There is a saying in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: “You can bomb a hospital, but not Bralima.” Short for Brasseries, Limonaderies et Malteries S.A., Bralima is the DRC’s oldest brewery and one of the largest beer producers in Central Africa, and, until recently, a subsidiary of the Dutch beer giant Heineken. Every day, countless bottles of Primus lager roll off Bralima production lines in major cities across the country, and by year’s end, they are converted into hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of revenue. Dozens of armed groups may roam the DRC countryside conquering mining sites, looting health clinics, and committing atrocities against civilians, but even to them Bralima is sacred—so much so that at least one militia in the country, Raia Mutomboki Bralima, took the brewing company as its namesake.
And why would anyone bomb a brewery anyway? Even rebels crave a cold beer after a hard day of fighting, and any upstart group that would deprive the Congolese of their beloved Primus would be making one of the few bids possible for unanimous unpopularity. As the DRC enters its thirtieth year of armed conflict involving a legion of rebel groups, Primus, the brewery’s flagship brand, is one of the few things that unites the country.
Before colonialism introduced bottled commercial brews, homemade beer was a staple food for many and was integral to social and political life in the region. Today, beer still holds outsize cultural value in Central Africa. The drink is reverently referred to as la sainte mousse, or holy foam, and is an obligatory offering at baby showers, funerals, and every social event in between. In fact, beer is often the first thing a newborn tastes, to ward off colic. Insatiable demand means that selling beer is just about the most democratic business opportunity out there: Anyone who can afford a fifteen-dollar crate is in business. Blast some music from a speaker and you’ve just opened a bar; lug a crate or two to a mining site and you’re sure of a profit.
But beer is also revered in the DRC for another reason: As in other developing countries, breweries are some of the most reliable businesses through which the government can capture revenue. Cash-strapped treasuries cannot tax the informal transactions that make up the bulk of the Central African economy; even for the formal taxes that the government relies on for income, a typical siphon point is the taxman himself, who is expected to pocket much of what he collects. But because Central African breweries pay their value-added corporate income and excise taxes directly via bank transfer, they have become a fiscal pillar for governments, and the DRC’s breweries are among the country’s biggest, most reliable payers. Valued at $600 million, the Congolese beer market is the largest in the region, and the excise revenue alone is estimated to bring the country’s treasury some $200 million a year. Tiny neighbors Burundi and Rwanda, which have their own beer industries, look across the border with envy, eyeing the DRC’s 116 million potential consumers and its informal mining economy. With all this cash floating around, nearby governments and rebels in the backwoods have begun to ask themselves: How can we capture some of that liquid gold?
Long Walk to Thaba
They need look no further than the tortuous, largely informal choreography of taxation that every bottle of Congolese beer is subjected to in the course of its life. Between when the beer rolls off the production line at the urban factory and when it gets consumed at an inland bar or artisanal mine, it might be taxed dozens of times by local chiefs at an off-loading point, by rebels and soldiers along roads, or by a local mining boss just trying to make a buck. In a country where fortunes are made not by producing goods but moving them, sitting by the side of the road and imposing levies on passage has proved a time-tested income opportunity for anyone with a gun.
The beer’s trek into le Congo profond—the country’s deep interior—is the most profitable part of its journey.
Any bottle of Congolese beer—whether manufactured by Bralima or the French Castel Group, which serves the rest of the market through its Bracongo and Brasimba subsidiaries—starts its life in a brewery in a city like Kinshasa, Kisangani, or Lubumbashi. The bottles are chucked together in crates of twelve or twenty depending on their size and are picked up by wholesalers after the government takes its cut—about five dollars a crate—directly at the factory gate. The beer barons who own the barges and trucks are usually the biggest economic players in town, possibly a close relation of the president or provincial governor, and it’s at their risk that the beer begins to wend its way through the muddy roads and lazy rivers that make up the Central African transportation network.
The crates and their custodians are prime targets for any of the hundred or so roadblock operators that line a typical Congolese road. Many of these checkpoints are run by a variety of state agents, like customs deputies, traffic police, and immigration officials, each of whom has a formal prerogative to inspect one thing or another. In practice, these mandates to search for bushmeat, smuggled wares, or expired licenses serve as a pretext to fleece the beer truck for money that likely wouldn’t have made it to the treasury anyway.
But along the main arteries in the eastern DRC, where most of the fighting in the current conflict is taking place, the army is the main state actor operating roadblocks, and it controls only about two-fifths of the scattered checkpoints. Most of the remaining three-fifths are manned by the wazalendo, an assortment of local militias positioned there, ostensibly, to fight other rebels. Over the tens of miles that might make up an ordinary highway journey, the hauler pays about thirty-five cents a crate across ten such checkpoints. On a bad day, with a light load and a greedy hand to pay, the driver could be liable for as much as ten times that. For the truckers, it makes little difference whom they pay. They stuff a wad of Congolese francs into the hands of whoever hails them, and they’re allowed to go on and deliver their crates to the next relay point.
