The supreme being Waaqa once had to punish one of his loyal servants for a crime. The punishment was death. After the sentence was passed, Waaqa found out that the man was innocent. Unfortunately, it was too late to save him because the sentence had already been carried out, and the man was dead. Filled with grief, Waaqa visited the man’s grave and wept. As the tears from Waaqa’s eyes watered the ground, a new plant sprung up from the ground – coffee.
-Excerpt from an Oromo proverb1
This is not a history of coffee. If you are looking for such a history, you will find several listed in the bibliography appended to this essay. Many more than those have been written, but the ones I reference will give you an excellent foundation, as within them the subject appears to have been covered quite exhaustively. Moreover, if you familiarize yourself with even one of them you may find it a useful companion to this essay. However, while I have no intention to write yet another history of coffee, I will of necessity be relying heavily on the excellent work of many historians, archeologists, botanists, psychologists, explorers, luminaries and others to excavate and illuminate a thread of that history that, as near as I can tell, has been forgotten, or ignored, or perhaps never closely examined. Thus, for much of this narrative I will be recounting timelines and events, not so much to present a cohesive history of coffee, but rather to bring certain aspects of that history into sharp relief.
The most commonly told origin story of coffee, the one about Kaldi and his herd of dancing goats, has flourished in the hearts and minds of both purveyors and consumers of coffee, most likely because it is, in the words of coffee historian Tristan Stephenson, “…cute, vaguely believable, and open to embellishment.”2 However, while it may be an excellent tool for selling coffee, this story tends to gloss over the massive significance the discovery and subsequent adoption of coffee had and continues to have for the tribes of southern Ethiopia, particularly the Oromo and Kafecho, who still tell versions of this story, and to whom Kaldi, if he ever existed, most likely ought to have claimed membership, as well as for the Sufi mystics of Yemen, separated from the Oromo and Kafecho by a relatively short boat ride across the narrow Red Sea strait of Bab al-Mandab.
To truly come to grips with our modern relationship to coffee and how that relationship has evolved over the centuries, and why it may need to evolve yet again, we will need to unpack some of that early history.
Many of the historians I’ve read that mention the Kaldi myth state that, while they don’t really know for certain when his goats supposedly did their jig, the generally accepted theory is that it must have happened right around 800-900 CE. Having established this date, historians then generally hop over to 15th century Yemen, where the story coalesces around scraps of documented oral histories and even a few written records from travelers and historians of the time (or soon thereafter), and focuses primarily on the adventures of one or more Sufi monks, who by various turns introduced coffee consumption into their medical practices, social circles and, most significantly, their religious ceremonies in Yemen. Exactly which monk and by what means is open to some debate. I’ll return to this later, but if you want a deeper exploration of this fascinating bit of history, please pick up a copy of Ralph Hattox’s Coffee and Coffeehouses, The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East3, where he presents a summary of his meticulous examination of the few source materials available from the time. Also check out his bibliography and follow his sources. This is one of the most cited works I’ve found in my journey, and for good reason.
Having established Sufis as the group most likely responsible for introducing coffee to Yemen, historians typically move on to the far more exhaustively documented role of the Ottomans and coffee’s relentless bloom out of the laps of sultans and emperors into the hands of the worlds literati and thence to the commoners, where it went on to totally change everything. However, even if these historians have set their dates correctly (and there may be good reason to believe they haven’t, by quite a wide margin), that leaves, at the very least, a vast blankness of Ethiopian history about 500 years long, about which the history of coffee remains oddly silent.
A curious and perceptive reader might notice this and ask just what the heck was going on in Ethiopia all that time, and specifically what the people there were doing with coffee when al-Dhabbani, al-Shadhili, al-Aydarus or whichever 15th century Sufi monk it was happened to drop by and notice, and found it so mind blowing that they then took it back to Yemen and made it part of their religious ceremonies?
My attempts to find answers to these questions became the heart of my research for several months, and have bolstered my sense that the current role of coffee in modern culture falls far short of its potential. To begin to understand why, we must first tease out from the dim past whatever small scraps of history are left that might help flesh out our understanding of the origins of human’s relationship with this curious plant.
