SOUTH AFRICA: A Ball for A.A.

South African law holds that white man’s liquor is colored man’s poison. Last week, Minister of Justice Charles Swart broadened the definition of “colored” to include Chinese, proclaimed that henceforth no Chinese will be allowed to buy liquor without a special permit.

To South Africa’s Chinese colony, 4,000 strong and as sober as Mandarin ducks, this was a matter of face. At the same time that he signed Swart’s Chinese prohibition decree, Governor General Ernest George Jansen invited Shao Ting, 58, Nationalist China’s Consul General in Johannesburg, to a United Nations ball. Under the decree, Shao or any other Chinese attending the event would not be able to get a drink. Shao refused to go. He wrote to the government protesting the “stigma of inferiority” implied in Swart’s decree. After all, said Shao, “we Chinese were the first race to drink liquor. That was in 2200 B.C.”*

Swart relented—for one evening only. He told Johannesburg cops to look the other way while Shao and guests took a nip. So Shao went to the ball. Its purpose: to raise funds for Alcoholics Anonymous, which, in South Africa, is strictly an all-white organization.

*Shao apparently forgot about the Babylonians who were appeasing their gods with a genial mild-and-bitter (brewed from wheat and honey) almost 40 centuries earlier, circa 6,000 B.C. Genesis 9:21 notes that after the Flood Noah “drank of the wine, and was drunken.” The ancient Egyptians, too, were prodigious tipplers: according to his temple inscriptions, Pharaoh Ramses III (c. 1198-1167 B.C.) personally stood the gods 466,303 jugs of beer.