And the next relay point is where the highway turns to dirt. The hundred thousand or so miles of road that one sees on a map of the region don’t necessarily exist in reality, so most of what the bottles traverse on their journey are paths that only hawkers on motorcycle, foot, or bike can handle. When the terrain gets too difficult for a truck to continue, the driver kills the engine and a crew of men appears from surrounding huts. Circling the truck and counting the crates, these authorities—be they customary chiefs, territorial administrators, or secret service agents—must be paid off before the truck can unload. Once the money changes hands, the cargo is divvied up among small-time traders, who carry through the jungle their allotted crate or two.
But the danger, and the opportunity for payoffs, only increases from there. The informal hawkers who haul crates over slippery jungle paths are colloquially called nguya, “the brave ones”—and not just because they might sprain an ankle. Once a crate enters the bush, it is liable to meet a new sequence of roadblocks, run by armed groups big and small, which bring the hawker to a halt with a rope they sling across his footpath. If the young men sporting Kalashnikovs and rubber sandals don’t know the hawker from a previous trip, they’ll test him with a greeting in their dialect and ask whom he knows down the road. If he answers proficiently, they’ll opt not to beat him up but to inspect his crates. If his beer is from Rwanda, widely considered the party responsible for the DRC’s war, he will be sent to meet his maker. If not, he’ll be asked to pay a levy and told to have a nice day. He’ll pick up his crates, adjust them on his back, and push onward to the next roadblock in the jungle.
The beer’s trek into le Congo profond—the country’s deep interior, where roads and formal government presence do not reach—is the most profitable part of its journey. Two years ago, an armed group called Le Front Patriotique pour la Paix–Armée du Peuple even distributed a leaflet outlining its tax rates for transporting beverages through the forests of North Kivu: “case of 65Cl: Fc 3.500; case of 50Cl: Fc 5.000; case of soft drinks: Fc 5.000.” These very reasonable sums are what the commander expects to see per crate but not necessarily what the hawker pays—how else is the foot soldier going to get what’s his but by relieving this trader of a few more banknotes? After the highway turns to dirt, the crate will be taxed somewhere between eleven and twenty-two dollars among five or so militia roadblocks. This means that a few dozen armed men extract between two and four times what the national treasury does from each crate.
Hawkers often pay these amounts with a shrug. They know they will earn the cash back if they reach the most common destinations for a crate of Primus. If the beer doesn’t end up at a remote nganda—a village watering hole cobbled together out of corrugated iron sheets and plastic chairs whose blown-out speakers blast rumba over the roar of gasoline generators—it will end up at one of the gold-mining sites run by an army or rebel commander. Since the early 1980s, when a bankrupt Republic of Zaire legalized artisanal mining, thousands of gold-mining camps have sprouted up all over the eastern DRC, becoming the beating heart of a vast and messy informal economy. During the wars that followed, they became a magnet for armed groups seeking to self-enrich. Today, these mines employ about a quarter of a million workers who produce between twenty and thirty tons of gold a year, the equivalent of $3 billion to $5 billion. Because gold is easy to hide and, as one militia leader grumbled to me, “artisanal miners aren’t honest when it comes to paying their taxes,” mine pit owners usually resort to extracting value from the miners by monopolizing the sale of beer and heavily inflating the price.
Finally, after a five-day trek from the nearest road, the hawker reaches a collection of muddy ramshackle shelters. This is the mining camp, and here he exchanges his stock for gold dust from the local commander’s wife, who superintends beer procurement and sales to the men sieving mud and wielding pickaxes. At the end of their shifts, these men will swallow the accumulated inflationary burden imposed by every rebel, chief, and taxman who stood between them and the brewery. Cracking open his lukewarm Primus, the miner might pay the equivalent of $25 in gold dust for a bottle that retails at $1.65 in town.
But the journey of that bottle doesn’t end when the miner drains it. If he is caught throwing away his empty, he’ll get a beating from the commander’s wife, because the spent bottle is worth money. Namely, it is worth about half the value of the beer inside it, in hard foreign currency. Any new bottle used by a brewery would have to be bought abroad in dollars, a hefty input cost Bralima goes to great pains to avoid. As a result, the company runs a buyback scheme that puts recycling efforts in progressive American cities to shame, requiring wholesale clients to return their bottles all the way from the bush to the brewery before receiving their next allotment of beer. (This is why bottles imprinted with “Republic of Zaire,” which ceased to exist in 1997, are still in circulation today.)
After the hawker receives his gold dust, he carefully tucks his payment into his wellies or waistband, picks up his empties from the last trip, and passes back through the roadblocks without being taxed. He has receipts for what he paid on the way in, and if the men at the roadblock were to rob him of his gold, they would discourage him from making his next taxable journey, which would surely piss off their commander, whoever he may be. Of course, to grease the wheel, the hawker might just offer them a cigarette or a bank note the equivalent of less than fifty cents—just to make sure the return trip goes smoothly.
