This paper examines the subjectivities created by COVID-19 lockdown. It focuses on how residents in the townships consume and harness imbamba – an alcoholic beverage to satisfy their needs and ensure that they sustain basics of their livelihoods and sociocultural sense of personhood. Imbamba is a moving substance that mobilises social relationships in myriad ways. Given the challenges posed by the COVID-19 lockdown, the paper explores how, collectively and individually, residents imagine and negotiate their future pathways around a famous township’s beverage, imbamba. The paper focuses on the strategies deployed by residents to navigate and reconcile the possible contradictions of the alcohol ban during COVID-19. The study employs an anthropological perspective using ethnography and shows the importance of imbamba, incompleteness and conviviality in the township. Conviviality in this paper assures interdependence. Despite many challenges and much frustration during the lockdown and reliance on alcohol, the paper found that alcohol enabled people in the townships to maintain relationships and resist the lockdown regulations in South Africa through conviviality. This aspect of social practice is manifested in various forms – eliciting beer sales to indoor parties – that reinforce the relationships through alcoholic drinks.