Going, going… gongoTanzania’s taboo tipple

By Erick Kabendera
Raphael John,* 30, holds a Diploma in Teaching and teaches mathematics at Mwalimu Nyerere Primary School. It’s a good job and a respected position in society, but what is unusual about a graduate like John and some other people in top positions in various organisations across the country, is that he got there on booze money.
John’s mother, Jessica Joseph, 65, was able to afford his school fees, from class one to form six, through selling the illicit brew gongo.
John was brought up in the Kigoma region. When his father died in 1983, his mother had no alternative means of raising money to take care of the family, other than vending gongo. John and his mother bought gongo at midnight from wholesalers who produced it in the forest, and took it to the village where his mother, had a pub.
“The police were a problem. We knew gongo was prohibited by law, but we depended on it to survive and later for me to study, ” he says adding that the police operations to curb the gongo industry threatened his family’s survival because every coin they ever spent came from the gongo business.
John says to avoid police harassment, they developed clever techniques to circumnavigate the threat like burying jerry cans filled with gongo in the ground in front of the sitting area of their house and spreading straw mats on the top.
In some areas around Tanzania, gongo is described as a traditional drink offered to the elderly guests to symbolise respect. This may be true, but its popularity is unrivalled and as in John’s case, families that engage in the business can earn enough money to support.
Gongo processing techniques tend to vary from region to region. In the Karagwe district of the Kagera region, gongo producers usually spend sleepless nights along the riverside with locally made processing equipment, brewing gongo.
They use a simple chemical distillation process, which involves taking sour rubisi alcohol - another traditional brews made out of bananas, and pouring it all into a big or medium-size iron drum. The drum is put on the fire to boil while its top section is tightly covered with a banana tree base to ensure the steam doesn’t evaporate. A hole is then made across the drum and a bamboo log inserted and directed to the river into a kettle. The kettle is put into a basin in the water for cooling. The steam produced from the boiling drum, through the log to the kettle is the final product, gongo.
Much like varieties of wine, vodka or schnapps, depending on the crops grown locally and the conditions, each region will have its own style of gongo.
However, as with anything where humans and alcohol are involved, there’s a negative side to gongo consumption. Illegal brews by their very nature are informally created and standards or checks are non-applicable. It is for this reason that the police try to be strict about gongo. Only recently in Machakos, Kenya, 60 people died in June after consuming a drink laced with methanol
In Dar es Salaam, the war against gongo distributors and distillers is tough and despite their zealous approach, the police also have been accused of working hand in hand with both distillers and distributors. Some distillers say they paid the police to protect them while running their businesses. An example of police involvement would be Police Inspector Wambura, who was caught distributing gongo in Manzese Midizini between 1998 and1999.
Between 1990/91, a drum of gongo under distillation at Mabibo army barracks exploded and killed one child injuring another. The distiller later died from his injuries while the case was still pending in court.
James Mutayoba says that ten years ago his late father; Emanuel Mutayoba lost his high ranking job and tragically his life, because of a gongo drinking habit. He would even drink gongo in the office and as a result, would cause chaos and fail to work. His mother, Gertrude Mutayoba says she became a gongo retailer to support her family after she split from her husband because of his abusive behaviour, especially when he was drunk.
“We couldn’t sleep when he came home drunk at night. He would beat me up like a snake and harass everyone. In the end I had no alternative but to end the marriage,” Mutayoba says.
Mutayoba adds that she was surprised at how gongo twisted her husband’s life around, turning him from an executive to a drunkard. In the past, she says, her husband was a moderate gongo drinker, but she never expected his drinking habits to accelerate and cause the family to fall apart.
As nobody could tolerate her husband’s behaviour and with his income drying up, perhaps ironically, in order to make ends meet Gertrude took to selling the very thing that was killing her husband. She moved into a muddy rental house from the family home and started selling gongo. Mutayoba senior continued drinking seriously until he died in September 2000.
“It was raining heavily that night. He came to greet us for a bit and then left. The next morning, someone came to my house and broke the news that my husband had been found dead in a water tunnel,” Mutayoba says sadly.
It was assumed that he had drunk a lot of gongo, fallen in the tunnel and failed to pull himself out of the water. “The medical report clearly showed that his death was caused by excessive drinking,” she says.
The incident did not deter Mutayoba from selling gongo. She says she had no alternative because she had a responsibility to pay her children’s school fees.
“ I used all the money I got from selling gongo to send my three children to school,” she says.
Mutayoba disapproves of police officers conducting raids and inspecting villages house by house in search of gongo retailers. She says the alcohol is a tradition and people have used it for years. “In our tradition, we give some gongo or rubisi and dried chewing coffee to visitors,” she says.
Mutayoba adds that in most of the areas in Kagera region, gongo is produced from rubisi brew, which is legal.
“So, why should gongo be prohibited?” she questions.
Mutayoba junior says he quit drinking after his father died. But, at some traditional events, he finds it hard to resist drinking gongo because each of the family members, especially men, is expected to drink gongo as a sign of manhood.
“Some of my brothers’ drinking habits near my father’s,” he says.
Mutabazi Lugaziya is a High Court of Tanzania advocate who has been a magistrate for ten years. He says the Moshi (Moshi Manufacturing and Distillation) Act No. 62 of 1966 is the law that controls gongo in Tanzania. According to Lugaziya, section 2 of the Act says the chief chemist is legally entitled to declare a certain substance, as being gongo and to qualify it should contain at least one percent of alcohol volume.
Under the law, Lugaziya says, if someone is caught with anything believed to be gongo, the chief chemist should prove its alcoholic content. But in the case that involved Kanzaga Shillungu v/s the republic in 1982, Tanzania Law Report (TLR) 138, the court ruled that gongo could also be identified by its smell and its effects on drinkers.