The hawker’s next stop is a town near the Ugandan border, where he sells the dust to his patron—a business partner of the beer wholesaler and the man running the show. Once the boss accumulates a kilo of gold from his various underlings, he crosses into Uganda and sells it to a gold trader for a fresh stack of US dollars. This Ugandan gold trader pools the patron’s dust with other nuggets and ore he’s bought and brings it to the Thaba refinery in Entebbe, which produces close to half of Uganda’s declared gold exports. There, the “dirty” gold is smelted into standardized ingots, which are consigned to a through-shipping firm. Though the gold has already been bought by a third party, because Thaba lists transport firms as the formal buyer on its customs declarations, that third party remains anonymous. The bars are flown to Dubai, the destination for most of Africa’s conflict gold, and from there the miner’s beer money disappears into the world of federal reserves and private holders.
Meanwhile, as the bars are washed of their origins, the trader crosses back across the border, where he uses his fresh dollars to order more beer, which he allots to his nguya to sell in exchange for yet more gold, starting the cycle over again.
Home Brewer, Enemy of the State
This convoluted logistical and fiscal circuit, in which gold moves out untaxed and beer flows in heavily taxed, is ironically the result of a centuries-long battle to build power and extract rents from the flow of booze—and particularly beer—in Africa, where alcohol was essential to Europe’s colonial project.
It was awfully cumbersome to tax every improvised brewery in the country.
This battle unfolded in phases. In the opening salvo, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans used booze to pay off African potentates and barter for slaves. By the nineteenth century, as European powers distanced themselves from the business of the slave trade, they opted to bankroll newly established colonial administrations with tax revenue earned from a staggering flow of privately imported alcohol. Finally, in the early twentieth century, colonial administrators built breweries across colonies to better monetize growing demand, indirectly tax their subject populations, and ensure foreign currency went back to the metropole rather than to their European competitors. Seeking to bolster this rent-seeking regime, Europeans attempted to wean the local population off traditional home brews in favor of bottled alternatives, which subjects would need to enter the monetized economy to purchase. Administrators criminalized home brewing and restricted where grain and bananas meant for beer could be grown, hoping to nudge farmers toward cash crops and wage labor to obtain the money necessary to buy bottled beer, a transaction they could tax. The resulting levies created a robust fiscal base for colonial administrations, which their successor regimes in turn inherited.
But beer also created the European states that built these empires. Ever the enterprising types, the Dutch financed their independence struggle from Spain primarily with a strict beer tax, an income stream they further cultivated to pay for their imperial adventures. Before the Dutch revolt, beer production had been a scattered and artisanal affair, with women in every hamlet brewing recipes that dated back centuries. Home brews at that time were a nutritious staple food and often safer than drinking water, with the average European drinking one to two liters of beer a day. Drinking that much beer was also, of course, a lot of fun. When the Dutch provinces began their revolt, the privilege of taxation belonged to town councils, whose finances, in the words of two Dutch historians, “floated as a cork on a great pool of beer.” As rebel authorities prepared for war, they needed cash for their war chest and turned to beer to fill it, leading them to fight the Eighty Years’ War on two fronts, essentially: outward against Spain and inward against the home brewer.
At first the States General, the administration of the rebelling Dutch provinces, appropriated the municipal tax on every barrel of beer sold for its war chest. But it was awfully cumbersome to tax every improvised brewery in the country, so in the second decade of the war, the rebel authorities set about consolidating beer production itself. They prohibited home brewing wholesale and then outlawed the production of beer outside major towns, which allowed large outfits in a handful of urban hubs to dominate the brewing sector within a few years. Beer production and distribution then became the most surveilled activity under the rebels’ gaze: No barrel of beer could leave a brewery without a certified porter carrying a receipt proving all taxes had been paid. By 1648, both the Dutch and their centralized brewing industry emerged victorious. The republic had beaten the Spanish Empire, which had spent vast sums on its Army of Flanders and never found enough silver in Potosí to cover it; and the beer industry had trounced the centuries-old tradition of home brewing. In the last years of the fighting, the beer tax in the province of Holland alone was bringing in as much as the Spanish crown’s tax on all the silver of the Americas.
Ultimately, what the rebels had built was not merely a brewing monopoly but also a machine for turning drink into credit. A state that could tax a barrel of beer in Delft every week did not have to wait for a treasure fleet, and it could borrow against next year’s drinking at rates the Habsburgs could only envy. At the end of the war, the Dutch Republic was the cheapest borrower in Europe and spent the proceeds on ships: The West India Company was chartered in 1621 with an exclusive national license on sailing to the Americas, the African coastline from the Tropic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope, and the traffic that ran between them. The early eighteenth-century Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville, famous for coining the utilitarian creed that private vice leads to public benefit, observed that Dutch sailors would spend what they made overseas on taxable boozing when they returned home: “By heavy excises, and other impositions, the greatest part of [their earnings are] soon drawn back into the public treasure.”
