bean evolved into the civilized Arabica, potentially making the Harrar Longberry the missing link of the genus Coffea. To understand the importance of this you must first know that there are two basic species of coffee beans: the luscious Arabica from East Africa, which prefers higher elevations, and the reviled Robusta from Zaire, which grows just about anywhere.
That being understood, we must now go back to that mysterious time before the dawn of civilization, the Precaffeinated Era.
Back then, fifteen hundred to three thousand years ago, the world’s first coffee lovers, the nomadic Oromos, lived in the kingdom of Kefa.1 The Oromos didn’t actually drink coffee; they ate it, crushed, mixed with fat, and shaped into golf-ball-size treats. They were especially fond of munching on these coffee-balls before going into battle against the people of Bonga, who generally beat the pants off the Oromos. The Bongas also happened to be first-rate slave traders, and sent about seven thousand slaves each year to the Arabic markets in Harrar. A fair number of these unfortunates were Oromos coffee chewers who had been captured in battle. It was these people who accidentally first brought the bean to Harrar. Ethiopian rangers say the old slave trails are still shaded by the coffee trees that have grown from their discarded meals.
But the important thing is the difference between the regions’ plants. Beans from relatively low-lying Kefa grow in huge coffee jungles and are generally more akin to the squat, harsh Robustas that probably came out of the jungles of Zaire thousands of years before. Harrar’s beans, by contrast, are long-bodied and possess delicious personalities like the Arabicas. In adapting to Harrar’s higher altitude, something wonderful seems to have happened to them. No one knows what, but we should all be grateful that it was the evolved Arabica beans of Harrar that were later brought to Yemen, and then to the world at large.
So Rimbaud’s risking his life for the bean (in fact, it killed him) is perhaps not so unreasonable. It’s worth noting, however, that the poet/merchant did not seem to hold Harrar’s coffee in high regard. “Horrible” is how he describes it in one letter; “awful stuff” and “disgusting.” Oh well. Perhaps all those years of absinthe had dulled his taste buds. The fact that the locals were fond of selling him beans laced with goat shit probably didn’t help matters.
After a few more cups, I checked into a hotel and set out in search of Rimbaud’s home. Harrar is a small place of about twenty thousand inhabitants; a maze of alleys lined with lopsided mosques, mudhuts. It is noticeably lacking in street names. Rimbaud’s house is probably the easiest thing to find in the city, since any foreigner who approaches is mobbed by wannabe tour guides. I had no intention of paying anybody for guiding me to a house, and eventually, by taking the most obscure route imaginable, I managed to reach what I knew was Rimbaud’s neighborhood undetected, only to find myself in a dead-end alley.
There was nobody in sight, so I yelled a cautious hello.
“Here,” came a familiar voice.
I crawled through a jagged crack in one of the walls, and there, squatting on a pile of rubble, was Rambo Man.
“Aha!” he shouted. “You have come at last.”
He was sitting in front of one of the oddest houses I’d ever seen. At least it seemed so in the context of Harrar’s one-story mud huts. It was three stories high with twin peaked gables, all covered in elaborate carvings. The shingled roof was fringed with fleur-de-lis decorations and the windows were stained red. Straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, I thought. The oddest thing, though, was how the mansion was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high mud wall with no opening other than the crack that I’d just crawled through.
The man was looking at me in surprise. “You have no guide?”
“Guide? What for?”
“No problem.” He waved a yellow piece of paper at me and demanded ten birra.
“What are these?” I asked.
“Tickets.”
“Tickets? Are they real?”
“See them.” He seemed vaguely offended. Ticket—Rimbaud, said the piece of paper. 10 Br. “You see—real house. Government. Not like the others.”
“You mean there are other Rimbaud houses?”
“No. Only one.”
I paid him, and he led me up a narrow interior stairway into a huge chamber, perhaps three thousand square feet, with a fifty-foot-high ceiling ringed by an old-fashioned oval balcony The walls were covered in handpainted canvas “wallpaper,” now so filthy and tattered that I could barely make out the quaint Parisian garden scenes and heraldic devices. Huge dust particles floated about. There was no furniture of any kind.
The great French poet spent the last days of his life in this surreal château, alone except for his beloved manservant. He wrote no poetry, and his letters were filled with complaints of loneliness, disease, and his financial problems, including a disastrous attempt to sell slaves and guns to the Ethiopian emperor. His prophecy of coming home with “limbs of iron… and fierce eyes” proved false. He returned to France delirious and destitute. His left leg had been amputated. A mysterious infection soon killed him.
I wandered about for a while, peering over the balcony, touching the walls. The place seemed uninhabited. A boy in rags trailed after me only to flee as soon as I spoke. Pigeons cooed from nests among the tattered wall hangings.
As I left, the man asked me if I wanted to meet Rimbaud’s descendants.
“There were daughters,” he said. “Rimbaud’s daughters…”
“Rimbaud had children?” I asked.
“Many daughters. Very beautiful girls… so young…” he stopped, suggestively. “You want Rambo girl?”
To sleep with the bastard offspring of Arthur Rimbaud, I thought; that would be a story. She would be beautiful, as all the women here were, and perfectly arrogant, as behooved one of Ethiopian-French descent. It was tempting. But hadn’t it been a case of Harrarian clap that killed Rimbaud? I declined.
Don’t roast your coffee beans in the marketplace.
(Don’t tell secrets to strangers.)
Oromo nomad saying
I MET ABERA TESHONE WHILE LOOKING FOR THE HYENA MEN, a caste that feeds Harrar’s trash to the packs of hyenas that gather nightly outside the city walls. The caste started as a way of keeping the animals from entering the city and attacking humans. Today it’s largely a tourist attraction, although the sight of hideous animals accepting garbage from men in rags is not likely to topple the Disney empire.
Abera, a young man with a withered left leg, had been my guide for the event, and afterward we’d gone for a beer. He wanted to know why I had come to Harrar.
“Not many tourists come here,” he explained.
“I noticed. I came here to learn about coffee.” A thought struck me. “Hey, didn’t you say you were an agriculture student? What do you know about its origin?”
“Do you know the story about Kaldi and the dancing goats?” “Of course,” I said. It’s one of coffee’s mythological chestnuts. It goes like this:
