Region & History

How did beer come to Johannesburg? With gold. When gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, a city of tents, mine shafts, and migrant workers sprang up within just a few years. Charles Glass recognized that the miners were thirsty and began selling them beer. His Castle Brewery gave rise to South African Breweries in 1895, and Castle Lager from Johannesburg has been one of the country's best-known beers ever since. The brand now belongs to AB InBev, which acquired SAB in 2016.

The workers brought their own beer into the city with them: Umqombothi, a beer made from sorghum and maize that was traditionally brewed and sold by women. For many families, it was an important source of income. The white city administrations soon saw something else in it, namely revenue and control.

The so-called Durban System turned this into policy. A 1908 law in Natal permitted only municipalities to brew and serve beer to Africans, while home brewing was banned. The profits from the municipal beer halls flowed into hostels, administration, and police, which is to say, into the surveillance of the very patrons they served. The model was later copied in other cities. Resistance was not long in coming: in June 1959, around 2,000 women protested in front of the beer halls in Durban against the ban on home brewing.

Where prohibitions exist, alternative spaces emerge. This is how shebeen culture grew, home taverns in living rooms and backyards, often run by women known as shebeen queens. In Sophiatown and later in Soweto, neighbors, musicians, and journalists gathered there. In 1962, Africans were for the first time legally permitted to buy alcohol anywhere. During the 1976 uprising, students in Soweto attacked nearly every beer hall, many viewing them as tools of control. Today, large corporations, small craft brewers, and home brewers share a history in which there are no easy winners.