Only decades later, England built the same machine and built it bigger. Looking to pay for the army it needed to fight a civil war in 1643, Parliament created the Office of Excise, and beer was just about the only thing it taxed. By 1655, the beer excise was the most lucrative in the country, and after England went on a brewery consolidation spree in the 1690s, it supplied nearly a fifth of the entire English government’s income. With excise inspectors practically living inside breweries, it would be apt to say that modern British bureaucracy was born among the beer barrels. In fact, the line of credit that financed Britain’s warmaking abilities, and thus its early empire, took the country’s beer duty as collateral. In 1694, Parliament passed a bill titled:
An Act for granting to theire Majesties severall Rates and Duties upon Tunnage of Shipps and Vessells and upon Beere Ale and other Liquors for secureing certaine Recompenses and Advantages in the said Act mentioned to such Persons as shall voluntarily advance the summe of £1,500,000 towards the carrying on the Warr against France.
This was the loan that created the Bank of England, and it serves as a tidy example of sociologist Charles Tilly’s argument that the modern European state was a byproduct of war finance. Rulers made war, war forced extraction, extraction required a bureaucracy to do the collecting. That bureaucracy of extraction is what we now call the state, and it was tried out and perfected on beer brewers.
While Tilly showed how warmaking and tax-taking worked together to create the state, he overlooked how the appetite for beer fueled imperial expansion. Just as in Holland before it, England’s beer tax allowed for exceptionally credible public borrowing, and the loans the Bank of England raised were spent to make sure the country’s fleets traveled faster and plundered farther. By the eighteenth century, it was clear that mass intoxication, if properly channeled and taxed, could be converted into standing armies and administrative capacity, two necessary ingredients for imperial reach.
Put It on My Tab
On the frontier side of empire, Europeans struggled to secure items attractive enough for African slavers to exchange for people in the triangular trade. Alcohol was a clear solution to this problem and provided a few other advantages as well. As the Nigerian historian Kenneth O. Dike put it, “A bottle of rum was much easier to transport than a bag of salt”—and unlike an even more infamous trade good, it could not be pointed back and shot at you.
By the eighteenth century, it was clear that mass intoxication could be converted into standing armies and administrative capacity.
Millions of crates of gin and casks of rum were bartered for slaves, who were then shipped to the Caribbean to produce sugar molasses, which was distilled in the New World into more gin and rum, which were then used to purchase more slaves. According to one estimate, alcohol bought about a third of the 1.18 million captives legally exported through Luanda in modern-day Angola between 1710 and 1830. The importance of liquor in the slave trade was such that in 1765 two distilleries were built in Liverpool—by then the greatest slave-trading port in the Old World—for the express purpose of supplying ships bound for Africa. In 1770 alone, rum made up roughly four-fifths of colonial New England’s exports to Africa. And at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the Dutch municipality of Schiedam, then the capital of the world’s gin industry, earned the nickname Black Nazareth, because hundreds of coal-powered distilleries blanketed the town with velvety soot as they converted grain into bottles of liquor destined for Southeast Asia and West Africa.
Among Africans, the resulting flow of bottled alcohol was considered both a threat and an opportunity. Like the cowrie shells, gold dust, and cloth that the bottle replaced, gin, rum, and brandy were goods that circulated chiefly among elites. Rather than diffusing into the general population, alcohol was concentrated in the hands of the small class that ran the slave trade, who used bottles to display status and reward dependents. Ships arriving at Old Calabar in present-day Nigeria paid “comey”—anchorage dues for the right to trade at all—in iron bars, copper rods, and puncheons of rum and brandy. Of the 1,867 bottles of brandy a pair of Liverpool ships carried there in 1769, something like 70 percent were never traded for anything at all. In the reckoning of the accounts, they left the ship as dues and gifts. Farther inland, rulers taxed the caravans that crossed their territory in drink. The rate went by rank: One early nineteenth-century French traveler who tried to pay a chief in the interior with a few casks was told he should have sent a barrel, since that was “the quantity powerful sovereigns had the right to claim.” When, in 1829, news spread along the caravan routes that Brazil intended to ban slave imports, African rulers had begun saying they’d “bring war upon Benguela”—a Portuguese colonial foothold in Angola—because the flow of textiles and Brazilian cane booze had already begun to dry up.
Sixty years later, when European powers gathered to agree that the international slave trade ought to be abolished—an easy moral stand considering profit margins had moved elsewhere—delegates discussed a ban on importing alcohol to Africa. The representative of the Netherlands, which made a pretty penny exporting a juniper-flavored liquor called jenever, argued against it, noting that in the Congo Basin, “spirits are, so to speak, the currency and the main trading instrument.” Indeed, the Europeans simply couldn’t forego this lucrative income stream: A special commissioner sent to the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1895 by the British Foreign Office wrote that without spirits, “trade in the Delta is at present impossible.” Crates of gin served as the main currency in Lagos until 1907, with each of the twelve packed bottles representing one shilling. Still to this day, bottles of liquor dating to the early twentieth century wash up on the coast and riverbeds of southern Nigeria.
So strong and consistent was the flow of bottles into African ports that when Western powers decided to convert their African trade presences into outright colonial rule, taxes on alcohol imports became the fiscal foundation of their early administrations, in no small part because direct taxation of Africans was not yet thought feasible. Moreover, the material form that spirits took—standardized and easy to count—made them an ideal taxable commodity, particularly as they came ashore at only a handful of coastal ports. Despite being one of the liquor trade’s staunchest opponents, Herbert Tugwell, the Church Missionary Society’s bishop in West Africa, conceded that
it is a very easy and cheap way of raising revenue. A vessel comes into Lagos and deposits 10,000 cases on a wharf. . . . All that the Government has to do is to send down a clerk and have the cases counted, and on each to charge five shillings, which practically means realising £2,500.
