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 were meeting friends.
“Don’t be stupid,” one of the cops said after they’d escorted my friends to the nearest subway station. “You’ll never have no friends here.”
“THE GERMAN PRESIDENT IS COMING TO VISIT JIGA-JIGA,” Abera said when I told him what had happened. “So they made you leave.”
But he had good news. He’d mentioned my quest to his girlfriend. It turned out her housemate knew how to brew kati, and she’d invited me over for a cup.
There are actually two types of coffee-leaf beverage. The first, and more common, is kati or kotea, a concoction made of roasted coffee leaves. The other is called amertassa, an earlier version of the drink made from fresh-picked green leaves that are left to dry in the shade for a few days and then brewed without roasting. The market lady from whom we bought our supplies could remember her grandmother drinking amertassa. Now it was almost extinct. She did, however, have a burlap bag full of kati, broad leaves with orange and green highlights.
Kati and amertassa are strong candidates for being the first cup of coffee, for while Ethiopians have been eating the beans since time immemorial, the first mention of a coffee beverage suggests it was brewed from the plants’ leaves. Kafta was its Arabic name. Some scholars claim it was brewed with leaves from the narcotic plant qat, yet in the early 1400s Arab mystic al-Dhabhani saw Ethiopians “using” qahwa, a clear reference to coffee in a liquid form. So what were the Ethiopians drinking? Quite likely a brew made from coffee leaves: the semimythical Abyssinian Tea. Raw beans were added later in southern Yemen by the Sufi mystic al-Shadhili of Mocha or one of his disciples.2
Whatever the case, kati is a lovely cuppa. Preparation is simple: dried leaves are roasted on a flat pan until they acquire a dark, tarry texture, then crumbled and brewed over low heat with water, sugar, and a pinch of salt. Cooking time is about ten minutes. The resultant amber-colored liquor has a delicately caramelized, smoky flavor comparable to lapsang souchong (Chinese smoked tea) but more complex, both sweet and salty, with a sensuously gelatinous texture.
It proved an especially sympathetic combination with the qat leaves Abera had bought for us to chew. Qat is the evil sister to coffee and has addicted much of southern Arabia and East Africa (it has also recently developed a following in the West). The two drugs’ histories are so intertwined that one nickname for the patron saint of coffee drinkers, al-shadhili of Mocha, is “the Father of Two Plants,” qat coffee. Qat is taken by chewing rew leaves and holding the pulp in the cheek until the juices are extracted. I’d first tried it years ago in Kenya and been unimpressed, but the stuff Abera brought that day was electrifying, comparable to low-key Ecstasy. Ecstasy, however, produces a physical and emotional high, whereas quality qat—and Harrar is said