Valentine Cascarino
They’re sour. They’ll get you drunk easily. And they’ll prepare you for your grave sooner than you expected. They’re called mbamba, bitla le ahlame and mqomboti, are made from fermented maize or bread and are drunk mostly by the homeless, sometimes with a bowl of sugar.
This is the new stuff provided by shebeen owners all over Johannesburg to those wanting to get high. The liquors are of low quality, made usually in unhygienic environments, and are cheap and highly intoxicating.
Rumour has it they often contain chemicals from car batteries, brake fluid, dirty water and rotten bread. Such poisons cause illnesses such as loss of appetite, coughs, deformities of the face, loss of weight, chest pain and a swelling of the lips and feet. Many consumers are believed to have been diagnosed with lumbago and rheumatism; others are believed to have been poisoned to death.
But consumers, manufacturers and shebeen owners love it. Manufacturers say that increasing the alcoholic content of any beer is about creativity. After all, drunkenness itself is a good remedy for insomnia, and a cheap anti-depressant.
“All we need each day is just R1 to get drunk and forget about the troubles of this world,” says a patron who gave his name as Tim Tlohoane. He believes that people who buy refined beer are wasting money a drinker will get just as drunk on homemade brew. “The purpose of drinking any beer is to feel its presence in your body, which is interpreted by the educated as drunkenness. So homemade brew and Western beer equally satisfy the criteria,” he says.
To make mqomboti, Tlohoane says one boils mealie meal in water until it is a soft porridge. It is then poured into a sizeable container. Mtombo mela or King Korn yeast is added and the whole mixture is submerged in a basin of hot water and left to ferment for three to four days. The chaff is sifted and the opaque solution preserved for a day or two before drinking. “If you want to add in any other powerful substance to further increase the alcoholic content, it’s up to your power of imagination,” he says.
The filmy mbamba is perhaps the easiest to make because it requires less time. Brown bread, brown sugar, yeast and malt are the main ingredients. The bread is broken into pieces, soaked in hot water and malt, brown sugar and yeast are added. The mixture is placed in a tin and left to ferment for 14 hours and then sifted. More brown sugar is added to improve the taste before drinking.
Bitla le ahlame (a Sotho phrase for “the grave is wide open”) is said to originate from Lesotho. It’s made the same way as mbaba, with a few Eurocentric substances, like loose horseshoe tobacco, added.
Police have begun raiding areas where the drinks are sold places like Westgate, a sprawling bus and taxi terminus in west Johannesburg. So the consumers who used to flock there now converge in many parks around Johannesburg or in abandoned buildings early in the morning or late in the evening to continue drinking these dangerous brews.