Writing about the Southern Nigeria Protectorate, Charles Strachey, a principal clerk at the British Colonial Office, further emphasized “the beauty of the system by which the consumers of the spirits are made to contribute more than anyone else to the cost of governing the country.” But not everyone was equally pleased with this system. Lord Lugard, the first governor-general of Nigeria, later called it “a disgrace to an administration that nearly half its revenue should be derived from such a source,” but then went on raking in the excises. And in 1890, a Dutch caricature depicted Leopold II, who owned the Congo Free State as his personal property, as a sinister tollgate operator attempting to extract cash from Dutch horse-drawn carts en route to the African interior loaded with barrels of jenever.
Despite rising tariffs, demand—overwhelmingly from Africans—continued to grow, causing the colonies huge trade deficits and chronic shortages of foreign currency. In an age of growing trade competition, colonial metropoles preferred to repatriate profits rather than pay foreign traders for booze. Colonial bureaucrats’ answer to both the foreign currency deficit and the increased demand for alcohol in their colonies was import substitution, building brewing plants at the nodes through which foreign-produced beer and spirits had hitherto flowed. This is why, for many African countries, the first major industrial plant was the brewery. Over the following decades, the bulk of excise revenues moved from the wharf to the brewery, and, ever eager to extract as much tax as they could, colonial administrations became increasingly preoccupied with their subject populations’ drinking habits.
Draft Dodgers
There was just one problem. Virtually every community on the African continent had its own centuries-old tradition making pombe, or beer, out of whatever crop—millet, sorghum, maize, banana—was at hand. So pervasive was this custom that, by the time colonial administrations were building their breweries, a person in Central Africa got roughly 30 percent of their daily energy intake from a form of liquified and fermented grain or fruit. By that same token, Central Africans would scarcely engage in labor-intensive farming and horticulture beyond the extent necessary to produce beer for the household—for the rest of their nutrients, they’d subsist on a more leisurely combination of herding, foraging, and hunting.
The European effort to tamp down on artisanal beer production was intimately tied up with market creation.
Colonial administrations thus stumbled upon the lesson the Dutch had learned three hundred years prior: that artisanal beer is inimical to state-making and monetized markets. Home brews are hard to tax because they’re perishable, nonuniform, and embedded in a web of nonmarket exchanges. Across Africa, beer had variously served as tribute to chiefs, a lubricant for ritual, an offering to ancestors, and a means of mobilizing communal labor to work the fields and maintain huts. Seeking to monetize their market and redirect precious farm labor toward “productive” crops, colonial regimes set about trying to weed out indigenous beer culture.
To this end, the Belgians began resettling scattered rural communities away from their banana groves and palm gardens and nearer to newly constructed colonial roads. This was so that indigenous labor could be counted and taxed, but it also meant these communities could more easily be reached by trucks picking up farm produce and dropping off crates of beer. Administrators attempted to limit the production and circulation of banana beer, the most common type of home brew in parts of Central Africa, because, as a former director of agriculture in the Belgian Congo put it, “Excessive consumption of banana beer reduces physical resistance and weakens the dynamism of the population.” The Belgians enacted laws prohibiting pombe production outright, forced people to cultivate cash crops, limited the space allowed for banana groves, and sent police to patrol villages and harass women who brewed clandestinely in the bush. When all these measures failed to stem the expansion of banana beer production in Burundi, they opened another brewery in 1955 with the express purpose of replacing pombe with a product that could yield consumption tax. That brewery today supplies the Burundian state with its single largest block of tax revenue.
Indeed, the European effort to tamp down on artisanal beer production was intimately tied up with market creation in general. As one economic historian of the Belgian Congo noted in 1967, bottled beer “often created the first ties between the subsistence economy and the market economy.” The native appetite for beer and the marginalization of artisanal brewing forced a largely uncaptured peasantry to obtain cash to buy commercial brews, which in most cases involved either selling their labor for wages or tilling the soil to produce cash crops. This conveniently spurred monetization and taxation in even the most remote corners of vast territories, areas colonial agents typically couldn’t reach. Where cash crops failed to take hold, officials were quick to blame home brewing. When locals in what was then Ruanda-Urundi were questioned for refusing to tend to their coffee plants, the logs from their 1949 interrogation show Belgian authorities turned to the beer parties they had held instead—at which, witnesses said, one man had urged others to burn down the colonial agents’ houses.
Metropolitan breweries benefited tremendously from these policies in the colonies. Heineken, whose home market had become stagnant, began producing beer in Africa in the 1930s. By the 1950s, the continent was supplying half of everything Heineken earned abroad, compared with just 15 percent of company profits earned in the Netherlands itself. In the words of one Heineken executive surveying the Belgian Congo’s beer market in the 1950s, whenever an African man
goes to work it is only for his own pleasure, not in respect of the work itself but because of the pay he receives. And because this pleasure largely consists of drinking beer, breweries consider this the promised land. It is said that in the rural stores 70 percent of trade now consists of beer and . . . that 25 per cent of the negro’s income is spent on beer.