Many historians place humans’ first encounters with coffee (be it Kaldi, or Sufis, or others) in Ethiopia (a.k.a Abyssinia, Aksum, D’mt or Punt depending on how far back you go into history or prehistory). Due to vagaries of customs, politics, religion, geography and the propensity of humans to commit acts of unspeakable violence upon people who don’t look, talk, act, dress, mate or worship in the same ways they do, there’s just not a whole lot of solid information about the early years of coffee in Ethiopia/Abyssinia/Aksum before the 14th century. That said, we do have a few clues from written history and archeology, as well as recent careful ethnoarchaeological observations of current tribal practices that may finally illuminate this relatively obscure corner of historical knowledge.
In the lands to the south of ancient Abyssinia, members of the Oromo tribe “…in a remote, unchronicled past, gathered the ripe cherries from wild trees, ground them with stone mortars, and mixed the mashed seeds and pulp with animal fat, forming small balls that they carried for sustenance on war parties. The flesh of the fruit is rich in caffeine, sugar, and fat and is about 15% protein.” Modern day Oromo continue this practice of eating a mixture of ground coffee cherries and ghee, called bunä-qäla, which also serves as a central feature of some of their most culturally significant social/religious ceremonies.
In the nearby Kafa region, practically within sight of the Boma Plateau, which genetic research has recently verified as the birthplace of coffea arabica an archeological expedition in 2006 uncovered what is currently the earliest archeological evidence of the use of coffee, which revealed coffea arabica amongst pottery remains in layers dating to about 250 AD.
In 525 AD, the Christian King Kaleb of Aksum (now Northern Ethiopia), sent an invading force into Yemen,and established an Ethiopian protectorate there that would last nearly half a century. It is possible, though pure conjecture, that soldiers from the invading force who had relied on these ancient power food balls for sustenance brought coffee cherries with them and, once they had settled, planted them around their settlement on the Arab peninsula. If true, this might provide one possible explanation for the established presence of coffea arabica trees in Yemen by the time Sufis got turned on to it a thousand years later.
The Persian physician Abu Muhammad ibn Zakiriya El Razi (865-922 CE), a.k.a. “Razes” mentions a drink he called “bunchum”, a name that some scholars controversially claim is related to “bun”, which is what the Arabs and Persians call the coffee cherry. He describes this drink as “hot and dry and very good for the stomach”. A few years later, Ibin Sina, a.k.a Avicenna (980-1037 CE) mentions the same beverage, with similar properties. Some believe that these may be the earliest written references to coffee as a beverage, though there is no archeological or other historical evidence to support this claim.
Tantalizingly, an archeological discovery in 1998 in the Emirate of Ras al-Khaimah, situated close to Dubai on the coast of the Arabian Gulf, potentially establishes the presence of coffee beans on the Arabian peninsula in the early 12th century CE, 350 years before the current earliest record of its ritual use amongst Sufis in Yemen somewhere around the middle of the 15th century. More archeological work will need to be done to establish how these coffee beans got there, and what was being done with them.
And that, folks, is just about all that written and archeological history has to say about the possible uses of coffee anywhere in the world prior to about 1450, which is when reports first started appearing of a new practice amongst the Sufis in the southern Arabian port city of Aden. And yet, despite the fact that prior to then coffee was apparently completely unknown anywhere in the world, somehow, a scant hundred years later, there were 600 establishments selling coffee hundreds of miles north in Istanbul, and nearly all of that Turkish coffee was being imported from the Yemeni city of Al-Mukha, or Mocha, which quickly became the source of one of coffee’s common nicknames.
Where did all that coffee and all the excitement propelling its furious expansion and use come from? This question, called by some the “Great Mystery of Coffee”, has been the subject of much speculation amongst coffee historians. For the purposes of our journey, it will be useful to dwell within that mystery for a bit, and dive a little deeper.
In his book, Coffee, a Dark History, Antony Wild presents a narrative intended to explain the sudden, almost magical appearance of coffee consumption in Yemen all at once in the late 15th century, despite there being nearly no mention of it in any historical or archeological record from the Egyptians, Aksomites, Greeks, Romans, Christian Orthodox missionaries, or frankly anyone at all before then.
