Commercialization and corporate capital in the sorghum beer industry of Central Africa

Within industrial geography Third World studies remain a largely underdeveloped research terrain. Especially in developing Africa, the poverty of manufacturing research is evident, with the mass of current studies concerned only with descriptive monitoring. The present paper represents a contribution to the geography of business enterprise in Africa investigating the evolution of sorghum beer manufacturing in Central Africa. The time span of this study embraces a period of rapid change in the political environment of the region, with the march of decolonization. The examination of the sorghum beer industry highlights the themes of an emergent African multinational enterprise, the takeover by British capital and finally its withdrawal leaving a niche which was occupied by South African capital. The major corporate actors in the sorghum beer industry are shown both as active agents of industrial change and reactive agents of the shifting international political tide.