Before the First World War, a sack of Harar coffee could reach New York under its own name, or it could go by way of Aden and arrive as Mocha. Three accounts from those years follow it on the road, and record what was taken from it along the way.
William Ukers wrote All About Coffee for buyers, and his pages on Ethiopia read like directions for getting coffee out of Harar. They are also as close as these old documents come to the people who grew it. Most of the coffee around Harar, he wrote in 1922, came from small plots of fifty to a hundred trees, owned mostly by Hararis, Oromo and other Ethiopians, with a few Greek, German and French planters among them. Near the town, the women of farming families carried the coffee in long, shallow baskets on their heads to the brokers. Farther out, the farmer waited for the broker to come to him.
The only grower Ukers shows us in those pages is in a photograph, captioned as a coffee grower and his helper in his grove of young trees near Harar. The caption does not give his name.
Once the coffee reaches town, Ukers becomes very exact. At the open-air custom-house in the center of Harar, the local government took a tenth of the coffee as duty, paid in coffee. On top of that came one Abyssinian dollar for every thirty-seven and a half pounds, which he calls Ras Makonnen's share. Makonnen, the governor of Harar and father of the future Emperor Haile Selassie, had died in 1906, so either the levy outlived him or Ukers was working from older notes. The dealer then took what was left to the brokers, who sat in a line of small booths along the street outside the custom-house gate and charged the buyer a piaster a bag. At that point, in Ukers' words, "the coffee then becomes the property of the European merchant." It went by mule or camel to Dire Dawa and by rail to Jibuti, where it paid one percent. Much of it went on to Aden, where the British took another anna.
It is a careful list, and it begins at the custom-house gate. What the woman with the basket was paid for her coffee is not on it. That number is not in Ukers, and it is not in any other document in this series.
What happened to the coffee after Jibuti depends on whom you ask. The British Foreign Office handbook on Abyssinia, prepared for the peace conference after the war and published in 1920, says Harar coffee went before the war chiefly to Hamburg, and in smaller amounts to Le Havre, London, Antwerp and New York, "sometimes being sent first to Aden to be mixed with Mocha coffee and sold eventually as pure Mocha." Twelve pages earlier the same handbook says it was "frequently sold (in Europe) as pure Mocha." Sometimes in one place, frequently in another, and no figure in either.
The American consular agent at Aden had said the opposite in 1908. Plenty of Abyssinian coffee came through his port, he wrote, but the merchants dealt in both kinds and guarded their reputations, and mixing the two "would be at best but a clumsy fraud and would be readily and rapidly detected." I do not think the two accounts cancel each other out. The American was describing the Aden merchants he knew. The British were describing what happened to the coffee in Europe, after it had left those merchants. Neither of them counted anything. Between them they show that what Harar coffee was called was decided far from Harar, by whoever handled it last.
The handbook does count the trade as a whole. In 1913, 3,761 tonnes of coffee left the country through Jibuti, valued at 7.1 million francs. Among exports by value that year it ran a close second to cattle hides, and by 1916 it had moved ahead. Wild coffee from the southwest went another way. Some of it used to travel to Addis Ababa on the backs of mules, a journey Ukers puts at thirty-five or forty days. By the war it was going west by pack animal to Gambela and by river steamer to Khartoum, but only in the months when the rivers could carry a boat, roughly from the middle of May to the middle of November. In 1917 that route carried 2,782 tons of coffee, and the handbook says it fetched about half the price of Harar coffee by the ton. These are values at the border and the port. There is no grower price anywhere in the handbook.
The railway had changed the route. In Burton's day Harar coffee went to the coast by camel, to Berbera or Zeila. By 1920 the handbook could report that Zeila, once Harar's port, had "lost all but an insignificant fraction" of that trade since the railway was built. The railway made the trade faster and far easier to count. As far as these documents go, the counting began at the custom-house in Harar, and not a step before it.
The Foreign Office handbook passages, the 1908 consular report and Ukers' pages on Ethiopia are reprinted in full in this series.
Sources.
- Great Britain, Foreign Office, Historical Section, Abyssinia, Peace Handbooks No. 129 (1920), pp. 70, 79 to 82. Internet Archive.
- U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food Inspection Decision 91 (1908), quoting the consular agent at Aden. Internet Archive.
- William H. Ukers, All About Coffee (1922), pp. 228 to 229, 268, 308 to 310. Project Gutenberg.
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