The blatant racism of his observation aside, it described a real set of conditions created by Belgian colonization (which benefited, in no small way, the executive himself). Beer was the incentive used to entice the uncaptured peasant to walk back down the hill and plant cash crops. With his home brewery taken from him, he was given the opportunity to buy back in bottled form the beer he had once fabricated himself.
As a hangover from the colonial period, the war between bottled and artisanal beer still rages today in Central Africa. In 2014, Burundi’s national brewery branded itself as selling “a high quality affordable beer that replaces home made brews with uncertain hygiene and alcohol content,” and over the last decade, Rwanda has incrementally tightened its restrictions on indigenous brewing. In 2016, a Rwanda Standards Board official warned producers that refilling empty Heineken bottles with home brew “can lead to their court summoning.” (In a single 2018 raid, the Rwandan National Police seized 5,083 appropriated bottles.) This makes bottled beer in Central Africa a particularly perverse example of rentier capitalism, with states and industrial firms obstructing everyday people’s ability to nourish and produce for themselves while hawking a nutritionally inferior but fiscally legible replacement.
But in a region where over half of the population lives off subsistence farming, commercial brewing’s battle isn’t won just yet. After colonization ended in the 1960s, up to a third of grains cultivated in Africa was still reserved for pombe production. The bulk of the banana groves adorning Rwandan hillsides today are still planted exclusively for the production of beer, while across the borders in Burundi and the DRC region of South Kivu, even more households depend on beer bananas. Those living from the land can’t afford a bottled beer anyway—a Primus costs the equivalent of two to three days of everything a rural Congolese consumes—but there are other jobs that might lure him into the beer economy, like artisanal miner, perhaps, or maybe even rebel taxman.
Pint Glass Runneth Over
Given that nearly the entirety of the region’s economy is informal, any national government’s budget is mostly drawn from taxes on a handful of multinational companies. These multinationals operate within highly secured enclaves and pay the treasury in local currency at an official rate fixed to US dollars. In the DRC, the major revenue sources are a couple of huge copper and cobalt mines, but because mineral prices are subject to extreme market volatility, the exact tax earnings are unpredictable. This makes the brewery a weak state’s best friend. The tax revenue earned from Bralima and its competitors represents the most dependable line entry in the DRC’s annual budget; by its own estimate, Bralima alone accounted for 9 percent of all government tax receipts in 2015.
States and industrial firms obstruct everyday people’s ability to nourish themselves while hawking an inferior replacement.
Ruling elites in the DRC are hugely reliant on this stream of income. But in Burundi and Rwanda, where most people survive by cultivating small patches of tea and coffee, the governments’ dependencies on the beer tax are even more severe. Rwanda’s Heineken subsidiary, Bralirwa, was named 2022’s “overall best taxpayer” by the revenue authority. Brarudi—owned 60 percent by Heineken and 40 percent by the Burundian state—is not merely the country’s largest taxpayer but also, as one local analyst put it, “the principal supplier of money to the government.” Brarudi’s tax payments make up 45 percent of all tax revenue and 25 percent of the Burundian civil service payroll. By all accounts, beer excises thus foot a substantial part of the deployment bill for both countries’ forces across the border in the DRC, where they are bogged down in a proxy war that revolves as much over military matters as it does over protecting market access. And with gold prices more than doubling over the past few years, the eastern DRC’s informal mining economy provides an opportunity that Rwanda and Burundi just can’t resist.
The two neighbors are fighting in this war on opposite sides, and for opposite reasons. Rwanda is the power behind a rebel group called the March 23 Movement (M23), which holds significant territory in the eastern DRC, including the town of Rubaya, home to a substantial portion of the world’s coltan, as well as gold-bearing hills in North and South Kivu. Officially, Kigali, whose soldiers supervise and support M23, is hunting whatever remains of the militias responsible for the 1994 genocide. Realistically, it is trying to emulate its neighbor to the north, Uganda, whose refineries we saw in action earlier. Uganda has made gold its largest export without mining almost any ore itself, and Rwanda has built its own refinery in Kigali with ambitions of doing the same. Burundi, meanwhile, has thousands of troops in South Kivu fighting on Kinshasa’s side to keep M23 away from its border. One of the poorest countries in the world by most metrics, Burundi is fighting to ward off scarcity. The country exports barely an eighth of what it imports, which leaves a trade deficit of about a billion dollars, and the eastern DRC is where it can source dollars to cover the gap.
Since both countries became involved in the latest iteration of the DRC’s proxy conflict five years ago, they have also entered the war for the Congolese beer market. Each has ramped up brewery production and beer exports to the DRC, where the potential consumer base is significant: The combined population of North and South Kivu is larger than either that of Burundi or Rwanda. For Rwanda, capturing a share of the Congolese beer market is good for business. For Burundi, it is closer to a bid for basic survival, because its teachers and soldiers are paid largely with the taxes the state collects on beer sales. As the company’s marketing director told me, “If Brarudi suffers, everyone suffers.”
