"You guys are just the same as those nyaope and whoonga kids!" That was my wife’s comment after she eavesdropped on a conversation with a mutual friend who was telling me how he’d bought bootleg gin from an "underground supplier" at a heart-stopping R600 for a bottle that usually costs around R130.
This was two weeks ago, before the relaxation of lockdown conditions to allow the sale of alcohol again.
And when I say my wife eavesdropped on us I am not being accurate. The conversation with my friend was on Zoom, and my wife happened to walk into my office at the time.
That in itself is bizarre. War stories are usually told under a tree, around a fire or down by the poolside. But thanks to Covid-19 our lives won’t be the same again.
We tell our war stories using Zoom and social media now.
Anyway, back to our story: my wife said the fact that my friend not only paid ridiculous amounts of money — he bought four bottles — for alcohol and actually risked being arrested while at it, showed that he had a serious addiction problem.
She likened it to addiction to whoonga, the deadly drug that is killing kids in urban areas.
Liquor sale restrictions showed me that my friends have not forgotten how to brew traditional concoctions
This was said in jest. But many truths are said in jest.
Like crack in the US in the 1990s, whoonga makes those addicted to it go to extremes in order to secure it. Kids will sell their mothers’ furniture to get money for it.
Lockdown did indeed show us how addicted we are as a nation — to alcohol and cigarettes. My friend who paid so much money for those bottles of gin is not an exception.
There is another friend who bought four packets of cigarettes at R300 each. And they were not regular cigarettes, but dodgy brands from Zimbabwe.
He bought them from an intermediary who’d bought them at R150 each at Jeppe hostel. These cigarettes ordinarily sell for R30 a packet at the same hostel.
The intermediary was happy to tell him: "You’re going to pay R300 a packet, or else you can go to Jeppe yourself." My desperate friend paid.
I’ve heard of people using drones to collect liquor from bootleggers as well. More desperation.
With the lifting of liquor sale restrictions my friend was angry. He’d spent so much money on alcohol at inflated prices, only to be witness to the lifting of the restrictions days later.
I laughed. Mainly because he expected me to sympathise with him. I couldn’t. First, I don’t smoke. Second, I have deliberately refused to consume alcohol since the imposition of lockdown even though I have bottles of good wine in my house.
Liquor sale restrictions also showed me that many of my friends have not forgotten how to brew traditional concoctions — everything ranging from umqombothi, the regular sorghum brew, to imfulamfula.
Imfulamfula is made from a mixture of breadcrumbs, yeast and crushed pineapple.
As a Zulu man, I was taught at a young age how to brew umqombothi. But I’ve never tried brewing imfulamfula. I have tasted it, though, and the kick I got from it told me — even then, back in the 1980s — that it is deadly crap. I had no intention of learning how to brew it.
Yet, during lockdown I’ve seen people bragging on social media how they were brewing imfulamfula, or ipaynapu, as they call it in Joburg.
To speed up the fermentation process, they were adding ingredients I’ve never heard of before. And I thought: we’re in trouble.
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