I'm going to focus here on southern Africa, which presents some distinctions from West Africa in this regard.

Before 1880 or so, beer brewing was a profoundly important part of village-level agricultural production of finger millet and sorghum and to a lesser extent maize, which started to displace millet and sorghum during the 19th Century.

As a general matter, with some variations throughout the region, women were in charge of brewing beer (as they were in charge of most agriculture) and they brewed different preparations of beer throughout the calendar year. Some brews were highly seasonal and might have fruit or other additives; a few might be much higher in alcoholic content to mark particular festivals or occasions. The standard, everyday beer was a sour thick mash that often had some grain left in it, with very low alcohol content. It was usually passed around in a shared vessel between a group of drinkers. It was often shared with members of an extended kin group who might have helped with a harvest, which sometimes separated 'rich' peasant families from poorer ones--if you were offered the hospitality of beer, you felt obliged to help with the harvest, but only people who had a lot of labor and land to work could produce sufficient beer to put the burden of hospitality on kinfolk and neighbors.

When European colonial or white settler states began to assert strong administrative control over indigenous communities, they often specified that Africans were not allowed to drink "European liquors", which meant both hard liquor and European-style beers. This was mostly straight-up segregation designed to keep educated Africans out of bars that whites frequented and to communicate to educated Africans that they should stick to "their" beers. But in urban areas and some rural towns, colonial governments and the South African apartheid regime built "beer halls" that exclusively served what these regimes called "Bantu beer", an industrially produced version of the most common indigenous brewing style--a thick, sorghum-based beer that's sour and slightly pink. Women in townships often brewed illegally aside from the government beer halls (and brewed a stronger liquor usually referred to as skokiaan, a kind of 'white lightning' that could be almost anything) and served their own brews in local illegal taverns called shebeens. (Ellen Hellman's fascinating pre-WWII sociological study Rooiyard has some vivid descriptions of brewing practices and the lengths people had to go to in order to disguise them from the police.)

Today you can buy this sour sorghum beer throughout the region in milk cartons--in Zimbabwe, it goes by the brand name "Chibuku"-- or go to the descendents of these beer halls and buy a large bucket that is passed among friends. It's very filling and about 2% or so ABV, so people can drink for a long time without getting notably drunk.

By the 1940s at the latest, many governments in the area were permitting the same of European-style lagers to Africans--the most common brand made in South Africa and sold throughout the region was Castle, which remains widely available. It's a very undistinguished, standard lager but quite popular. Quite recently--the last 10 years--craft brewing has started to pop up in some places, often where tourists or relatively wealthy people are around.

In rural areas, you can still sometimes find people brewing more traditional seasonal grain beers besides the standard sour sorghum mixture, but not very often.

Although it may not be the first country that comes to mind when you think of “Beer in Africa,” Egypt has a fascinating history with beer.

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I think most are aware of the importance beer in Pharaonic Egypt. As the work by Delwen Samuel has shown, the beer they were drinking was most likely made from the fermentation of barley, emmer wheat, or both. Beyond that, there is debate whether it contained dates or other sweeteners. There is no evidence that it contained hops. It was likely produced through a combination of grain processing. The grain could be malted, ground, and mixed with cold water or ground, mixed with water, and then boiled. It is not clear how much of each type of grain preparation was used, but a mixture of these two processed grains would then sieved and then fermented.

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Samuel’s work is interesting because for a significant amount of time people believed that Ancient Egyptian beer was made through a process similar to a more contemporary cereal drink in Egypt, buza.

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The best description in English of the beverage comes from Ralph Hattox’s book Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East:

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It is a drink closer to a solid than a liquid, resembling nothing more than cool, slightly fermented farina, with a sort of fizzy tingle imparted by the carbon dioxide, as well as the tell-tale yeasty-sour smell and taste of the stuff leaves little doubt that it contains some, though probably very little, alcohol…” (p.123)

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For this discussion, the most important features of the beverage is that its grains were not malted before fermentation. Some recipes even call for it to be made from stale bread.

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Nevertheless, if we are to find any legacy for ancient Egyptian brewing in contemporary Egypt it is probably buza. After the pharaohs, beer was known and made in Egypt well into the Islamic period. For example, the term mizr (translated as beer) featured prominently in the work of medieval chroniclers, especially in the work of al-Maqrizi (1364-1442), Egypt’s most famous medieval chronicler. For example, in his al-Mawaʿiz wa-l-Iʿtibar fi dhikr al-Khitat wa-l-āthār (Admonitions and Reflections on the Quarters and Monuments), Al-Maqrizi recounts not only how mizr was a favorite among the populace, but also how it was a target of pre-Ottoman Egyptian rulers like Salah al-Din and Sultan Baybars, who used the prohibition of mizr to prove their Islamic bona fides.

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However, after al-Maqrizi, the records of mizr (and other fermented cereal beverages) disappear in favor of buza. And buza would maintain its position as the fermented cereal drink of Egyptians until the 19th century.