Nairobi, Sept. 10 -- It is the same warning they give you with muratina: that you should not be fooled by the sweetness as the honey-based brew trickles past your tongue. That after a while, it can and will demonstrate that it is alcohol anyway.

So, when I order a canned sweet banana-based alcoholic drink at the Fusion Restaurant in the Hemingways Retreat Kigali, with the alcohol content indicated as 14 percent, I am warned that the sweetness is a Trojan horse; that this drink has the power to make me attempt a Guinness World Record for the longest vernacular weeping soliloquy.

"Vernacular? No. I'll do it in the King's English if it comes to that. The fluent-est English I will ever speak," I say. This is because I do not wish to drag my...