Historian Dr Nomalanga Mkhize provides a history lesson we all need to learn.

Nomalanga: The widespread economic impact of the ban on alcohol should scare us.

How much of our economy has dependent on us consuming huge amounts of alcohol?!?

Our economy is not healthy literally! We are dependent on hard drinking culture to keep jobs.

This is why we used to teach the history of Alcohol as part of the evolution of the SOUTH African economy.A400 year problem!

Beginning with the dop system of wages in the Cape.

Alcohol was further used by white gov to FUND TOWNSHIPS because they did not want ‘white tax money' to pay for their apartheid urban policy

Families watched Black men parting with their pitiful wages at the beerhall and then rolling back home in embarrassment and humiliation.

Later the wars of alcohol production were won by the 'English capital faction' through their development of SAB which effectively replaced the state alcohol monopoly through private market.

SAB was owned by Anglo-American - the company that destroyed Black men in the mines and fomented a social economy of violent masculinity in the hostels and urban areas.

That same violent hostel culture came to be ethnicised with the Inkathafication of hostel dwellers.

That same Inkathafication would spill over into the deaths of 20 000 PEOPLE in the 90s as the apartheid state pushed tens of thousands of pangas and guns into the townships and rural areas of KZN.

THIS IS THE WEB OF VIOLENCE which we reap to this day. Dr Nomalanga Mkhize