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Travel

Really Strange Brew

I'm in the Kibera slums of Nairobi, Kenya, to taste my first glass of chang'aa, a local form of moonshine

Mama Becky cooks up some chang’aa at a distillery in Kibera. The women who run this place live off the kangara and chang’aa that they brew.

I’m in the Kibera slums of Nairobi, Kenya, lost in a labyrinth of garbage-filled alleyways and encircled by rotting tin sheds, a row of enormous bubbling cauldrons, and a dozen giant plastic jugs. I’ve traveled here to taste my first glass of chang’aa, a local form of moonshine. In Swahili,

chang’aa literally means “kill me quick,” and it will obliterate anyone who pours it down his or her gullet. It’s the Crazy Horse of rotgut. Before I have a taste, Mama Miriam, a member of the nine-woman collective who runs the distillery, wants to show me how strong it is. She lights the chang’aa on fire, growing excited as the cup begins to melt. “See?” she says. “Really powerful.” I pull the cup up to my nose and immediately gag. It smells like bad whiskey and hits like paint thinner. The first sip puts me in a daze. The second causes uncontrollable shudders and tears. And by the third I am breathing fumes and feel like I’ve gone cross-eyed. Chang’aa (also know as busaa or banana beer) is typically distilled from maize or millet. It’s brewed in Kenya’s poorest areas, costs 20 shillings (about 25 cents) per glass, and (surprise!) is popular with the unemployed and disenfranchised. In Kibera, one of East Africa’s largest slums, this drink is a daily staple for many residents. Until recently, chang’aa was illegal in Kenya. Unscrupulous vendors frequently spike the spirit with methanol for an extra kick, and there are rumors that jet fuel and embalming fluid are sometimes added to the mix. Police have found decomposing rats and women’s underwear in large batches of chang’aa, and the water used to distill it is often befouled by fecal matter, so it’s no surprise that chang’aa has killed hundreds and blinded thousands more. Mama Toto has owned and managed a chang’aa bar in Kibera for the past seven years. She will happily drink any of her clients under the table and continue serving afterward. Clients visit 24/7, and Mama Toto is always waiting. The Kenyan government legalized chang’aa in late 2010 with the goal of cutting down on poisonings and deaths by putting standards in place. Under the new liquor laws, chang’aa must be bottled, sealed, and marked with a warning label. If authorities discover any sketchy ingredients, such as lethal amounts of methanol, the manufacturer faces fines and jail time. “We don’t even like to call it chang’aa anymore because the name has such a bad reputation,” says Vitalis Odhiambo, aka Diddy, an unofficial tour guide I paid to show me around Kibera. Diddy was born and raised in the slums, and he sees opportunity in legalization. The women of Kibera can distill chang’aa at home, providing some much-needed income to household budgets, while their husbands and boyfriends are on the streets, hustling tourists like me. Diddy runs a carwash and provides “ghetto tours” for visiting foreigners. A typical tour involves navigating wide-eyed tourists through Kibera to snap pictures of grinning children and abject poverty. But when the photo ops are done, for a couple extra bucks he’ll bring visitors to local drinking holes (more often than not a one-room home filled with mothers nursing newborns in the background) where they can get hammerdrunk on chang’aa. Most drinkers are close to unconscious after a couple rounds, but Diddy provides his clients with another kind of stimulant: bags of khat, the all-natural African equivalent of speed. “I do what I can to make it a good experience,” he says. “We want it to be an industry. In Kibera we are doing it right, we are doing it clean, and the chang’aa isn’t poisonous. We don’t add toxic chemicals here. We want to brew it the traditional way, and we want visitors to enjoy it.” Back at Mama Miriam’s distillery, everything seems on the level at first. The aluminum condensation pots are clean enough, and everyone swears the water being used comes from local pipelines (not the nearby and extremely polluted Nairobi River). But inside a squalid fermentation shack lies the big problem facing slum distilleries: Filthy barrels of rotting maize sludge line the walls, jutting out at all angles and perilously close to toppling. Quality control doesn’t really exist, and neither does storage or bottling facilities. Even though legalization makes it easier to distill and drink chang’aa in the open, brewing is still an underground operation. The women who keep this particular distillery going have to bribe police officers about 500 shillings ($5.75) a week to keep from being shut down (and I had to pay the police 1,000 shillings when they crashed my photo shoot). “Everyone’s hustling here,” Diddy explains. “What we need is a bottling factory and direction from the government about how to get inspections and licenses. We don’t have anything to hide, but we still face too much harassment if we try to sell to the outside.” Instead, women sell 5- and 25-liter plastic jugs to local booze dens, where it is usually served in the mornings to security guards just getting off the night shift, and all night to vendors and laborers looking to unwind. The Kenya Industrial Estate, a company that provides capital for small businesses, recently announced it would invest in chang’aa breweries, noting that Kenyans bought an estimated 16 billion shillings’ worth of the brew every year. Charities and church groups are also trying to help local distillers, the idea being that if it must be sold, chang’aa should be profitable and safe instead of lethal. “It’s getting better. It will take some time, but we’ll be selling to the big companies some day,” says Diddy. “Maybe the wealthy people prefer Johnny Walker, but real Kenyans know this is better.”