“Section 19 of the law stipulates the circumstances of which possession of gongo could be regarded as legal,” Lugaziya says adding that the law identifies some people who are licensed to possess gongo for the purpose of taking it to the collection centres to be processed. “This means some people are entitled to carry gongo, but not for the purpose of drinking it. The license is for ferrying to where the law directs,” he says.
In 1981 the law was amended (Written Laws Miscellaneous Amendment Act No 22) extended the translation of gongo. According to Lugaziya, if someone is accused of unlawful possession of gongo in Karagwe and is charged in Dar es Salaam, it isn’t important the gongo be brought to Dar es Salaam to complement the evidence.
“In the case of Tabu Fikwa v/s the Republic of 1988 in TLR 48, Judge Barnabas Samatha gave a foundation on the people caught with gongo. Samatha said before declaring that gongo is illegal, that the court should look into the surrounding social issues before judging the culprit,” he says.
As a retired magistrate Lugaziya, says such an area is very challenging in the legal affairs. He says he understands Judge Samatha’s sentiments because many people survive by selling gongo.
“In keeping with their incomes, most people can’t afford modernised brew,” Lugaziya says. He suggests gongo collection centres for local manufacturers be established for refining the alcohol correctly as the law directs.
Lugaziya admits knowing some of the most reputable “land brothers” whose education was financed by the gongo business. He says people selling gongo with good intentions like paying for their children’s school fees should be given lenient sentences like community service.
The big question is should gongo be illegal in the first place? Is it not just a national traditional drink? The French have their wine and champagne, the Portuguese Port, half of Eastern Europe claim vodka as their national tipple, while the Alpine countries enjoy schnapps? Liquor producers in Tanzania need to come into play and produce gongo of high quality that achieves certain specified levels of alcohol content, hygiene and method.
According to information on the East African Breweries Ltd. website, Uganda Waragi, a Ugandan brew, was upgraded from Enguli, local gin. Before the Enguli Act of 1965 was passed in Uganda, the Enguli was crude and lethal alcohol. The law approved the distillation of Enguli under the licence. The licensed dealers sold the Enguli to the new distillery, The East African Distillers. The local Enguli was collected from local suppliers and distilled to make Uganda Waragi. Surely such a system can be implemented in Tanzania?
Johannes Mutanyatta is a professor at the University of Dar es Salaam. He says the first class gongo produced in Kagera; Mbandule once won an award against Uganda Warage at the alcohol exhibition in Uganda. “ I heard about the project coordinated by Tanzania Breweries Ltd. to upgrade the gongo in Tanzania, but I don’t know where it ended,” Mtanyatta says.
He says gongo can be produced from any crop in Tanzania but he says in his home village, Kayanga in Karagwe, gongo is produced from bananas. Mutanyatta and other lecturers from the faculty of commerce and chemical engineering at the University of Dar es Salaam are proposing the idea of upgrading gongo. As part of the project, they want to manufacture simple gongo processing machines, within the economic reach of local people.
“In Karagwe, people use their feet to crash bananas to produce Rubisi, which later goes into producing gongo. We want to get rid of that old processing method by producing portable and affordable simple machines to produce gongo, ” Mtanyatta says.
If the project succeeds, Mtanyatta says it would play a crucial role in fighting poverty.
Mtanyatta, whose mother was an expert at testing the quality of gongo during the process, says they are now conducting research into setting up a gongo formula.
He points out that even the police, who arrest people with gongo, drink or sell it, only eventually surrender the empty drums to their seniors. “We can’t successfully attain a poverty eradication policy without coming up with plans for developing indigenous businesses,” says Mtanyatta.
Joshua Katabwa works with the Tanzania Bureau of Standard (TBS) as the Chief Quality Assurance Officer. He says once gongo from Kagera region was taken to TBS and the portable spirit specification, Tzs 468:1992 was made. The findings revealed that there was nothing wrong with it. “It was a regular Gongo brew and they had no problem at all. I think the problem here is the colonial mentality because gongo was prohibited during the colonial era. Colonial rulers wanted to sell their own spirits,” he says.
Katabwa says it’s not the duty of TBS to advise the government to declare gongo legal. Stakeholders should convince the government to get rid of those laws and then the government would tell TBS to do its job.
“The government is worried that gongo contains a higher alcoholic content, but in fact other spirits tend to have higher alcoholic contents than gongo,” he says.
Katabwa says TBS has its doors open for any person who wants to bring in gongo brew for analysis as long as customers abide by their regulations.
When Staphord Kalokola was a university of Dar es Salaam student, he was the chairman for Karagwe University Students Association (Kausa). The association wrote a proposal to Karagwe District Municipal Council selling the idea of upgrading gongo. “We had organised for chemistry students to work with us, but we failed because of our reliance on parliamentarians to assist us, which they never did,” he says.
Kalokola says in their district, coffee, which was a commercial product, is no longer marketable. “If the government does away with the old laws, then bananas will become marketable and increase people’s income,” Kalokola says.
A few months ago, councillors of Karagwe district council complained that the district was loosing a lot of revenues from the ban on gongo. They said gongo was smuggled into a neighbouring country, processed and sold back to Tanzania as a legal commodity.
The counsellors’ meeting soon formed a commission to explore the possibility of legalising gongo.
If it is true that declaring gongo legal can bring about positive economic development for the benefit of the people, then the authorities have no reason to maintain gongo’s current restrictive laws. Small business, students, professors and your average citizen are all clamouring for gongo to be legalised. If stringent controls are placed on the manufacture of Tanzania’ favourite home-grown tipple to ensure drinkers’ safety, then there is no reason why it should not be legalised. Who knows perhaps there will be an export market?