the prose the quaintly archaic, singsong English of the subcontinent. I have no idea what it was called, since the cover had long ago rotted off. I suppose it was typical stuff, just another half-crazed Hindi rant about how dietary imbalances in the West were creating a race of hyperactive sociopaths hell-bent on destroying Mother Earth. Most of the tract kvetched about meat eaters (Hindus are vegetarians) and cow killers (Holy Beast, that). But the section that caught my eye was the one lamenting the evils of “that dark and evil bean from Africa.” I paraphrase:
Is it any wonder, I ask the reader, that it is told how the black-skinned savages of that continent eat the coffee bean before sacri ficing living victims to their gods? One need only compare the violent coffee-drinking societies of the West to the peace-loving tea drinkers of the Orient to realize the pernicious and malignant effect that bitter brew has upon the human soul.
You-are-what-you-eat fruitcakes are as common in India as in California. But what struck me was the contrast to an eighteenth-century French book I’d happened upon in Hanoi, Vietnam. The book, Mon Journal, was written by social critic and historian Jules Michelet, and in it he essentially attributes the birth of an enlightened Western civilization to Europe’s transformation into a coffee-drinking society: “For this sparkling outburst of creative thought there is no doubt that the honor should be ascribed in part to the great event which created new customs and even changed the human temperament—the advent of coffee.”
How French, I’d thought at the time, to attribute the birth of Western civilization to an espresso. But Michelet’s notion is curiously similar to modern research indicating that certain foods have affected history in previously unsuspected ways. Specialists in the field, called ethnobotany, have recently theorized that eating certain mushrooms can alter brain function. Others have reported that the sacred jaguars depicted by the Mayans are actually frogs that the priests consumed en masse for their hallucinogenic properties. Recent research has indicated that the sacred violet of the pharaohs was considered holy because of its intoxicating powers. These foods are all drugs, of course. But so is coffee—as an addict, I should know. Perhaps Michelet had been on to something. When had Europeans started drinking coffee, and what had it replaced? I was clueless. I Certainly had no idea that finding the answer would take me three quarters of the way around the world, roughly twenty thousand miles, by train, dhow, rickshaw, cargo freighter, and, finally, a donkey. Even now, penning this page, I don’t know what to make of what I’ve written. At times, it seems like the ramblings of a hypercaffeinated hophead; at others, a completely credible study. All I knew in Calcutta was that the logical place to start looking for confirmation of Michelet’s proposition was in the land where coffee had first been discovered over two thousand years ago, the country I’d been waiting to revisit for a decade.
It was time to head to Ethiopia and get that second cup.
Abole, Berke, Sostga—one, two, three cups, and we are friends forever.
Con artist in Addis Ababa
Harrar, Ethiopia
“YOU LIKE RAM-BO?”
My questioner was a wiry Arab-African squatting in the shade of a white clay wall. Sharp eyes, wispy mustache, white turban. Not your typical Sylvester Stallone fan.
“Rambo?” I repeated uncertainly.
He nodded. “Ram-bo.” He adjusted his filthy wraparound so the hem didn’t drag in the dirt. “Ram-bo,” he repeated with infinite disinterest. “Farangi.”
“Are you really a Rambo fan?” I was surprised—Charles Bronson had been more popular in Calcutta. I flexed my biceps to clarify. “You like?”
The man looked at me in disgust. “Ram-bo,” he insisted. “Ram-boo, Ram-boooo. You go? You like?”
“No go,” I said, walking off. “No like.”
I’d just arrived in Harrar, a remote village in the Ethiopian highlands, after a grueling twenty-four hour train journey from the capital, Addis Ababa. I already preferred Harrar. Its winding alleys were free of both cars and thieves, a big improvement over Addis, where pickpockets followed me like flies and my one night out had ended in an attempted robbery after a “friendship coffee ceremony.” I also liked Harrar’s Arabic flavor, the whitewashed mud buildings, and the colorful gypsy-African clothes worn by the girls. Rambo Man had been the only hustler so far, and he seemed reasonable enough.
I found a suitable café and grabbed a table in the shade. The coffee, brewed on an old handpulled espresso machine, was a thick black liquor served in a shot glass. The taste was shocking in the intensity of its “coffeeness,” a trait I attributed to minor burns incurred in the pan-roasting technique common in Ethiopia. Harrarian coffee beans are among the world’s finest, second only to Jamaican and Yemeni, but this… I suspected local beans had been mixed with smuggled Zairean Robusta, which would account for the fine head of crema (called wesh here), as well as the fact that after one cup I felt like crawling out of my skin.
I ordered a second. Rambo Man had come to stare at me from across the road. Our eyes met. He shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands suggestively. I scowled.
Harrar is one of the legendary cities of African antiquity. It was closed to foreigners for centuries because an Islamic saint had prophesied its fall the day a non-Muslim entered the walls. Christians who attempted to enter were beheaded; African merchants were merely locked outside and left to the tender mercies of local lion packs. Not that inside was much better. Hyenas roamed the streets, noshing on the homeless. Witchcraft and slavery flourished, particularly the notorious selling of black eunuchs to Turkish harems. By the 1800s, the walled city had become so isolated that a separate language had developed. It is still spoken today.
This reputation drew Europe’s most intrepid adventurers to Harrar. Many tried, many died, until Sir Richard Burton, the Englishman who “discovered” the source of the Nile, managed to enter the city in 1855 disguised as an Arab. It fell soon afterward.
The most intriguing of Harrar’s early Western visitors, however, was the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud had come to Paris when he was seventeen. After a year of pursuing his famous “derangement of the senses” lifestyle, he’d established a reputation as the most depraved man in the city. By nineteen, he’d finished his masterpiece, A Season in Hell. Having reached his twentieth year, he renounced all poetry and disappeared off the face of the earth. Rimbaud…
“Rambo!” I shouted, jumping out of my chair. That’s what the fellow had been going on about—Rimbaud, pronounced “Rambo.” He’d wanted to take me to Rimbaud’s mansion. The poet had not “disappeared off the face of the earth” when he’d abandoned poetry in 1870. He’d merely come to his senses and become a coffee merchant in Harrar.
Rambo Man, however, had vanished.
Rimbaud’s reason for coming to Ethiopia was more complicated than a desire to enter the coffee trade. He was actually fulfilling a passage from A Season in Hell, in which he predicted going to a land “of lost climates” from which he would return “with limbs of iron, bronzed skin, and fierce eyes.” He wanted action, danger, and money. He got at least the first two in Harrar. The emir had been deposed only twenty years earlier, and tensions were still high. The French coffee merchants needed someone crazy enough to risk his life for a bean (albeit one going for one hundred dollars a pound). Rimbaud was their man.
The
