Five weeks in Nigeria and still I hadn't gotten used to it: the disapproving looks when I as the only woman in the bar ordered a beer. Nigerian women don't drink beer, or at least, not in public. They prefer nauseatingly sweet girly drinks like Smirnoff Ice, which they think more ladylike than lager, in spite of its higher content of alcohol. Beer has a funny reputation in Africa's most populous country. For some reason beer is percieved as something much more dangerously alcoholic than for example wine. Maybe because Jezus in the Bible does pour down a glass of wine or two, but never a pint of lager? Nigerians even think palm wine - which I know from my own experience can have a pretty drastic effect - more innocent than beer, judging this statement last week in front of an Osun State court. The defendent argued he had not drunk beer, but only palm wine, and therefore he couldn't have been that drunk.
