Word: shebeens
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Shut Up Shebeens. There is another reason why there was less heavy drinking in Soweto this Christmas?government-owned beer halls and liquor stores, burned down by students last June in protest against white authority, have not been rebuilt. Moreover, yet another SSRC directive demanded that the hundreds of illegal shebeens (speakeasies) close down during the mourning period. After the fire-bombing of a few that stayed open, the shebeen queens (women operate most speakeasies) duly shut up shop, and Sowetoans did their Christmas drinking quietly at home...
...from blackness and oppression is Soweto's social life. Community halls provide television, a relatively new feature in South Africa, but since programs are allwhite, they generate little interest. Instead, Soweto families prefer to visit a beer garden for "Bantu beer" (made of slightly fermented maize), or a shebeen (speakeasy) for stronger drink and the sensuous local music called patha patha. The shebeens, which sprang up because black men could not be served hard liquor legally, are still unlawful, but police tolerate them as pressure valves...
...burly man called "Beer Belly" stood on the wooden stage. He glowered through the smoke-filled hall that was once a Catholic church and is now a shebeen (illegal drinking club) in the middle of Belfast's Falls Road Catholic ghetto. It was Sunday and the wooden trestle tables groaned under the weight of Guinness bottles, but no police or military would dare enforce the law that closes pubs on Sundays. The place was packed with laughing, plotting Irishmen, nearly all working-class, some of them members of the outlawed Irish Republican Army. As Beer Belly began to recite...