Trading on inequality: Gender and the drinks trade in southern Tanzania

This article explores the economic logic of the domestic drinks market and its place in the subsistence strategies of men and women in a rural district of Ulanga in southern Tanzania, where women's brewing coexists with men's monopolisation of the sap alcohol market. The seasonal availability of sap alcohols, combined with the district's integration into national grain markets, creates a short-lived opportunity for some women to supplement their income from the production and sale of maize beer, an opportunity made possible by the unequal economic interdependence of men and women and of different regions of Tanzania. The seasonal expansion of the market in maize beer occurs at a time when maize prices are high and household grain stocks are low. Brewers must choose between their immediate consumption needs and investing their small reserves of cash or grain in beer production in the hope that it will generate longer-term profit. As in other parts of Tanzania, the choice is idiomatically expressed through the contrast between 'eating' (kulia) and 'generation' (zalisha) through which grain, and the money to which it is explicitly compared, can be made to reproduce itself through careful investment.