If you thought a pub was just a place that ended in a hangover, Ashraf Jamal has news for you "The pub, like pubs all over the world, was a place for debate and discussion, for the exchange of views and opinions, for argument and for the working out of problems. It was a forum, a parliament, a fountain of wisdom and a cesspool of nonsense, it was a centre for the lost and the despairing, where cowards absorbed Dutch courage out of small glasses and leaned against the shiny, scratched and polished mahogany counter for support against the crushing burdens of insignificant lives. Where the disillusioned gained temporary hope, where acts of kindness were considered and murders planned."This passage, from Alex la Guma's A Walk in the Night, the edgiest, coolest novel ever written out of South Africa, sets the stage: the pub, bar, pleasure dome, hole-in-the-wall; a zone of liberation, innovation, lust, love, addiction, despair and dumb mistakes.Why bars matter has everything to do with being an animal. "Next to breathing," says the socio-bio-logist Desmond Morris, "drinking is the most essential of all human activities ... for a man deprived of sustenance will die of thirst before he will succumb to starvation."story_article_left1We drink to live, yes, but we also drink because, being human, we know the taste of death. And, of course, because alcohol, unlike HO, gives us the existential kick we need to feel alive. La Guma knew this all too well. A Walk in the Night has one of the most compellingly sketched drunken souls in literature, with "eyes ... dull and damp as pieces of gravel in a gutter". And who can forget Edgar Degas's Absinthe Drinker?Unlike his fellow Impressionists, Degas was no soak, but he certainly had the talent to see just how vulnerable humans are. His drinker, upright yet fragile, her eyes locked upon some indefinable horizon, is each and every one of us, conscious, perplexed, and fundamentally clueless."All alone is all we are," is Kurt Cobain's finest truism. And yet community defines us too, and no community does that better than a community of drinkers.In the 1930s Tom Harrisson set up the Mass Observation project. In his research he concluded that "Bars are the only kind of public building used by large numbers of ordinary people where their thoughts and actions are not being in some way arranged for them; in other kinds of public building they are audiences, watchers of political, religious, dramatic, cinematic, instructional or athletic spectacles."But in bars the surveillance system crashes, the heart slips under the radar, and anything - absolutely anything - can happen.Which is why in my 'hood, Observatory in Cape Town, it is the bars such as Café Ganesh and Tagore's which the cops raid. Instinctively they know that these cells are not spaces of distraction, reverence, or numbing awe, but inter-zones in which the living separate themselves from the dead and discover what it is they must become.Bars, at their best, allow for freedom from thought control. By sustaining the ancient ritual of buying rounds, bars also keep society whole.block_quotes_start Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut - Ernest Hemingway block_quotes_end"In almost all drinking places, in almost all cultures, the unwritten laws and customs involve some form of reciprocal sharing of drinks," notes Morris. A mystic glue, drinking is of course also good for the economy; never mind the couples for whom bars are the sticking point, the place to fall in love, break up, or cheat.As the wise drunkard Ernest Hemingway remarked, "Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." Except of course that we need to blunder, act the fool, or screw up. Which is why, as another famous soak, F. Scott Fitzgerald, declared, "First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."story_article_right2The master of the gothic horror, Edgar Allan Poe, was not a happy chappy either. "I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulant in which I sometimes so madly indulge," he wrote. "It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom."Yes ... and no. Benjamin Franklin, the greater sage, preferred to note that "in wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria".But why one drinks is not the focus here, and neither is it how one drinks; rather, it is the place in which we choose to drink that's the real story.The African Freedom Station in Westdene, Johannesburg is, for me, a zone of liberation. It's the Senegalese sound mixed with reggae, the slow cheap food, the buchu in the whisky, the mezzanine jammed with books, the concreted alley-way and yard where the talk ticks over, and, most of all, the re-mix of people from across the continent, the planet, who are all attuned to the realisation that we were not humans on a spiritual path, but spirits on a human path.What matters inside the African Freedom Station - built on the bones of Triomf and Sophiatown - and what matters in every other "freedom station", is the human factor; people who see through skin, money, class, caste.Stepping out at 4am, Fela Kuti still playing, I saw two young white boys in vests, shorts and plakkies, fat brown quarts in their hands. A brazier was burning between them, the fire a glittering cubist puzzle of pine off-cuts. The whole scene was bathed in fluorescent blue light pouring through the gaping door of a pawn shop. On that unpoliced night, freedom seemed to be everywhere, as surely it must also have seemed to Fitzgerald when, thoroughly soaked, he saw the world through "the rose-coloured glasses of life".mini_story_image_hleft1Back in Cape Town, Ganesh celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. It is proof that utopia can thrive on this forsaken earth. A hub for anarchists and accountants, poets and activists, it's a place where the South African story is rewritten every night.Run by Anthony Mlungisi Baker - whose middle name means "to make right" - Ganesh is the bar the hipsters and the larnies choose to slum in. Neither artisanal nor chillingly cool, Ganesh's drawcard is that it's the place Steve Bantu Biko dreamt about; a place in Africa which would give the world "a human face".Famous for its umngqusho - meat, samp, beans - "spinach ka Beauty", and crayfish samoosas, Ganesh understands that food makes sense when it stops being a fetish. The kitchen has always been open (long before it became fashionable). The cooking, cleaning and wait staff are indistinguishable.Unlike Cape Town's sterile CBD, or the "gentrinaaied" Woodstock, Observatory remains a safe house, thanks to the spirits of Tagore's and Ganesh.Tagore's is a music mecca once run by Ntone Edjabe, the Cameroonian brain behind pioneering magazines Chimurenga and Chronic.Ganesh, says Baker, is a place "for incendiary people". "Obs is not the bohemian capital it used to be, it's quietened down, had its wings clipped, but it still retains its accepting nature." It is this principle which bars that matter keep alive.Ask yourself which bar gives back this freedom and refuses to clip your wings. After all, you're only human when you are uncensored and the micro-fascist in you has been nuked...