in Ethiopia, it was little more than a crumpled piece of straw held together with half a dozen black patches. And dirty— I didn’t dare wash it lest it dissolve. I loved it all the same. People in every nation reacted in a different but characteristic way. Nepalese facetiously offered large sums of money for it. Indians laughed and praised its “unique quality.” The Ethiopians merely thought it unhygenic.
“You cannot wear that hat,” said Abera. “Not tonight. It would be disrespectful.” He pulled out an Islamic-style scarf. “Wear this. I will tie it on for you.”
“Okay.” I knew he was right. Besides, the scarf, white with blue and red fleur-de-lis patterns, was rather stylish. Abera tied it on, turban style.
“It looks good,” he said. “You look like a Muslim.”
“So I’m in disguise?”
“Maybe. Not a bad idea when you walk in Harrar late at night.”
We chatted for a while. He refused my offer of dinner and, after a final exhortation to send him copies of Cosmopolitan Magazine (he rewrote the articles for the university paper), he departed. I sat down to wait in the hotel lobby.
Eight o’clock came and went. Then nine. Ten too. The hotel guard was spreading out his sleeping roll when there came a knock on the front door. It was Abera’s friend. I thanked him for coming but asked if he thought the ceremony might be over, since we were running two hours late. No problem, he said. Nonetheless, we hurried through Harrar’s darkened alleys. Squatting men called out greetings. The women, more diffident, smiled hello.
“They think you are Muslim,” my friend commented, pointing to my headpiece.
As we moved out of the town’s center it grew quiet. My companion fell silent. Harrar’s streets are said to be haunted by spirits from all the tribes that have been enslaved here. Its hyenas, traditionally believed to be hermaphroditic, are said by some to be spirits of the poor boys castrated and sold as eunuchs. According to the eighteenth-century French traveler Antoine d’Abladie, hyenas were thought to be a type of werewolf called buda that attacked and ate Zar spirits.
As we approached the house where the Zar ceremony was to be held, I heard singing. The exorcism was already in progress. My companion indicated silence, and we slipped into a long, narrow room lit by a single lamp. A crowd of perhaps twenty people squatted near the door. Halfway down the room hung a dirty white sheet through which we could see the silhouette of the sheykah reclining on a huge brass bed. Before the sheet stood the first patient. Since we had arrived late, I was never quite clear as to the nature of this man’s ailment. But the sheykah had already identified the possessing spirit and convinced it to leave the man in peace if he sacrificed three cocks with certain colored feathers about their necks.
A glass of pale liquor was passed around the room. People chatted in low voices. I was pleasantly surprised to be ignored. Apparently my “disguise” was working and I was being taken for some sort of foreign Muslim. Some of the people crouching by the wall began to rock slowly back and forth and sing a curious syncopated melody over and over. Incense was thrown on a brazier.
The traditional way to begin these exorcisms may include sacrificing a pair of doves or the taking of ganja or alcohol. All involve the roasting of green coffee beans, which are then chewed and brewed, thus “opening the box” and releasing the power of the sheykah so he can communicate with the Zar spirits, described as being toeless and having holes in their hands that, if you look through them, reveal another world. They are also said to be beautiful and come in a range of racial archetypes like Arab, white, and Chinese. The word Zar is thought by some to be a corruption of Jar, which in the Cushitic language of the Agaw tribe is the name for Waaq, the sky god.1 Ethiopian Zar priests traditionally come from a tribe called Wato or Wallo, the name of the lake where tonight’s priest was trained and Ethiopia’s most ancient holy spot. The Wallo tribe claims to be the descendants of the original Oromo coffee chewers and at one point were so feared for their magical powers that other tribes dared not molest them. Until recently it was customary to plant a coffee tree on the graves of particularly powerful sorcerers, and the Oromo say that the first coffee tree grew from the tears of the sky god as they fell on the body of a dead wizard.
I’ve called this ceremony an exorcism, but it’s really a negotiation between the Zar and the sheykah, who alone can communicate with the Zar and, if necessary, bargain them down to more reasonable requests. The role of coffee is perhaps comparable to the peyote “allies” popularized in Carlos Castaneda’s Way of Knowledge trilogy, inasmuch as the “spirits” within the bean can only function according to the abilities of the person who has taken them into his or her body.
A girl came forward and placed more gifts on the ground before the sheykah’s silhouette. She suffered from headaches, it seemed, terrible, horrible headaches that would last for days. As she talked, the sheykah’s silhouette could be seen shivering.
The girl stopped and stood mute while her narration of woes was picked up by a male relative. From his description, it appeared her difficulties were more serious than headaches.
“It is a problem in the head,” whispered Abera’s friend.
She’d been having fits and strange, violent seizures in which she destroyed furniture. The family had decided to consult the Zar priest when she had tried to bite off her mother’s finger. The audience moaned as her tale unfolded. Her symptoms indicated classic evil Zar possession. The Zar tend to inhabit women, whom they mount like a horse and force to perform unnatural acts, including self-mutilation with iron bars, the scars of which invariably disappear by morning.
Suddenly the girl threw herself to the ground and started yelling, clutching her head, and shivering as if in great pain. It grew more and more pronounced as the sheykah questioned the evil spirit within her. During all this, my Catholic friend shook his head in disgust. Finally it was decided the girl’s family would donate a calf. Then the girl’s Zar made a highly unusual demand: she must cut off all her hair and go alone to scatter the strands in the fields where the hyenas waited.
A pair of scissors was fetched. But when they began to cut, the girl pointed to where we sat. Apparently my disguise was not as good as I’d thought. She did not want a foreigner to witness her shearing.
As we trudged back to the hotel, Abera’s friend explained things I had not understood. He had a low regard for the proceedings. I mentioned that in America we had similar healers on TV.
“They too use coffee beans?” he asked.
“Well, coffee is certainly popular among them,” I explained. “But for payment they generally prefer credit cards.”
I was told the next day that all traces of the girl’s hair had vanished from the fields by sunrise.
ONCE THE ETHIOPIANS DISCOVERED COFFEE’S PSYCHEDELIC powers, it was only a question of time before their neighbors caught on. By some accounts it was the pharaonic Egyptians to the north who first got hooked, with some overexcited scholars speculating that Egypt’s legendary nepenthe, consumed by Helen of Troy to “ease her sorrows,” was an early form of the Frappuccino.
But the main direction the coffee bean headed from Harrar was east to the Red Sea, then by boat to the port of al-Makkha, also known as Mocha, in what is today the nation of Yemen. There was a fair amount of trading going on between Harrar and al-Makkha back in the first millennium. Mainly ostrich feathers, rhinoceros horn, and tortoiseshell. The essentials. And slaves, of course. The Arabs were notorious slave traders and roamed this
