Black Gold. Antony Wild

with coffee plants discarded by the coffee-chewing Oromo captives. This would not account for the domestication of the plant, however, which required the application of specific skills. As there was a sudden surge in demand for coffee in the first half of the sixteenth century, it would have made the cultivation of coffee commercially worthwhile, and Harar was in any case a great deal more convenient for Arab traders than distant Kaffa. The presence of a domesticated coffee plant in the Arab-controlled Harar region would have made the transplanting of that variety to Yemen virtually inevitable as Mocha consolidated its position as the chief coffee port.

      Although the coffee trade remained relatively insignificant, and the records concerning its usage remarkably thin in the era up to 1550, it would appear that the groundwork, in the form of tacit social acceptance, along with religious and imperial approval, had been done on the basis of Ethiopian coffee alone, and that the cultivation of the plant had first commenced in the Harar region. The pretensions of Yemeni coffee to hold the monopoly on the early coffee trade are hollow indeed.

      However, the switch of the principal source of coffee production from Ethiopia to Yemen can be dated with some confidence. In 1544 the Imam banned the cultivation of qat in the Jabal Sabir region of Yemen and introduced coffee plants ‘from which the population will derive great benefit’. The same date is ascribed to the introduction of coffee in a later Arabian chronicle. The Ottomans took the neighbouring city of Ta’izz in the following year, and it is under their auspices that the cultivation of coffee became a significant feature of the economy. Indeed it was in many ways a classic colonialist venture: cultivated in a conquered country, coffee was principally consumed in the main cities of the conqueror. The only element missing from the later European model was the use of slaves, for it appears that the rapid expansion of coffee drinking throughout the Ottoman Empire had created a golden opportunity for Yemeni farmers. The mountains overlooking the Tihama – the coastal plain which had previously been relatively uncultivated – proved to be perfectly suited to coffee growing. Farmers from the Tihama and inland plateau moved there: an immense project of terrace building and irrigation works was implemented, financed by the burgeoning coffee trade throughout the Ottoman Empire.

      Situated at the south-west corner of the Arabian peninsula, Yemen defies any mistaken preconceptions of unrelenting heat and equally unrelenting sand dunes. It is as if the peninsula had been stood upon, like a sheet of ice, in the north-east, raising the south-west Yemeni portion into ranges of mountains sliced through with precipitate gorges strewn with rocks and vegetation and watered by seasonal streams. The Tihama, bordering the Red Sea, is intensely hot and humid, but only thirty kilometres inland the mountains soar straight out of the plain to heights of well over three thousand metres. Whereas the Tihama remains relatively dry almost throughout the year, the mountains catch the monsoon clouds, and short, intense bursts of rain are frequent, resulting in sayl – flash floods in the dry river beds. From this dramatic landscape the coffee farmers fashioned a yet more dramatic way of life; to catch the sporadic rainfall, the precipitate hillsides are covered from peak to trough with terraces held in place by stone walls. It may take a wall five metres high, snaking around the craggy contours, to create a cultivatable terrace two metres wide. Looking up from below, it sometimes seems as if the whole mountain is one gigantic man-made dry stone wall stretching into the clouds. In order to harness the rainfall in an elaborate system of irrigation channels and tanks, Yemeni villages are deliberately built away from the terraces – the only such place available being on top of the mountains. Since the vernacular architecture favours houses in the form of five- or six-storey square-built stone mini-skyscrapers, the total effect is unique and astounding. Villages of perhaps ten of such houses are perched in the most improbable clusters on the top of jagged mountainsides, whilst below them row after row of terracing planted with windbreaks of wolf’s wood and screw pine fall into the infinity of colossal ravines, home to wild roses and prickly pear, baboons, rock hyrax, leopards, and weaver birds.