Wild, like many other historians, credits the introduction of coffee in Yemen to a Sufi monk, Mohammmed bin Sa’id, a.k.a. al-Dhabhani. However, Mr. Wild extends to al-Dhabhani not only credit for the discovery of the use and stimulating effects of the coffee plant, but also the invention of the methods for processing, roasting and brewing thereof into a drink he and his followers called “bun-qahwa”- a term borrowed from the Sufi word for wine that literally translates to “bean-wine”, shortened to “qahwa”, a word that would later be transliterated to “coffee”.
Wild builds what, on the surface, appears to be a convincing case for al-Dhabhani’s spectacular performance, which Wild attributes to a combination of factors including al-Dhabhani’s study of alchemy, his exposure to the tea drinking practices of Chinese merchants trading in Yemen, and his role as an Islamic missionary to a land across the Red Sea which we now know as Ethiopia.
A somewhat different tale is presented by Mr. Hattox (see note above), from source material credited to Shihab al-Din ibn ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, and recorded several years later by ancient coffee historian Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri (fl. 1558):
“The reason for [Al-Dhabhani] introducing coffee, according to what we heard, was that some affair had forced him to leave Aden [in southern Arabia] and go to Ethiopia, where he stayed for some time. [There] he found the people using qahwa, though he knew nothing of its characteristics. After he had returned to Aden, he fell ill, and remembering qahwa, he drank it and benefited by it. He found that among its properties was that it drove away fatigue and lethargy, and brought to the body a certain sprightliness and vigor. In consequence, when he became a Sufi, he and other Sufis in Aden began to use the beverage made from it, as we have said. Then the whole people – both the learned and the common- followed [his example] in drinking it, seeking help in study and other vocations and crafts, so that it continued to spread.”
This report establishes that al-Dhabhani first witnessed “people using qahwa” during a visit to Ethiopia. But here again we confront the mystery that Mr. Wild and many other historians have tried to solve: If people in Ethiopia were drinking coffee prior to the mid 15th century, why then is any mention of its use so conspicuously absent from any Ethiopian historical or archeological record up until that time? It seems logical to assume that the beverage must have been invented by the Sufis.
I would like to propose an alternative answer to this question, based on a political and cartographic view of the history of the land known as Ethiopia, as well as extracts from what little is known of the early history of a Cushtic speaking people called the Oromo and the perhaps even more obscure Kafecho of southwest Ethiopia.
The country historically referred to as Ethiopia or Abyssinia is today a federation of eleven ethno-linguistically based regional states and two chartered cities, which together represent a population consisting of 80+ linguistically and culturally distinct tribes. But the area that people have called “Ethiopia” or “Abyssinia” has not always been organized this way, nor has it included the same geographical areas. The history of the interactions and political boundaries of these regions and tribes is incredibly complex, and even a cursory review has required navigating through competing and often contradictory reports encrypted in layers of unresolved controversy that I am unqualified to untangle or represent. Thus, the snippets of that history that I am going to present here will of necessity be devoid of meaningful context needed to fully understand them, and might well be disputed by those more informed or who subscribe to competing narratives. My hope and intention is that, while my sources may deviate from any particular narrative, the facts I’ve gleaned from them may nonetheless lend themselves to supporting a view of the history of coffee that need not tread too heavily upon valid claims pertaining to larger issues of cultural identity made by any of those competing narratives. If my account offends, the fault is wholly due to my own ignorance, and I welcome further education on these points.
What is mostly non-controversial is that during the 1,400 years preceding the arrival of coffee in Yemen, Ethiopia was organized under three (or four, depending on how one counts), successive kingdoms: The Kingdom of Aksum, The Zagwe Dynasty, and the Solomonic Dynasty, nearly all staunchly Christian, with varying degrees of religious and ethnic tolerance, and each with external and internal boundaries that fluctuated significantly with the outcomes of local tribal and international religious conflicts.
However, until the mid 1500s, all three of these kingdoms had one major feature in common: they all occupied the northern Ethiopian highlands, and did not extend their province much past the regions south of the area known as Shawa, which lies roughly in the center of present day Ethiopia. As historian Mohammed Hassen points out, “Historical Abyssinia was no more than one third of modern Ethiopia, the boundaries of which were determined in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.” These were primarily northern kingdoms, not southern, and it is an error to assume that the written history and archeological records of the northern peoples provide an accurate representation of the whole of what we now call Ethiopia.
