Sarah -- it's about east Africa, but you might look at Justin Willis'
website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/History/web/cover.htm
        I'm forwarding this to two Nigerian colleagues in case they have
sources to suggest.
        By the way, Africans have by no means lost sight of the fact
that women traditionally made the alcohol (although in some parts, only
the men traditionally drank it).  Thus you can find portrayals of women
making opaque beer on stamps. 
        There's quite a substantial scholarship on female brewers in
Africa, though mostly for eastern and southern Africa. There are a
couple of relevant historical papers in Crush & Ambler, eds., Liquor and
Labor in Southern Africa, 1992.  One of several relevant Nordic studies
of the contemporary situation is Johanna Maula, Small-scale production
of food and traditional alcoholic beverages in Benin and Tanzania:
implications for the promotion of female entrepreneurship. Helsinki:
Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies, 1997.  Colson and Scudder's
book, For Prayer and Profit, documents how improving roads and
industrialization took control of the beer supply and the income from it
out of the hands of village women over a 40-year period in southern
Zambia -- the men were quite willing to run the taverns, though they had
been unwilling to make the beer. 


-----Original Message-----
From: Sarah Hand Meacham [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, 1 July 2001 12:01 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: African alcohol recipes/distillery project


Dear scholars,

Does anyone happen to know of a source that includes
alcohol recipes from western Africa?  I've performed the
usual literature searches, but since I'm not as familiar
with African history I could easily have missed something.
I'm particularly interested in the 1500-1800 era, but would
appreciate any references or suggestions at all.

While I'm writing in, I thought I'd tag onto the Distillery
Project topic.  In my research on alcohol production in
the early Chesapeake I've run across a number of receipts
(1790-1820) stating that someone has or has not paid the
required distillery taxes in VA, MD, and PA.  What has
surprised me are the number of stills that appear to have
belonged to women.  In the receipts the tax collector
states that it is the woman's still.  Have others run
across this?  Did it strike anyone else as remarkable?

I'm interested in learning not only if early 19th century
woman commonly owned stills (or if I just found a few freak
situations), but also how Americans have forgotten that it
was women who used to make much of the alcohol.  Women
brewed in other countries as well; is their involvement
known outside academia?  Is it only in America that we have
forgotten the gendered aspect of alcohol production?  I'm
curious about how countries remember (or mostly appear not
to remember) their alcohol histories.

thank you,


Sarah Meacham
************************

Sarah Hand Meacham
Ph.D. Candidate
Dept. of History
University of Virginia