      There are no records concerning the terrace building project. However, the mass migration to the coffee mountains is still recalled in many oral family histories in the country. It was in its time as significant as the California gold rush. By the end of the sixteenth century, Arabia Felix was universally seen to be the origin of coffee production, totally eclipsing Ethiopia in a matter of half a century. When Europeans first heard of coffee, and when their merchants gathered intelligence regarding the trading potential of the mysterious new drink, it was to Yemen they looked. Yemen had usurped the Ethiopian claim to be the unique source, and farmers brought coffee to the busy entrepôt of Bait-al-Faqih at the foot of the mountains, from whence it was transported in camel trains down the Tihama to the port whose name soon became synonymous with the coffee trade: Mocha.

      The name Mocha is so enmeshed with that of coffee itself that it appears on everything from Ethiopian coffee to a variety of brewing machines, to coffee blends, or coffee made in myriad ways, including, in the case of one coffee bar, ‘espresso, steamed milk, chocolate, richly blended, topped with fresh cream’, which would seem about as far removed from the austere majesty of the Yemeni original as it is possible to be. The reason for this ubiquity is simple: for a hundred and fifty years Mocha was celebrated as the sole port supplying the world’s coffee, at a time when coffee drinking was booming in the Islamic world and Europe. Today, it is hard to believe that the town was very prosperous, with six thousand houses and a stone-built Governor’s mansion ‘with very fayre and large stayres’. It is now a godforsaken, fly-blown spot, strewn with the inevitable mounds of plastic bags and mineral-water bottles that are the unfortunate detritus of Yemen’s qat chewing habit. The sand dunes have reclaimed much of the town, and the most permanent buildings are made from redundant shipping containers. Even in the mid nineteenth century it was described as ‘a dead-alive mouldering town’. However, one can still find some signs of its former glories: the ruinous brick walls that have not been buried by the sand show signs of having been richly decorated with ornate plasterwork – these would have been the villas in which the wealthy coffee merchants lived. Likewise the mosque dedicated to Shadomer Shadhili, patron saint of the town, rises like a pearly mirage in the distance through the hot, dusty air, and the curving stairs of the ruins of what is said to have been the lighthouse, marooned half a mile from the sea, can still be visited, as long as the smell of human dung can be endured. This is one feature of Mocha that has not changed since the first descriptions by Europeans, who found it handsome and whitewashed along the waterfront, but ‘unbearably filthy within’. The other is the unrelenting heat and humidity. The Tihama is as airless and humid a place as can be imagined, and early European merchants who ventured there in their doublets and fustian must have been horribly uncomfortable. The squalor and the heat contributed to the town’s reputation for being an unhealthy place, ‘a hell of heat and humid air, of infected drinking water and without a breath of wind’. The villa owners built verandas on the top of their houses, shaded by reed screens and designed to admit the slightest of breezes.

      Mocha, according to one early account, ‘standeth hard by the waterside in a plaine sandye field’. The local soil was barren because of salt contamination, and the only thing that grew there was date palms, from which toddy was made. It was hardly an ideal place for a port, but it was the best that was on offer on the Tihama coast. Aden, one of the world’s great natural harbours around the corner on the Arabian Sea, was too far away from the coffee-producing mountains to be of use. Although fourteen fathoms deep, Mocha’s anchorage was ‘open and dangerous with very shoali water a mile off the town’. These shallows were eventually to be the death of the port as they accreted silt and became increasingly treacherous: today the water is only four fathoms deep as far as four miles off the town. This natural tendency to silt up was not helped by American trading ships in the early nineteenth century dumping their ballast in the anchorage before taking coffee on board.

      By the time the first European traders arrived in the first decade of the seventeenth century the prosperity of Mocha was assured, with the coffee supplied by new plantations developed on the towering Yemeni mountains hard by. However, the increasing dominance of the Ottomans on both sides of the Red Sea meant that the strain of coffee that had been successfully introduced to Yemen continued to have a rival in the form of the Ethiopian Harar coffee. That coffee was under Arab control, and it was shipped to Mocha before being sold to other merchants. Hence the so-called monopoly held by the port of Mocha was a monopoly on the trade, not on the origin of the coffee.