For thousands of years, humans have poured drinks for gods, ancestors and spirits. Palm wine, beer, wine, gin, even water. Whatever a culture considered worthy, some of it went to the unseen before the living got on with business.
Then came Fanta.
That sounds almost comical, because it is. A brightly coloured, aggressively cheerful soft drink doesn’t exactly scream “sacred communication with the ancestors.” Yet somewhere along Nigeria’s long romance with modern commerce, bottles of Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fanta started turning up in places once reserved for palm wine and local spirits.
This isn’t really a story about soft drinks replacing alcohol. It’s a story about what happens when a culture changes its beverage but refuses to let go of the meaning attached to pouring one.
A drink is rarely just a drink
Libation is the clearest example. Among the Kiong-speaking Okoyong people of Cross River State, libation isn’t just wasting a splash of liquid on the ground. It’s a full performance involving invocation, social relationships and communication with the unseen, and researchers describe it as one of the ways the living stay connected to the dead.
That tells us something easy to miss when we judge drinks purely on nutrition, alcohol content or price: the liquid has a job to do. Sometimes it refreshes. Sometimes it intoxicates. Sometimes it celebrates. And sometimes, culturally speaking, it talks.
That’s also why swapping one beverage for another doesn’t automatically kill the ritual. The drink is often just one piece of a much bigger symbolic machine.
Enter Fanta, stage right
Here’s where it gets genuinely funny. Back in 2023, Drinkabl’s own reporting tracked a trend inside some white-garment churches, where worshippers were asked to bring Fanta and other orange-flavoured drinks for prayers tied to sweetness, wellbeing and prosperity. In some accounts, the drinks were prayed over and used in cleansing rituals, and demand pushed Fanta’s price noticeably above rival soft drinks in the affected areas.
A word of caution: this is a documented trend in particular congregations, not proof that Nigerian churches broadly treat Fanta as holy water. But culturally, it’s still fascinating. Somewhere between the altar and the supermarket shelf, Fanta stopped being just Fanta. Its colour, sweetness and sheer familiarity picked up a second layer of meaning that no one at the bottling plant designed on purpose.
The manufacturer sells refreshment. The consumer, in the right cultural setting, supplies the symbolism. That gap between the two is the whole story.
Alcohol had a head start, not a monopoly
Alcohol obviously has one big advantage here: it alters consciousness, which made it a natural fit for ritual across many cultures, and older Nigerian scholarship notes that gods were traditionally appeased with a splash of alcohol on the ground. There’s also a widely held belief in parts of the country that ancestors have particular tastes, and that a soft drink simply won’t do when something stronger is expected. Whether that idea comes from formal research or generations of oral tradition, the sentiment is the same: spiritual preference can be remarkably picky, even when the packaging has moved on.
And yet Fanta’s appearance in prayer sessions proves alcohol doesn’t own the spiritual lane outright. A drink can pick up sacred meaning without getting anyone tipsy, which is either deeply profound or slightly hilarious, depending on your mood.
The real contest isn’t Coke versus gin
It’s tempting to frame this as soft drinks battling alcohol for the affections of the spirit world. That makes a great headline and a weak argument. The real contest is between the original cultural meaning of a drink and the new meanings people attach to whatever a factory happens to bottle.
Traditional drinks grew out of the culture that made them: palm wine from a tree, beer from grain, spirits distilled by hand within the community. Modern soft drinks arrived differently, with labels, factories, advertising and refrigeration trucks. And yet consumers did something very human: they ran the new products through the meaning-making systems they already had.
Companies manufacture products. Cultures manufacture meaning. That’s the whole trick.
The lesson for the industry
Beverage marketing tends to assume brands create occasions. It might be the other way round: culture creates the occasion, and the beverage simply gets invited to the party. A drink can become tied to weddings, funerals, football nights or family lunches without the manufacturer scripting any of it.
That’s precisely why the Fanta story matters more than it first appears. It shows that brand meaning can slip the leash of brand strategy entirely. A company can spend millions explaining what its drink stands for, while somewhere else, consumers quietly decide it stands for something else altogether. That isn’t a marketing failure. It’s proof of how much power culture actually holds.
From palm wine to Fanta
Maybe that’s the real story of modern beverages in Nigeria. They didn’t replace the old drinking culture so much as move in with it, poured into old rituals, set beside older offerings, and eventually handed meanings no brand manager could have pitched in a boardroom.
The grain becomes beer. The grape becomes wine. The palm becomes wine, then gin. The bottle becomes a brand. And every so often, the brand becomes a symbol.
So maybe the real question isn’t whether the gods prefer alcohol or soft drinks. It’s why humans have always needed a drink to say what words alone can’t. If history is any guide, we were never just drinking the liquid. We were drinking the meaning. Sometimes, apparently, that meaning comes in an orange bottle.
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