Zimbabwe’s Economic Crisis and the Shebeen Sector in Bulawayo, 2007-08

Abstract

Between 2000 and 2008 Zimbabwe experienced an economic crisis that reached its peak in 2007 and 2008. Africanists who have written about the informal sector in general and those who have written about the informal sector during periods of economic crises in particular have emphasized the inverse relationship between the formal economy and the expansion of informal sectors: that economic problems in the formal sectors of the economy led to the expansion of the informal sectors. This meta narrative, however, obscures the experiences of other sectors of the economy during the same period. Using primarily interviews with shebeen owners, patrons, and newspaper reports, this article argues that the same crisis that led to the expansion of other sectors of the economy destroyed the shebeen sector in Bulawayo. This was because the crisis reduced many people’s disposable income, a development which forced many imbibers to change their drinking habits and patterns as they turned to cheaper illegally imported spirits with high alcohol content and to drugs – commodities then not sold in shebeens.