old billy goat had been nibbling the berries off a certain plant. The goatherd tried a few himself and soon was dancing about, too.
A holy man wandered by and asked the boy why he was dancing with a goat. The goatherd explained. The monk took some berries home and found that after eating them he could not sleep. It so happened that this holy man was famous for his rather tedious all-night sermons and was having trouble keeping his disciples awake. So he immediately ordered all his disciples, called dervishes, to chew the bean before he preached. The dervishes’ sleepiness vanished, and word spread about the great prophet whose electrifying wisdom kept you awake until dawn.
Being a city boy, I mentioned to Abera that it seemed strange that the goats would eat berries. Didn’t they normally prefer leafy stuff?
“Yes, well, perhaps it was so,” he said. “That is how the country folk still make it.”
“They make coffee out of leaves?”
“Yes. They call it kati.”
“Really? I would like to try it. Maybe in a café…”
“Oh no,” he laughed. “This is only drunk in the home. Hardly anyone in Harrar drinks it today. You must visit the Ogaden. They still drink it.”
“Where do they live?”
“The Ogaden? They live now in Jiga-Jiga.” He made the place sound like a disease. “But you can’t go there. It’s very, very dangerous. And those Somalis, those Ogaden, are very arrogant. So rude!”
“Why? What is the problem?
“They are rude people!” Abera shook his head angrily at the Ogaden’s poor manners. “Why, just not long ago they did a bad thing to a bus going there. To all the men.”
“Bad? How bad?”
“Why, very bad. They killed them.”
“That’s pretty bad,” I agreed.
According to Abera, Ogaden bandits had pulled all the men off a bus heading to Jiga-Jiga and demanded they each recite a verse from the Koran. Those who failed were shot in the head. Thousands of the Ogaden, a desert nomad tribe, had recently been forced into refugee settlements as a result of the collapse of the Somali government. The largest camp was near Jiga-Jiga on the Ethiopian/Somali border, and as a consequence the whole area was buzzing with guerrilla activity. The recent turmoil in Mogadishu, where dead American soldiers had been dragged through the streets, had made the Ogaden especially hostile toward Yanks. The situation had grown so difficult that the relief agencies no longer sent white workers to Jiga-Jiga for fear they’d be shot.
“It is very bad for foreigners to go there,” he said. “But why do you want to go?”
“I just want a cup of coffee,” I said. “Have you actually been there?”
“It’s Hell.” Abera looked down his nose. “I urge you not to go.”
IT WAS A PLEASANT TWO-HOUR DRIVE FROM HARRAR TO Jiga-Jiga, through the so-called Valley of Wonders, although what makes this valley so wondrous I couldn’t say. I had set out at five in the morning, Abera having warned me that drivers refused to return from Jiga-Jiga after two in the afternoon for fear of bandits. He’d recommended I get an early start and head back to Harrar before noon unless I intended to stay overnight, in which case I’d most likely find my hotel robbed at gunpoint. That was assuming, of course, that anyone would be stupid enough to let me stay at their lodge. Was he being a tad paranoid? Perhaps. At any rate, it was a refreshingly cool way to start the day. By the time we’d reached the desert’s edge, however, it had grown so warm that some of my fellow passengers removed the pistols cached beneath their shirts.
“The human head, once struck off, does not regrow like the rose.” This observation was made by a British officer when Sir Richard Burton proposed visiting here in 1854, and it kept running through my head. The parallels between Burton’s and my quests were starting to seem spooky. We were both seeking mysterious “bodies of water” in Central Africa; my mysterious liquid contained a few coffee beans, but other than that, we were looking for the same thing. Burton wanted to see how the Nile started out; I wanted to see how some of it ended up. Burton wound up with a Somali spear stuck through both cheeks, which is about where I hoped the parallels would cease.
Jiga-Jiga proved to be a dusty place specializing in huts constructed from flattened Shell oil drums. I popped my head into the first doorway that showed a tray of chipped glasses.
“Kati?” I inquired in Amharic and Arabic. “Do you have kati?”
The lady pointed at my tattered straw fedora and burst into giggles. I tried another café. The proprietor shooed me out, as did the next and the next after that. Every time I stepped out onto the street I found yet another six-foot-tall skeleton eyeing me with an ominous disinterest. Men had rifles. Women wore wildly colorful head scarfs. Ogadens, I presumed.
Suddenly, a wizened old woman, with a string of Christian crosses tattooed about her neck, beckoned me into her hut. She started babbling. She seemed frightened. I pantomimed sipping and asked about kati.
“Kati?” she asked and gestured to a sack full of dirty leaves. She repeated my drinking pantomime. “Kati?”
“Yes!” I pulled one of the leaves from the sack and sniffed—was this it? The legendary kati, qat shia, Abyssinian Tea, and perhaps the great-grandmother of all coffee drinks? She gestured for me to sit in a corner of the hut and then turned away. Only there was nothing in the corner to sit on. In fact, there was nothing in the hut but the bag of leaves. Was this really a café? No cups, no seats… and where was she going to cook the kati? How did I even know those were coffee leaves?
The old lady stopped and looked at me suspiciously.
“Kati?” I repeated.
“Owwwww,” she sighed in a breathy voice.
Oh well. She looked honest enough. I crouched on the dirt floor. But what if she drugged me? There was a knock on the door, and a man in a military uniform stuck his head in. He wanted my passport. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing in Jiga-Jiga.
“Coffee,” I explained lamely. “I was told to come here to drink it.”
The soldier asked the old lady a question. She shook the bag of leaves.
“You are a very stupid white man,” he said angrily. “This is a restricted area—very dangerous! Please come with me.”
“But…she’s going to make some…” I could tell this plea was falling on deaf ears. “Of course, officer,” I said coyly. “May I buy you a cup of tea first?”
“Tea?” he asked.
“No, no. I mean kati.”
“What is that?”
I started to explain. “No. You must leave. This area is under military control.”
As he loaded me onto the next van leaving for Harrar, I flashed back to the time some Irish friends were thrown out of East Harlem by two New York cops, despite their protests that they
