In 1855 it cost more to carry Harar coffee to the sea than to buy it. Thirty-two years later, a newspaper in New Zealand called the town a great emporium of the coffee trade. Neither tells us what the grower was paid.
Richard Burton spent ten days in Harar in January 1855. By his own account he was the first European to enter the town. He met the Amir and spent most of his stay waiting for leave to go. Yet in the short chapter he wrote about the place, he stopped to record what a load of coffee cost.
A parcel of twenty-seven pounds sold in Harar for a quarter of a dollar. To hire a camel to carry twelve of those parcels to Berbera, on the Somali coast, cost five dollars. Twelve parcels came to three dollars of coffee. The camel cost five. Burton did the sum in the same sentence and concluded that "the profit did not repay labour and risk."
I keep returning to that sentence. Burton was a traveller repeating prices he was told, not a merchant keeping books, and the quarter dollar was the price in town, not what a farmer in the gardens outside the walls received. But the shape of it is hard to miss. In 1855 the road to the sea was worth more than the coffee, and whoever controlled the road controlled the trade. Burton heard the people of Harar say as much themselves: "He who commands at Berberah, holds the beard of Harar in his hand."
He wrote down two other things he was told about the Amir. One was that the Amir held coffee back so as not to flood the market at Berbera. The other was that the Harash, the men who tended the coffee, were forbidden to travel, so that the skill of growing it would not leave the country. Burton gave both as hearsay. Still, they describe a ruler who decided how much coffee went out and who kept the growers where he could use them. A reader in Ethiopia today will not find that unfamiliar.
Burton also told the Amir he was sorry Harar coffee was not better known among Europeans. That changed within a generation. On January 26, 1887, The Press in Christchurch, New Zealand, printed a short Reuters cable from Aden. Abyssinian forces had defeated the Emir's army and taken Harar. The battle was Chelenqo, and the army was Menelik's. Because its readers would not know the place, the paper added a note: Harar "is at present a great emporium of the coffee trade."
The editor's note gets several things wrong. It puts Harar three degrees too far south and calls it the ancient capital of the Hadya, which it never was. But the one fact the editor thought his readers needed was coffee. By 1887 the name of a walled town in eastern Ethiopia could be explained to a reader in Canterbury in a single line, and the line was about its coffee.
So in thirty years Harar went from a place whose coffee was worth less than the camel that carried it to a name known on the other side of the world. What I could not find, in Burton or in The Press, is what the people who grew it were paid. Burton tells us the cultivators owed the Amir a tenth of their harvest, paid in kind. We know the price in the market and the cost of the road. We know who held the beard of Harar. We do not know what the Harash took home.
That gap runs through every document in this series. The consular reports, the court rulings and the trade treaties that follow are careful about ports, names, duties and quotas. On the grower they are almost always silent. When a price does appear, it is the price at the town gate, at the port or on the exchange in New York.
Both sources are reprinted in full in this series: the 1887 telegram and Burton's chapter on Harar.
Sources.
- Richard F. Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa; or, An Exploration of Harar (London, 1856), Chapter VIII. Project Gutenberg text.
- "Home and Foreign," The Press (Christchurch), January 26, 1887, p. 5. Papers Past.
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