tribes dared not molest them. Until recently it was customary to plant a coffee tree on the graves of particularly powerful sorcerers, and the Oromo say that the first coffee tree grew from the tears of the sky god as they fell on the body of a dead wizard.
I’ve called this ceremony an exorcism, but it’s really a negotiation between the Zar and the sheykah, who alone can communicate with the Zar and, if necessary, bargain them down to more reasonable requests. The role of coffee is perhaps comparable to the peyote “allies” popularized in Carlos Castaneda’s Way of Knowledge trilogy, inasmuch as the “spirits” within the bean can only function according to the abilities of the person who has taken them into his or her body.
A girl came forward and placed more gifts on the ground before the sheykah’s silhouette. She suffered from headaches, it seemed, terrible, horrible headaches that would last for days. As she talked, the sheykah’s silhouette could be seen shivering.
The girl stopped and stood mute while her narration of woes was picked up by a male relative. From his description, it appeared her difficulties were more serious than headaches.
“It is a problem in the head,” whispered Abera’s friend.
She’d been having fits and strange, violent seizures in which she destroyed furniture. The family had decided to consult the Zar priest when she had tried to bite off her mother’s finger. The audience moaned as her tale unfolded. Her symptoms indicated classic evil Zar possession. The Zar tend to inhabit women, whom they mount like a horse and force to perform unnatural acts, including self-mutilation with iron bars, the scars of which invariably disappear by morning.
Suddenly the girl threw herself to the ground and started yelling, clutching her head, and shivering as if in great pain. It grew more and more pronounced as the sheykah questioned the evil spirit within her. During all this, my Catholic friend shook his head in disgust. Finally it was decided the girl’s family would donate a calf. Then the girl’s Zar made a highly unusual demand: she must cut off all her hair and go alone to scatter the strands in the fields where the hyenas waited.
A pair of scissors was fetched. But when they began to cut, the girl pointed to where we sat. Apparently my disguise was not as good as I’d thought. She did not want a foreigner to witness her shearing.
As we trudged back to the hotel, Abera’s friend explained things I had not understood. He had a low regard for the proceedings. I mentioned that in America we had similar healers on TV.
“They too use coffee beans?” he asked.
“Well, coffee is certainly popular among them,” I explained. “But for payment they generally prefer credit cards.”
I was told the next day that all traces of the girl’s hair had vanished from the fields by sunrise.
ONCE THE ETHIOPIANS DISCOVERED COFFEE’S PSYCHEDELIC powers, it was only a question of time before their neighbors caught on. By some accounts it was the pharaonic Egyptians to the north who first got hooked, with some overexcited scholars speculating that Egypt’s legendary nepenthe, consumed by Helen of Troy to “ease her sorrows,” was an early form of the Frappuccino.
But the main direction the coffee bean headed from Harrar was east to the Red Sea, then by boat to the port of al-Makkha, also known as Mocha, in what is today the nation of Yemen. There was a fair amount of trading going on between Harrar and al-Makkha back in the first millennium. Mainly ostrich feathers, rhinoceros horn, and tortoiseshell. The essentials. And slaves, of course. The Arabs were notorious slave traders and roamed this area in search of the victims they called zanj. The zanj were fond of the Arabs, or at least of their sweets. “The zanj held the [Arabs] in awe, 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