Roving Eye: Drinking beer: Bottle, glass or straw?
It’s almost 17 years since my dainty feet first touched Ugandan soil. Okay, I agree that this length of time does not exactly make me a Speke, Hannington or Lourdel. But, nevertheless, my arrival at Entebbe remains an important event in my little life. So, you may ask, 17 years later, is there anything that I particularly remember, that took me by surprise, during my first few days in Uganda? Was it that my nose was bigger than anybody else’s? Or my kabina (bum) smaller than anybody else’s?
Or was it something else? Yes, it was something else. So what was it? It was seeing people drink beer with a straw.
Previously, I had lived for two and a half years in Northern Nigeria, five in India and too many in the UK, but I had never seen anybody drink beer with a straw until I arrived in Uganda.
So why do some Ugandans drink beer using a straw? Is there any link between sucking beer through a straw and the traditional practice of sucking malwa from a communal pot using a long reed? Or is it that the straw increases the alcoholic impact of the beer? Tom, a 25-year-old self-employed businessman, gave me a rather different explanation. He said: “I normally drink beer directly from a bottle. But, Kevin, I do sometimes drink it with a straw. The advantage of using a straw is that you don’t finish the beer quickly – it takes longer to drink. You get better value for money. In other words, we don’t have money and that is why we use straws.”
My fellow Ugandans, you may wonder how Roving Eye likes to take his beer. The answer to that question is different from the answer to the question, how do I like to take my coffee? For I like my coffee like my women – hot, sweet and black.
I enjoy my beer very cold and because my behaviour has been shaped by many years of socialisation outside Uganda, I generally drink it from a glass. But, I do sometimes use a straw, which all goes to show that, indeed, “we are all Ugandans now”.
