La biere: le reflet de votre puissance

Just got an email from a friend in Ireland, talking (charmingly) about the need to keep to the centre of the pavements around St Patrick's day on account of the Guinnessy vomit on the walls and gutters.

Which reminded me: stout is absolutely huge in Africa. It's the last thing I'd have expected: I'd have thought the whole meal-in-a-pint-glass shebang would go much better in a climate like northern Europe where you lose a pie's-worth of calories shivering through each winter day.

But strangely, Guinness is everywhere. Every bar you enter has promotional Guinness plastic table mats, big cities are crowded with billboards for the stuff, black-and-beige bunting is draped outside drinking spots ... I've even seen plastic chairs with harps moulded into the backs.

In this climate I find it hard to get more than a half-pint of the stuff inside me at one go. The heat is dehydrating enough that more than two pints of anything alcoholic in one night would have me reeling. But locals knock Guinness back like it's water.

In Benin they even had adverts which called to mind the classic old 1930s Guinness marketing. A silhouette of an African man as impossibly muscly as the girder-carriers of the old ads, with "Guinness: le reflet de votre puissance" ("Guinness: the symbol of your power") emblazoned across it.

Now obviously they're trading on the idea that if you're black and you're proud then you've got to drink a black beer as well, rather than this cissy yellow stuff. But it's ironic that African pride is being invoked to enrich a European company at the expense of an impoverished part of Africa - though I guess that's advertising for you.

That said, there's now a local stout called Castle which seems to be catching up, although it must be bankrupting itself trying to compete with Guinness's marketing.