Читать книгу Black Gold - Antony Wild - Страница 10

All theory is grey. Green is the golden tree of life.

GOETHE

Although it is enjoyed daily by a good proportion of the world’s population, very little is generally known about the origins of coffee. There are a number of myths that are ritually aired by the coffee trade to keep the curious at bay, but nothing in the way of substantiated fact is usually presented to the public. To build a satisfactory picture of what happened in the time before coffee bursts upon the historical stage in the sixteenth century requires piecing together disparate elements of anthropology, archaeology, and even theology. Indeed, the search for coffee’s roots takes us back to the roots of man himself.

In 1974, at Hadar in the Afar desert of northern Ethiopia, palaeontologists unearthed the fossil remains of a group of Australopithecus afarensis, mankind’s oldest known ancestor. Despite earlier discoveries of Java Man, Peking Man and others, it seems that Ethiopia is mankind’s original location; genetic research suggests that all modern humans are directly descended from a group of about a hundred and fifty Homo sapiens sapiens who lived in the Ethiopian Highlands some 120,000 years ago. Even the Holy Grail of anthropology, the so-called Missing Link, may well have been found there, for the recent discovery of a fossilized toe of Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba offers the first tentative evidence of the species’ separation from the chimpanzee some six million years ago. Despite its highland forest environment, Ardipethecus ramidus kadabba appears to have walked upright. Previously it had been conjectured that man’s need to stand upright was forced upon him by the evolutionary process to enable him to peer over the high grass of the plains in pursuit of prey. The fact that he appears to have stood upright whilst still confined to the forest has fatally undermined this theory.

One of the other abiding mysteries of anthropology is the so-called brain explosion that probably took place about 500,000 years ago, the result of which was that man’s brain size increased by 30 per cent, principally in the cerebrum, the upper brain where most conscious thinking purportedly takes place. Various theories have been put forward for this, but the development of language would seem to provide the most credible explanation, as language requires a great deal of thought and in turn generates a great deal to think about. Its arrival put mankind in a position, at least in part, to determine the course of his own evolution, allowing him to develop and communicate concepts that had been hitherto literally unthinkable, and to begin to adapt his environment to his needs. It is tempting to wonder whether the proliferation of wild coffee trees in the same Ethiopian highland forests could also have had a hand in the process. Coffee has always been associated with speed of cognition and expression, and the sudden dawn of self-awareness in the Genesis story concerning the forbidden fruit of the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ is something that could have been prompted by a psychoactive substance such as caffeine. Such awareness (or, perhaps, gnosis) is also an attribute of language and thought, without which it is quiescent. To place the bright red coffee cherry centre stage in the story of the Fall is altogether a more inspired piece of casting than the choice of a lowly Golden Delicious; imagine coffee berries driving their eaters into a caffeine-fuelled frenzy of quick-fire contention and ingenious thinking, engines of brain evolution. The previously docile brains of Homo sapiens sapiens would have been ill prepared for such an assault. Likewise the Ethiopian Highlands, with their sumptuous vegetation and spectacular scenery, are a properly marvellous setting for the mythical Garden of Eden. Even today the wild coffee trees grow under the forest canopy on the escarpments of the Rift Valley, their white flowers heavy with a scent close to that of jasmine. The coffee cherries, the stones of which make two coffee beans, ripen in clusters as they grow from green through gold to a rich red colour, which stands out in bold contrast to the smooth, luscious dark green leaves of the tree. They were doubtless suitably tempting to our early ancestors. The description of the Tree of Knowledge contained in the rediscovered Old Testament Book of Enoch could easily suggest the coffee tree, with its depiction of delicious fragrance and clusters of fruit – and that previously missing book, supposedly suppressed because of its salacious content, was unearthed by the eighteenth-century explorer James Bruce in, strange to say, Ethiopia.

At this point it would seem appropriate to introduce this native of Ethiopia, the species Coffea arabica of the sub-genus Eucoffea of the genus Coffea of the family Rubiaceae of the order Rubiales of the sub-class Sympetalae of the class Dicotyledonae of the sub-kingdom Angiospermae from the kingdom of Vegetables. Left to its own devices the Arabica coffee plant can grow up to twenty feet high; its lush, dark-green, ovoid leaves are about six inches long, and it produces small white flowers with the characteristic heady jasmine-like fragrance. The coffee tree usually flowers once in a season, but in some countries where it has been transplanted from its homeland, such as Colombia, it may blossom and produce cherries at various stages of ripeness throughout the year. The flowers are pollinated by insects and the wind, and go on to form ‘drupes’, which are infant coffee berries, and which grow over a period of six months to form bunches of cherries that in many respects resemble the bright red domestic eating cherry.

