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Over the last thirty years a few books, collections and articles have shown what a promising subject drinking could be for study in the field of social sciences (Mandelbaum 1965; Everett et al. 1976; Heath, 1987; I. de Garine, this volume). It is clear today that drinking is a multi-dimensional phenomenon which Marcel Mauss might have well have called a phénomène social total. Depending on the various cultures in which it has been investigated, and on the interests of fieldworkers and scholars, different aspects have been studied: the physiological aspects related to liquid ingestion or to alcohol consumption; the psychological and behavioural aspects of inebriation; the symbolic meaning of drinks and their role in ritual systems; the economic dimension of the production of beverages and their exchange value; and the role of drinking in the expression of social ties or in the making of them. These topics have been documented in various parts of the world, and there are quite a few references to drinking in the social science literature devoted to Africa (Curto 1989). It seems that ethnologists not only thought that it was a relevant subject to study, but that, at least for a few societies, it might become the major topic as drinking appears to be at the core of social life. Studies of alcohol consumption in African cultures have focused on very different cultural situations, the so-called'traditional'agrarian communities (such as the one I will describe later on), and colonial and postcolonial, mostly urban, societies. Colson and Scudder (1988) and, more recently, Akyeampong (1996) have described in detail the historical evolution of the ways of drinking in two distant …