What the Temperature of Beer Can Tell Us About Socioeconomics

I had a bit of a shock last night when I walked up to the local beer stand and asked for a Nile. I bit my tongue as the shopkeeper went into the fridge, and was slightly taken aback when she handed me a frosty bottle and told me how much it cost – 2500 shillings, or roughly 97 cents. The price wasn’t the source of surprise, but rather the fact that she didn’t ask me if I wanted the drink warm or cold. Cold it was.

Cold beer could be hard to come by in Nsamyba and especially Ndejje last year, and when it was available a warm option was still on the table. This was before a dam in Jinga was completed, and load shedding (a pretty term meaning government controlled power outages) was rampant in the slums and villages deemed unnecessary for electricity. As a result, many Ugandans are accustomed and sometimes prefer warm beer. You don’t need electricity to drink, of course.

The longest power outage I experienced lasted a week, which coincided with a week without running water. Every night I would drink my warm beer and look up at the hilltop as the lights of the expatriate village didn’t waver. International government workers took a higher priority to ordinary Ugandans and their houses, although I almost never heard a complaint from anybody. It just seemed like business as usual.

Now that the dam in Jinga has been finished, power shedding occurs less frequently in the villages outside of Kampala, although I have no way of knowing the conditions farther north. As easy and justified as it is to criticize President Museveni, I can only think that this is a positive step for the country. Of course thousands of residents in Jinga could have been forced off their land in order for the dam to be built, but hopefully I’m just being jaded. Looking up at those lights last year, it wasn’t hard to get that way.

Things change slowly in a country now just 50 years post-independence and maybe the cold beer is another sign of progress. Ugandans are also steeped in their ways, and so I doubt many will change their taste from warm beer to cold – the stacks of beer on the wall instead of the fridge prove that. But of course that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I wasn’t asked my preference, and in village that was the site of slum tours for ignorant Westerners not too long ago, that says something.