LITMIR.BIZ

We spent the rest of the day lounging on the raised platform in Abera’s traditional Harrari home. Friends came to visit. More qat was chewed, more kati was brewed, and the afternoon soon lost itself in a qat haze, earnest but idle, where nothing matters so much as expression and understanding. The day was hot, but Abera’s clay house was cool and made comfortable with cushions. We talked about Rod Stewart, for whose haircut Abera confessed a great admiration. Later, during the more serious part of a qat session called Solomon’s Hour, the talk turned to witchcraft. I mentioned the Ethiopian Christian deacon who had claimed Muslims used coffee to lay curses on people. Abera had never heard of this. But here in Harrar, he said, some used it for magical healing.4

      “People come from many miles to Harrar to be healed by these people,” he said.

      “Have you ever seen it done?” I asked.

      “Once.” He shook his head. “I do not approve of these people.”

      “What happened?” I asked. “Did you see the Zar?”

      “You know about the Zar?”

      “The priest in Addis told me. It’s a devil, right?”

      “No, not exactly. It is the one that comes to the sheykah.” He asked his friend, who worked for a UN agency but spoke no English, a question. “Yes, my friend says the Zar comes to the sheykah. He knows all these people.”

      It turned out that a celebrated sheykah had just returned to Harrar after finishing four years of special training at Ethiopia’s holy Lake Wolla, He was now holding sessions in Harrar every Tuesday and Thursday. Today was Tuesday.

      “Your friend knows these holy men?” I asked.

      “Yes. Some.”

      I hesitated. “Is it possible for a foreigner to go to a healing?”

      “You wish to go?” Abera seemed surprised. “I don’t know…” He asked his friend another question. “He says he does not know. No foreigners go to these things. But he can ask.”

      It took us the rest of the afternoon to locate the sheykah, only to be told that he was still asleep. It’s a holiday, said his groupies; best to come back later. With presents.

      “Presents?” I asked.

      “Yes, that is normal. It is a sign of respect.”

      The plan became that Abera should go alone to buy the “respect” while I went back to the hotel. We’d meet again in the evening. But in the meantime I had to give him some money to buy the presents. I wondered if it was all a scam but produced the money anyhow.

      “What are you going to get them?” I asked before handing it over.

      “Green coffee beans,” he said. “That is what you always give. Two kilos should be enough. Don’t give them anything else! You’re only going to watch, not get healed.”

1 Kefa, some say, is the root for the word coffee. More contend that coffee derives from the Arabic qahwa, from the root q-h-w-y, “to “make something repugnant.” Qahwa originally referred to wine, which made food repugnant, and was applied to coffee because it made sleep repugnant. It’s interesting to note that Ethiopia is the only country in the world that does not use a word similar to coffee for the brew; there, it’s called buna, which means bean.

      The Kefans also gave us the world’s first baristas, a caste called the Tofaco, who not only brewed the king’s coffee but also poured it down his throat.

2 One theory is that coffee was created as a result of Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho’s supposed introduction of tea to the Arabs in the early 1400s. When China cut off contact with the outside world, the Arabs replaced tea leaves, unobtainable in Arabia, with qat or coffee.

3 Tea’s equivalent would be leppet-so, a pickled tea leaf chewed in parts of Burma.

4 Ethiopia is a traditionally Christian nation, whereas coffee is associated with Islam, a relationship that in the past has led to the banning of coffee for Ethiopian Christians.

       Ethiopian Prayer

      Eele buna nagay nuuklen eele buna iijolen haagudatu hoormati haagudatu waan haamtu nuura dow bokai magr nuken.

      Garri/Oromo prayer

      THE COFFEE BEAN HAS LONG been a symbol of power in Harrar. The caste of growers, the Harash, not only bore the city’s name but were forbidden to go beyond its walls lest the art of cultivation be lost. The head of the emir’s bodyguard was allowed a small private coffee garden as a sign of his rank.

      And of course, natives worshiped their coffeepots, as in the prayer above, which translates

       Coffeepot give us peace

      coffeepot let children grow

       let our wealth swell

       please protect us horn evils

       give us rain and grass.

      I think we all pray to the first cup of the day. It’s a silent prayer, sung while the mind is still foggy and blue. “O Magic Cup,” it might go, “carry me above the traffic jam. Keep me civil in the subway.

      And forgive my employer, as you forgive me. Amen.”

      But the prayer from the Garri/Oromo tribe is more serious, part of a ritual called bun-qalle that celebrates sex and death, and in which the coffee bean replaces the fatted ox in a sacrifice to the gods. Among the Garri the husking of the coffee fruit symbolizes slaughter, with the priests biting the heads off the sacrificial creatures. After this, the beans are cooked in butter and chewed by the elders. Their spiritual power thus enhanced, they pronounce a blessing on the proceedings and smear the holy coffee-scented butter on the participants’ foreheads. The beans are then mixed with sweet milk, and everybody drinks the liquid while reciting the prayer.

      If the whole affair seems vaguely familiar, it should. Who has gone to a business meeting where coffee is not offered? Its use as an intellectual lubricant, along with its ability to “swell our wealth” per the Garri prayer, has made having a pot ready for consumption an international business norm. Looked at this way, a modern business office is nothing more than a “tribe” camped out about its own sacred pot, and the bun-qalle is nothing less than man’s first coffee klatch, archetype of the world’s most common social ritual.

      Two things about the bun-qalle mark alle it as probably the earliest use of coffee as a mind-altering or magical drug. The first is that the beans are fried and then eaten, a practice clearly derived from the coffee-balls chewed by Oromo warriors near Kefa. The Garri, who live a few hundred miles south of Harrar, are related to the Oromo and share their language. The second part of the ceremony, where the roasted beans are added to milk and imbibed, indicates it predates Islam (A.D. 600) because Islamic alchemists believed that mixing coffee and milk caused leprosy (a belief that lies at the root of the disdain many Europeans have for coffee with milk).

      Further indication of the ceremony’s extreme antiquity is the fact that the Garri associate bun-qalle with the sky god Waaq. His name may sound uncouth to us, but the worship of this sky god is thought to be among the world’s first

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