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 religions. Whether the eating of coffee beans was performed in the original Waaq ceremonies is beyond knowing. One can say, I think, that since the Garri were doubtless among the first to taste our favorite bean, and since primitive people who discover psychoactive drugs tend to worship them (a penchant today denigrated as mere substance abuse), it seems likely that consuming the beans was added to the Waaq ceremonies at a relatively early date.
In the Oromo culture of western Ethiopia, the coffee bean’s resemblance to a woman’s sexual organs has given birth to another bun-qalle ceremony with such heavy sexual significance that it is preceded by a night of abstinence, according to the work of anthropologist Lambert Bartel. Oromo elder Gam-machu Magarsa told Bartel that “we compare this biting open of the coffee fruits with the first sexual intercourse on the wedding day, when the man has to force the girl to open her thighs in order to get access to her vagina.”
After the beans are husked, they are stirred in the butter with a stick called dannaba, the word for penis. Some people replace the stick with bundles of living grass because a dead piece of wood cannot “impart life” or impregnate the beans. As the beans are stirred, another prayer is recited until finally the coffee fruits burst open from the heat, making the sound Tass! This bursting of the fruit is likened to both childbirth and the last cry of the dying man. The person stirring the beans now recites:
Ashama, my coffee, burst open to bring peace
there you opened your mouth
please wish me peace
keep far from me all evil tongues.
In being eaten the coffee bean “dies,” blessing new thought and life, a tradition the Oromo say goes back as far as anyone can remember. After the bean has spoken, the assembly moves on to the matter at hand, such as a circumcision, marriage, land dispute, or the undertaking of a dangerous journey.
One important point about the bun-qalle. The beans are simply added whole to the milk, not pulverized. True infusion, where crushed beans are added to a neutral liquid like water, thus completely releasing the bean’s power, is reserved for the darker acts such as laying a curse or, as in tonight’s ceremony, the exorcism of an evil spirit.
“SOUNDS LIKE YOU’VE BEEN RIPPED OFF,” SAID AARON.
Aaron was an American health-care expert I met while waiting for Abera to take me to the Zar ceremony.
“Forty birra,” he said, referring to what I’d given Abera for the present. “Lot of money. I hope I’m wrong.”
Aaron had a particularly low opinion of Ethiopians and, like any good bureaucrat, had found some studies to back up his point of view. According to these, the massive influx of international aid during the famines had made begging from foreigners the social norm. It was as natural as breathing, according to Aaron. True or not, there was no denying that urban Ethiopia was filled with a type of begging I’d only previously encountered in America—that is, people obviously in no real need striking up mock friendships merely to cadge a few birra.
“No, you’ll never see your friend again,” Aaron assured me. “Why don’t you come up to my room and check out these baskets I bought? They were only seventy dollars each.”
Abera appeared, right on time. Everything was arranged. I could attend.
“But don’t give them any more presents!” he instructed again. “It is enough. And don’t drink anything they give you at the ceremony.”
The only disappointment was that he would not be going. He had a test to cram for. Instead his friend, a devout Catholic, had agreed to take me.
“Catholic? Will he show up?” I asked.
“He promised.” Abera sounded uncertain. “Stewart, I have to ask you something. Will you be wearing your hat?”
Abera was referring to my old straw hat, the one that the first kati lady in Jiga-Jiga had found so amusing. You know how it is when you get so attached to a particular article of clothing that you just can’t bear to throw it away? Well, I’d become very fond of this