During al-Dhabbani’s life, the Horn of Africa just across the Red Sea from his home in Aden was dominated by the Muslim Adal empire. Throughout much of the 14th and 15th centuries, life on the Horn and throughout northeastern Africa was largely shaped by the military adventures of various Abysinnian kings and Adalite Sultans engaged in protracted religious conflict, or later, with defending against incursions by the pastoralist Oromo, who, being neither Christian nor Muslim soon became fed up with the military campaigns of both and applied themselves most severely in an effort to reclaim the grazing land that was fast becoming an incidental casualty of war, as well as reclaim their people, who were not-so-incidentally being converted, sometimes through trade and sometimes by force, and either way conscripted into military service by both.
Throughout the many military adventures of this time, the legions of Allah and Christ would perforce have traveled through (and by some accounts devastated) nearby lands that were largely occupied by pastoralist Oromo. A Sultan such as Badlay ibn Sa’ad ad-Din II or Muhammad ibn Badlay, both of whom ruled Adal during al-Dhabbani’s life and fought battles of exceptional violence with their Christian neighbors, would likely have had a keen interest in obtaining the allegiances of as many of the surrounding tribes as possible to enhance their efforts. The Oromo, known for their clever and lethal skill as warriors (aided by their use of ground coffee cherries in the form of bunä-qäla), would, despite their keen resistance, have been a valuable asset, if only they could be persuaded. Thus, multiple missionary efforts, either at the hands of traders or at the spear points of Muslim jihadists, sprang forth from Adal, seeking to bring the pastoralist unbelievers to Allah, with mixed results.
It was into this religious, political, economic, military and tribal morass that our hero al-Dhabbani would have stepped when he, for reasons unknown to history, reportedly visited the African continent sometime in the middle of the 15th century CE. According to Hattox’s translation of al-Jaziri’s writing of al-Ghaffar’s report, it was to Ethiopia that al-Dhabbani traveled. Given the state of affairs on the horn, I find this unlikely. To me it seems far more believable that al-Dhabbani, if he came to northeast Africa at all, would have been traveling within one of the the comparatively safer and more or less solidly Muslim Sultanates, for instance Adal, than through the predominantly Christian and violently adversarial lands of Ethiopia, unless, of course, he was there as a missionary in lands that were not, strictly speaking, part of Ethiopia at that time, but rather one of the “wild” areas surrounding Adal, that were occupied by Cushtic tribes such as the Oromo.
From accounts compiled by Hattox, we know al-Dhabhani was, during his early life, a student, mystic, and largely a recluse, who “only went out on Fridays or to see important people,” and who wrote books about Sufism, which he later adopted. Later in life, he was a respected leader in the community, a Shaykh, led prayers in the mosque as an Imam, and was also a Mufti – a sort of Muslim legal scholar who was empowered to make judgements on legal matters. Given this reputation, it’s perhaps not much of a stretch to imagine that al-Dhabbani was among those that took up the mission to bring the light of Allah to the tribes that were causing so much trouble for the Adalite Sultans, and convert them from adversaries to allies. In his missionary travels, he would have had cause to live amongst and observe much of the life and practices of the Oromo.
The Oromo, Kafecho, Magangir and other people, who for perhaps thousands of years occupied the regions south of Shawa, were – and perhaps still are – largely considered by members of northern (primarily Amhara and Tigray) peoples as well as by the Muslims who came to inhabit the Horn, to be of lower caste, and were – and perhaps still are – frequently marginalized, mischaracterized or ignored altogether. Historian Mohammed Hassen provides a thorough review of historical relations between the Oromo and their northern neighbors in his 2015 book, The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia: 1300-1700. In his introduction, he sums up the state of historical misrepresentations of these people:
“The history, way of life, political and religious institutions, and even the name of the Oromo is in large part ignored in Ethiopian historiography. The source of such widespread neglect is partly due to lack of accurate information from the Oromo perspective. Since the Oromo, as a preliterate people, did not write about their encounter with the [Northern/Amharic] Christian society, existing records reflect the views of Christian monks and court chroniclers… who did not know the Oromo language, who were not familiar with Oromo history and who had no experience of the Oromo way of life, political processes, or religious institutions.
