Groove culture: alcohol as a passport to lost youth

Luís Júnior"

Night in Maputo. Friday, 8pm. The neighbourhood starts to throb. The speakers blare amapiano as if summoning demons, and the youth respond with glasses of fake gin in their hands. It’s groove, they say. It’s just groove. But make no mistake: what starts as a beat ends up as social anaesthesia. And the youth are dying, drop by drop, sip by sip, as if it were natural. Groove has become a religion and alcohol, a mandatory baptism. It doesn’t matter if you’re 13 or 18. If you don’t drink, you don’t belong. You’re “square”, “square”, “no vibe”. The bullying starts there, with the first glass you refuse. From then on, you either adapt or you’re pushed to the margins. And they adapt quickly: the bottle is spun like an offering and the shame is silenced with a deep gulp. At first, the body refuses. Then it gets used to it. Then it demands it. And nobody talks about it. Nobody wants to talk about it. Everyone knows that the youth are drinking themselves into stupidity. But we pretend that it’s normal. The entire neighborhood is full of 15-year-old girls dancing on tables with bottles in their hands, filmed by kids who don’t know what limits or the future are. Every video becomes a story, every hangover becomes a joke. And the adults? The adults keep quiet. Many are too busy surviving. Others have simply given up on education. There are those who even applaud: “Leave them alone, they’re just enjoying their youth.” But it’s not enjoying themselves. It’s drowning. Drowning in traumas, poverty, absent parents, absent education, teachers who sleep in class, politicians who only show up to ask for votes. Groove is more than a party: it’s the only place where these young people feel they have some power. Because the rest of the week, they’re invisible. No one listens to them. No one takes them seriously. So, there in the middle of the beat and the drink, they shout what they can’t say during the day. The first time I saw a kid pass out from drinking too much was in the neighborhood. He was lying on the floor, his eyes rolled back, his body shaking. He was 12 years old. Someone was filming. Someone was laughing. No one helped him. They gave him water, shook his face, and then left him there, like an old sack. The party continued. And the dance floor filled up again. That kid might be dead. Maybe he's now in a rehabilitation center, if that even exists here. But no one knows. No one cares. The youth in Mozambique are at their wits' end. At their wits' end, at their wits' end, at their wits' end. And alcohol is not an accident. It's a tool. An effective way of keeping young people busy while the country continues to be bogged down by rotten promises. While the corrupt make billions disappear, the kids make their sanity disappear, bottle after bottle. The bars sell without asking your age. The guys at the stall just want to know if you have money. There is gin and vodka that looks like “disinfectant”:. What matters is circulating the product. Even if the product is killing. And it is killing: livers destroyed before the age of 20, strokes at 30, depression disguised as a hangover. But the official statistics continue to say: “youth is the hope of the nation”. Hope for what, when all they offer is groove and spirits? It is not only alcohol that is to blame. It is a system that has given up on offering paths. Schools are prisons without bars, neighbourhoods do not have youth centres, parents are absent (because they need to be), and the few who try to warn people are called old-fashioned. The government limits itself to cabinet meetings, producing pathetic slogans like “conscious youth, strong country”, while on this side, the youth faints in the gutter. There is a collective indifference that is frightening and criminal. Churches pretend it is someone else’s problem. Teachers think it is a phase. The police only show up to charge for soda. And doctors treat the consequences as if they were inevitable accidents. No one tackles the core of the problem. Because admitting that we are creating a generation of alcoholics is admitting that we have failed — as a country, as a society, as human beings. It takes courage to say: groove is killing. It is creating zombies with Facebook. Kids who only know how to live with a drink in their hand. Girls who trade their bodies for status. Boys who live in hangover mode. There is no future where the present is already numb. And the most tragic thing: young people themselves do not see themselves as victims. They think they are in control. That it is just fun. That “everyone does it”. It is urgent to stop pretending. Groove is not a tradition. It is a symptom. A symptom of a country that does not care for its youth. That abandons them to their own fate and then is shocked by the results. It is not alcohol that is killing them. It is us, by doing nothing. By leaving them there, adrift, celebrating the void with music and drink. As long as we continue to romanticize this culture as if it were just fun, we will continue to push our young people into the abyss. And the worst part is that the abyss doesn't make any noise. It just swallows. It swallows dreams, it swallows health, it swallows entire lives — and it all starts with a drink on any given Friday.

2025/12/3