And Brarudi has been suffering. Most of the raw materials for manufacturing beer—malt, hops, yeast, bottle caps, and spare parts for the bottling line—have to be imported, and Burundi has one of the most acute foreign exchange shortages in Africa. The brewery needs at least $6 million each month to stay afloat—dollars the central bank can’t provide. But, as the marketing director put it to me in an interview earlier this year, “Our motto is ‘Impossible is not Brarudi.’” Indeed, because the Congolese pay in dollars, the brewery’s aggressive export strategy across the border is a hard currency lifeline, allowing it to buy the beer inputs that keep the country running.
Beer’s price and availability have long served as folk barometers for how bad a particular Central African conflict or government is. As one expression dating back to the 1980s has it: Quand la bière n’arrive plus, tout va mal (When the beer stops arriving, everything goes wrong). But during the thirty years in which eastern Congo has been embroiled in one armed conflict or another, beer’s disappearance has been a largely hypothetical proposition. In 2003, for instance, to keep its supply lines intact, Bralima signed a memorandum of understanding with the Rally for Congolese Democracy–Goma, a Rwandan-backed armed group that occupied a large swath of the eastern DRC. The agreement laid out how much tax the brewery owed to the rebel administration, to mutual advantage, one might add—the renegades’ rate was lower than what the government demanded. Le Monde later reported that a top leader of the rebel group claimed that Bralima “was very important for our revenues.”
In the decade between 2003 and 2013, some of those fighters were absorbed into the Congolese army, defected, and became M23, which in 2012 took up arms against the government in the east. Even as the rebels tore through the region, displacing and killing an untold number of civilians, Bralima’s products were still rolling off the production line, and as a result, M23 earned a significant portion of its war chest from beer taxes. In 2013, I estimated that roadblock levies on beer trucks could have supplied as much as $1 million to M23 and other armed groups, although Heineken put the figure closer to $50,000.
Though they were defeated by the Congolese government in 2013, M23 reemerged in 2021 and two years later launched the Congo River Alliance, a political front with designs greater than ruling over a few scattered checkpoints. Since its return, M23 has conquered a significant portion of DRC territory along the Rwandan border and has come to represent itself as a political movement protecting ethnic Tutsis from persecution. M23 now explicitly aims to overthrow the government in Kinshasa and institute a federal system that would allow it to formally govern the areas it occupies. Support from Rwanda makes it by far the most powerful rebel group in the eastern DRC, where it frequently ranks among the deadliest human rights violators. Nonetheless, the rebels appeared to be following the long-established convention of keeping Bralima’s product moving in regions they control. As the marketing director put it, “The beer will always find a way. . . . Especially in Congo, business, money talks.”
Asset Lite
But in February 2025, the beer stopped arriving. M23’s troops—with Rwandan special forces embedded in every unit—had advanced on the sprawling provincial capital of Bukavu. The Congolese soldiers and foreign mercenaries defending the town panicked and fled. In the ensuing turmoil, Bralima’s brewery there, which indirectly employed more than a thousand people and supplied 80 percent of the company’s profit margin, was looted. Grainy videos captioned with broken-heart emojis were viewed thousands of times on social media and showed civilians hauling away as many crates of their beloved staple beers as they could carry. Although M23 took Bukavu only weeks after it had captured Goma, another provincial capital, what stirred the nation’s soul was not the rebels’ encroachment but that Bralima had fallen on the field of battle.
With a single stroke, M23 added the biggest taxpayer in the Kivus to its fiscal portfolio.
More than a thousand miles away, Kinshasa took notice. Until then, the M23 rebellion had been merely an annoyance for President Félix Tshisekedi—the upheaval in the remote east of the country had hardly affected the regime’s bottom line. Even as the rebels tore through the Kivus just months before they took the city, the Bukavu brewery announced a new record: August 2024 had been the first six-figure sales month in its history. A hundred thousand hectoliters had been sold, a cheery banner hung in town boasted. This was the equivalent of fourteen million bottles—enough beer to fill a modest lake. Heineken was celebrating, but so was the government, as each additional bottle meant another penny in its purse. But when Heineken suspended operations at the Bukavu brewery after M23’s takeover, the rebellion finally hit the regime in Kinshasa where it hurt.
And then M23 added insult to injury. After they took Goma and Bukavu, major cities with a combined population of more than two million people, the rebels began filling the supply gap left by the Bukavu brewery’s closure with beer from Rwanda. This meant each bottle of beer purchased in the eastern DRC indirectly paid the government supporting the rebels. M23 took its cut too. DRC beer traders confirmed to me that at M23’s border checkpoints between Rwanda and eastern Congo, it taxed each crate of Rwandan beer at $2.50. Similarly, Brarudi executives told me that while the rate for beer from Burundi started at $2.50 a crate, the price was later ratcheted up to $10 for the privilege of entering M23’s “liberated” territory. After Heineken leadership prohibited Brarudi from shipping beer to territory M23 controlled, they opted to send crates the long way round, via Tanzania and Rwanda, which meant they still paid up at M23 checkpoints.