It turns out that the Kafecho and Oromo, living as they did in the southern coffee growing regions, indeed in the very birthplace of coffea arabica, were the first humans to discover and consume coffee. And while there remains significant debate as to whether they were the first to drink infusions made from the hulled, roasted and ground cherries, there is no question that they consumed coffee in various forms, and ethnoarchaeological evidence recently compiled by Dr. Morku Derara, as well as archeological evidence from Hidebrand et. al. cited above, and scraps of oral history that still survive among the Kafecho in the Kafa region, strongly suggest that the Oromo and Kafecho have been doing so for perhaps thousands of years.
The mystical, religious, cultural and social significance of coffee in the lives of the Oromo would be difficult to overstate. After years spent with the Oromo gathering direct observations, Dr. Derara wrote, in the conclusion of his doctoral thesis in 2019:
“The role of coffee in rituals is rather eloquent among the Jimma Oromo, who apart from regular coffee ceremonies, prepare the beverage during two important occasions other than the yearly feast before the onset of harvesting: holidays and trying times. Coffee is not just a beverage to be shared with neighbors but a means to daily supplicate and thank God (Waaqa). Traditional Oromo coffee ceremonies are often accompanied by the burning of incense and interspersing a very small portion of the meal to be served before drinking the first round coffee, known as awälä among the Jimma Oromo in Gomma. Coffee’s role in rituals is more pronounced in such trying times as agricultural failure, epidemic, drought and damaging rains. During these occasions, coffee can be prepared at home, within compounds, under shade of a tree or within a mosque compound where people gather and attend communal prayers aimed at pleading Waaqa for good harvest, the well-being of the people and nurturing rains. The overall purpose of coffee in Oromo rituals is to serve as a medium of appealing Waaqa to reverse difficult conditions and gratify Him for euphoric events. In this context, coffee can irrefutably be considered as a sacred plant employed as a ritual means to maintain the social order with the divine. (emphasis added)
The use of coffee in Oromo rituals gets a further impetus in bunä-qäla (coffee slaughtering) ritual which involves the preparation and consumption of butter encrypted hulled coffee during such occasions as the atete ceremony (a female ritual invoked for the health and fertility of the woman), naming of a newly born child, and sacrifice for a deceased person. The bunä-qäla ritual survives in two important cultural realms of the Jimma Oromo in Gomma: the birth of a calf and the arrangement of marriage. In this context, it is a means of prayer and praising Waaqa for the birth of a new calf and an expression of good wishes for a successful marriage. Since it is the female who slaughters coffee, the ritual is intertwined with diverse sexual metaphors representing woman, symbolizing human fertility, but also of cattle and sheep as well as the bursting open of seeds in plants. These uses of coffee in Oromo feasts and rituals as a substitute for blood would situate the plant between two extremes, the animal and the vegetable realms.”
And so, the solution to the mystery of the origins and uses of coffee in Ethiopia during those “lost” 500 years of coffee history seems to be that it didn’t actually originate in Ethiopia – or at least not in the country that was called Ethiopia at the time. Rather, it began in the regions south of ancient Ethiopia – which only became part of Ethiopia long after the consumption of coffee had spread far and wide – and with the Kafecho and Oromo, who didn’t write about it because they didn’t have a written language. Northern Ethiopian and Arab tribes didn’t discover coffee or write about it until much later in history because it didn’t grow where they lived, and the tribes who consumed it were, at best, pesky “troublemakers”, and at worst, low-caste “others” who’s history, culture and practices simply didn’t matter to them.
