prostrating themselves and calling out, ‘Greetings, Ο People from the Land of Dates!’” according to the medieval Arab writer Kitab al-Agail al-Hind. “For those who travel to this country steal the children of the zanj with sweet dates, luring them from place to place [with sight of the sweets] and then taking possession of them and carrying them off to their own countries.”
A thousand years ago it took the slave caravans up to twenty days to travel from Harrar to the Red Sea coast. Boys destined for the Turkish harems were castrated on the roadside. At least half of the captives died. The coffee trees sprouted from their leftovers.
My own journey to the Red Sea took only three days. I hitched from Harrar to the town of Dire Dawa near the country’s sole railroad. The train was a day late in arriving, but worth the wait; a baby blue, turn-of-the-century French chemin de fer with old-fashioned reclining seats (at least in first class) whose upholstery had disintegrated into filthy shreds. Mechanical failures turned the twelve-hour journey into a two day ordeal. As I had just spent a year in India, these kinds of delays seemed perfectly natural; I merely closed my eyes and pretended to be dead (or maybe I was just wishing).
We finally disembarked in the port of Djibouti, a town the thirteenth-century Islamic pilgrim Ibn Battuta described as “the dirtiest, most disagreeable and most stinking town in the world,” whose citizens had a taste for camel flesh. Today Djibouti is technically a nation. In reality, it’s a glorified French military post bursting with bars and brothels. My first stop was a café for a cold drink.
“You speak English?” A big-bellied man in a plaid skirt, a kanga, had seated himself at the next table. “Tu parles français?”
“Yes.”
He studied my hat. “Ah—an American man. Good! I speak twelve languages,” he informed me. “I have sailed to every port in all the world—Cairo, Alexandria, Venice, New York, Athens, Sydney, Hong Kong…”
The list continued. He was a retired sailor.
“And so I have returned to ‘Jibouti. You like?” I raised my eyebrows in a grimace of pleasure. “Why have you come?” he asked.
I explained I was looking for a boat going to al-Makkha.
He looked at me in surprise. “Al-Makkha? Why do you go there?”
“Coffee.”
“You go to Yemen for coffee?” he translated for the crowd at the bar. Everybody burst into laughter. “Not many boats are going there today, my friend.”
He explained that just yesterday Eritrea had invaded a group of Yemeni islands located midway between the two countries. The Red Sea was crawling with armies from both sides, and the Yemen air force had reportedly been bombing suspicious-looking vessels.
“But you are lucky. My friend’s boat leaves today. Some people, they have waited two weeks and will not worry about the bombs. But you must hurry!”
His friend’s boat turned out to be a thirty-foot long vessel whose brightly painted hull had long ago faded to gray. There was a hut, of sorts, toward the rear, and a rudimentary mast (no sail), but not much else. There was no radio, no light, and no emergency equipment of any kind. The toilet was a box hanging over the ocean. There wasn’t even a deck, just a jumble of crates covered with a green tarp, across which were scattered fifteen Somali refugees.
But it floated. Captain Abdou Hager and I quickly settled on thirty dollars. I hopped aboard, and five minutes later the Qasid Karin shook the rats off its lines and set off. It was that hour in the evening when the sun sinks out of sight, sending thick, buttery golden rays across the sky. The sea turned dark purple. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll be in Yemen. As we reached the harbor mouth, the ship slowed. There was a splash, and the engine went off.
“There is too much wind,” explained a fourteen-year-old Somali boy next to me. “We go tomorrow.”
His name was Mohammed. He and his sister were being sent to live with relatives in Yemen until the war ended. He was beautiful, I suppose, slender and tall with incredibly large feminine eyes and pouting lips. If he’d been dressed in a woman’s clothes, I would have taken him for a young girl. He asked if America had warlords like the ones in Somalia. Oh yes, I said, all the big cities had warlords. He and his sister, Ali, seemed surprised. Did the American warlords have tanks and guns? they wanted to know. Not so many tanks, I said, but lots of guns. I assured them that many neighborhoods in America were indistinguishable from Mogadishu.
After a few minutes of chatting, Mohammed, who spoke very limited English (though better than my Somali), gave me a present.
“I want you to have this,” he said, placing a wad of Somali money in my hands. “Take.”
I objected. Somali refugees shouldn’t give cash to American tourists. Quite the opposite. And I had absolutely no intention of handing out handfuls of American money in return.
“No, no, no,” I said. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“Yes, yes.” He thrust the money back into my hands. “Take.”
“It’s very pretty,” I said. It came to about fifteen thousand Somali shillings. “I cannot take this. You’re a crazy man.”
An Ethiopian who spoke better English intervened. The Somali government no longer existed. The money was worthless. I reluctantly accepted the pretty pieces of paper. Mohammed appeared mystified as to why I would only accept his gift if I thought it was worthless.
Ali was also distraught, mainly because in Yemen she would be obliged to don the veil. She pulled the hem of her robe over her face mockingly.
“Bad, bad,” she said. “Not in my country.”
Her face was a wonderful mix of Arab and African features. She plied me with tea and biscuits. I gave her my Arab-English dictionary.
Around two in the morning they pulled out their prized possession, a Casio minikeyboard. I played them the opening to Mozart’s Sonata in A, but they were more interested in the machine’s auto-rhythm controls, which produced a steady syncopation in whatever style you selected. In the days when coffee made this journey, these two would have been bound for slavery, I thought, listening to the tinselly bossa novas thumping against the wind. Now they were only refugees; I wondered if that qualified as a real improvement.
1 In the Rastafarian religion, which derives from Ethiopia, God is referred to as Jah.
In his travels he passed by a coffee bush and nourished himself, as is the custom of the pious, on its fruit which he found untouched. He found that it made his ain nimble, promoting wakefulness for the performance of religious duties.
al-Kawakib al-sa’irn bi-a’yan al-mi’a al-’ashira by Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi (1570–1651)
THE SHIP’S MOTOR WOKE ME in the morning. Djibouti had disappeared, and, peering over the railing, all I could see was a heaving sea of turquoise water flecked with whitecaps. It was like looking into a shattered mirror reflecting