Based off the number of trucks that beer traders estimate traveled across the Rwandan border to Goma and Bukavu, M23 earned between $2.8 million and $4.2 million in beer import taxes alone in the year after the Bralima brewery closed. The Rwandan government also clearly benefitted from this cross-border beer funnel. Rwandan brewery revenues went up by 22 percent in 2025 after the country reported a 14,000 percent increase in beverage and tobacco exports and an overall 50 percent increase in exports to the M23-occupied part of the DRC. This windfall could have only helped ease the budget crunch Kigali faced after it deployed thousands of soldiers to the DRC, saw foreign aid dry up, and weathered a battery of Western sanctions on Rwandan individuals and businesses connected to M23.
Reporting on the Bukavu brewery’s closure, a Congolese newspaper tallied up what the plant had been worth to the state: For its output, Bralima had been paying more than $1 million a month in national excise, another $1 million in customs duties, and $400,000 a month in provincial taxes to South Kivu on top. The government had no way of replacing either this income or the 40 percent of provincial water and electricity revenues the brewery had been responsible for. By June 2025, the National Assembly had recalibrated its budget to account for the 926 billion Congolese francs—an amount equivalent to more than $400 million—wiped out in North and South Kivu alone, an amount representing nearly a third of the entire country’s budgetary shortfall. Strangely enough, when the brewery closed, there was no accompanying outcry. When Heineken announced that it had suspended operations, no minister spoke, no agency objected, and the DRC press ran the announcement as wire copy. Less than a year later, the governor of South Kivu estimated his province had suffered an 84 percent decline in revenue and reckoned M23 was earning $17 million to $20 million in taxes in the territory and sending it to Rwanda. He called it forced taxation of a starving population.
For the Congolese who couldn’t stomach Rwandan beer, the drought ended in January this year, when delivery trucks rolled out of the Bukavu brewery for the first time since M23’s occupation began. As a friend in Bukavu told me, “The entire town drank all night, and everyone cried more than a few tears.” Congolese celebrated it as a retour à l’authenticité after a year of being forced to drink inferior foreign beer. This was a momentous occasion for other reasons too: Behind the return of familiar brand names and trusted logos, something had secretly shifted. The reopening of the Bukavu brewery was possible only because it had changed hands and jurisdictions months earlier, with Heineken having sold the plant for the symbolic sum of €1 (approximately $1.15) to Synergy Ventures, a Mauritian company incorporated a fortnight earlier by directors with close connections across the border. With a single stroke, an emblem of national pride was retooled into a mechanism for extracting value out of the country.
And with that single stroke, M23 added the biggest taxpayer in the Kivus to its fiscal portfolio. The rebel group’s beer taxation scheme now had two chokepoints instead of one: the border, where it continues to levy a couple of dollars on every crate crossing from Rwanda (which, according to a local beer trader, is still the most important source of beer for parts of North Kivu), and the finance department of the Bukavu brewery, where, without so much as lifting a Kalashnikov, it can claim the various taxes the government used to collect.
But few realized at the time that Rwanda and M23 had captured what was essentially the crown jewel in Heineken’s DRC portfolio. The Bukavu brewery, which carried four-fifths of Bralima’s margin, had subsidized all the others. Within months of the transfer, Heineken announced it was selling Bralima’s three remaining breweries to a second Mauritian holding company, abandoning its operation in the country altogether. Just half a year earlier, Heineken’s then chief executive had all but announced the move at an investor conference in Spain: “Historically, we’re a company that planted flags. We never took a flag down,” he warily remarked. It was true—Heineken had built one plant after another across Africa through the turbulence of the postcolonial period. In the DRC specifically, it had operated through the final blood-soaked years of the Mobutu kleptocracy, the two wars that followed, and then some. But he was speaking about the markets the company had filed under “resolve,” a kind of corporate triage for its worst performers, each of which now faced one of three fates: “fix,” “exit,” or “partner.” He didn’t name the DRC as a case to “resolve,” but he didn’t need to.
Today, the fine print on the label of a Primus produced in the eastern DRC tells us which option Heineken executives chose: The beers of the renamed Boissons des Grands Lacs brewery in Bukavu are bottled under license of Premium Beverages International B.V., a subsidiary of the Dutch multinational. Heineken left the actual ownership and administration of beer-making in M23-occupied territory behind but will remain there in spirit through long-term licensing agreements.
To Heineken, it no longer matters who runs the brewery, be it a national government, foreign businessmen, or armed group. This “asset light” model of rentier capitalism allows the company to take a cut regardless. Entrepreneurs operating in rebel-controlled Bukavu can manufacture and sell any of the Heineken brands they want without directly exposing corporate headquarters to either the risks associated with funding US- and UN-sanctioned warmongers or the routine gambles taken when running a business in a conflict zone. Not for the first time in history has a brewery served as a vehicle for local rulers and Western interests. The deeper logic of the business was always about bottling, extracting, and exporting a profit from Central Africa, and that logic seems sturdier than ever, even if a bigger cut goes to the upstarts with guns.