That is, they didn’t matter until someone, perhaps a young and impressionable al-Dhabhani, student of alchemy, aspiring Sufi mystic, and future Shaykh, witnessed something of the Oromo practices, possibly shared some coffee in whatever form it was served, and, perhaps in a state of caffeine-induced euphoria, was profoundly impressed by the entwinement of a divine presence experienced through coffee into every aspect of their culture, from their most sacred ceremonies to their everyday mundane affairs. Certainly an understanding and acceptance of mystical ritual and trance enhanced by psychoactive plants would be familiar territory to a student of the Sufi practices he himself later adopted. Hattox writes,
“Sufism places its emphasis on the mystical reaching out for God – a god more personally intelligible than the stern, abstract deity of the orthodox scholastic. Its adherents regard it, in the ideal, as a reaching for a state of complete obliviousness to the outside world, and a sort of spiritual merging with the divine, the attainment of a total severance from both mundane concerns, and from the five senses. Their dhikrs – the communal worship services usually held at night – are often marked by various practices designed to encourage a trancelike concentration on God, to the exclusion of all else; to attain, at least momentarily, the obliviousness that was sought. This they often try to effect by the rhythmic repetition, in unison, of a name or epithet of God, or perhaps of the shahada, the basic Muslim profession of faith. Certain prescribed swaying of the head, hands or entire body enhances the almost hypnotic effect of the chants.
Members of some orders apparently did not turn only to such self-induced trances for their spiritual bliss. The use of various sorts of drugs as inducements to holy rapture was not unknown.”
Concomitantly, it would have been no stretch for the Oromo, whose religious practices of Waaqeffanna were and are among some of the most inclusive in history, to have incorporated Sufi beliefs and practices into their own, creating a unique hybrid of both, possibly even leading them to incorporate elements of their coffee ceremony into their own nightly Dhikr. Historiographer and professor Tesema Ta’a, who has done extensive research into and writing on Waaqeffannaa, sums up the religion’s inclusiveness nicely in her 2012 paper, “Religious Beliefs of the Oromo”:
“According to the analysis of Bartels, the traditional mode of experiencing the divine among the Oromo continued unaffected in spite of the external influences impinging upon it… Almost all scholars whose works we have consulted more or less concluded that the Oromo did not completely abandon their indigenous religion, Waaqeffanna and its practices in spite of the introduction and spread of the major religions.”
And according to Dr. Derara, “The preparation and consumption of bunä-qäla, albeit a very old tradition, is still practiced among the predominantly Muslim [Oromo] population of Gomma.”
If the people Dhabbani “saw using qahwa” were Oromo, it seems that, given the attitudes and prejudices of the time, he would have had little motivation to attribute this practice to them. Seen in this context, it would perhaps not be difficult to understand how it could have appeared to later historians that the Yemeni Sufi’s use of coffee appeared seemingly out of the blue, and that the origin of the practice would remain couched in mystery and conjecture to this day.
Regardless of how, why and by whom coffee arrived in Yemen, soon after the Sufis in Aden began incorporating coffee into their nightly Dhikr, we begin to see some very interesting reports:
“The Shadhili [Sufi] Abu Bakr ibn Abd’Allah al-‘Aydarus was impressed enough by coffee’s effects that he composed a qasida (poem) in honor of the drink. Coffee-drinkers even coined their own term for the euphoria it produced — marqaha. The mystic and theologian Shaikh ibn Isma’il Ba Alawi of Al-Shihr stated that the use of coffee, when imbibed with prayerful intent and devotion, could lead to the experience of qahwa ma’nawiyya (“the ideal qahwa”) and qahwat al-Sufiyya, interchangeable terms defined as “the enjoyment which the people of God feel in beholding the hidden mysteries and attaining the wonderful disclosures and the great revelations.”
I invite you to pause for a moment and consider the implications of these words. For these Sufis, coffee had quickly become far more than a mere stimulant that helped keep them awake for their nighttime ceremony, more than a useful tool for “vocations and crafts”. In just a few years, coffee had transformed from being totally unknown, to being a vehicle for beholding the hidden mysteries. In other words, much like the Oromo before them, the Sufi mystics of Yemen had, through intentional ritual accompanied by the devotional consumption of coffee, experienced a direct communion with the divine.
- Trabocca Coffee Facebook Page, The Story of Waaqa ↩︎
- Stephenson, Tristan. The Curious Barista’s Guide to Coffee. Ryland Peters & Small, 2019. p.11 ↩︎
- Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. University of Washington Press, 1985. pp.14-23 ↩︎
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