As perhaps was the case with our putative Adam and Eve, ripe coffee cherries are a tempting proposition to some animals and birds, giving rise to some esoteric practices. Kopi luak is a fine Sumatran coffee, much valued in Japan, made from beans gathered from the dung of Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, the common palm civet, which skulks around the plantations at night selecting only the finest, ripest cherries. The beast digests the skin and the pulp of the cherry, the mucillage and the parchment surrounding the bean, and even the final obstacle, the thin ‘silverskin’. In so doing it achieves exactly what modern ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ processing technology seeks to emulate – that is, the complete separation of the core coffee bean from all its protective layers. The civet cannot digest the hard beans, however, and they pass through its system: they are picked out of the civet’s dung because the flavour imparted by the digestive process is highly prized once the beans are cleaned and roasted. Indian monkeys, parrots, and mongooses are also supposed to subscribe to this recondite method of coffee processing, and their coffee byproducts likewise are said to attract local enthusiasts. Not all such coffees pass entirely through an animal’s system: the spread of coffee cultivation in the Spanish Philippine Islands in the nineteenth century was evidently greatly assisted by Pardasciurus musanga, a small mammal which ate the flesh of the cherries but spat out the bean, which was then ready for germination.

Insects, however, find their enjoyment of the coffee cherry considerably lessened by its caffeine content. While the leaves and flowers of a coffee plant contain slightly less than 1 per cent caffeine by dry weight, the pulp of the cherry contains a little more, and the bean itself around 3 per cent. Nature has so ordered things that the highest levels of caffeine are to be found in the most important part of the plant, its seed. This is because caffeine is nothing more than a natural insecticide, and the high caffeine levels protect the seed from unwanted attention. Hapless insects who ingest too much find that their nervous systems go into overdrive. By the miracle of international trade, the same symptoms can be observed in office workers the world over.

The other species of coffee grown commercially around the world is C. canephora, the best-known variety of which is Robusta. The plant was first spotted by explorers in Uganda in 1862, where it was then used by the native Buganda tribe in a blood-brother ceremony. However, it was not until its rediscovery in the Belgian Congo in 1898 that it was thought worth cultivating. This was after outbreaks of hemileia vastatrix or ‘coffee rust’ had devastated the Arabica coffee plantations of Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies. Robusta coffee is, as the name implies, more robust than its Arabica cousin. It grows at lower altitude (and contains as much as double the amount of caffeine, perhaps in order to deal with the more persistent insects of the tropical lowlands), it tastes coarse and rubbery, and has very little to recommend it other than resistance to disease, which is in itself a recommendation only to planters. It was initially banned from the New York Coffee Exchange as a ‘practically worthless bean’. Being considerably cheaper than Arabica, it can be found in all sorts of less salubrious locations: instant coffee, cheap blends, vending machine coffee and the like. Its harsh flavour and heavy caffeine kick are easily identified. Introduced only a century ago, with the sudden rise to prominence of Vietnam (see chapter 18), it threatens to become a major force in the market, replacing the subtle refined flavours and aromas of Arabica coffee with its pestilential presence. It has some uses in espresso blending, but otherwise it is Arabica coffee’s crude, boorish, sour, uncivilized, black-hearted cousin, and true coffee aficionados rightly give it a very wide berth. No coffee-taster worth his or her salt would seek to maintain that a Robusta coffee was better in flavour terms than all but the worst-produced Arabica: its only merit is its price. Nonetheless, nearly half of the coffee sold in the UK is Robusta, and even in Italy, a country which celebrates its coffee culture like no other, a third of the coffee drunk is Robusta, whilst nearly a quarter of the coffee drunk in the USA is Robusta. The country that has thus far remained most immune to its pernicious influence is Norway, where it is still virtually unknown. Of global coffee consumption today, one-third is of a low-quality coffee variety that scarcely existed a century ago, and the proportion is growing. We are witnessing the triumph of the ‘practically worthless bean’ in our coffee cups. At the same time, ironically, with prices at their current levels of 35 cents per pound, Robusta coffee is even more practically worthless than its Arabica cousin.

Despite its widespread use, this black sheep in the coffee family receives an almost total informational blackout when coffee companies come to describe their wares. There are no illustrated pamphlets extolling the virtues of Togolese Robustas over those of Uganda, no analyses of the typical flavour characteristics of the Cameroon variety. Whereas many companies might draw attention to the fact that their blends are ‘100 per cent Arabica’, few would proudly point out that they use 50 per cent Robusta. This is simply because all coffee professionals know that Robusta coffee is a cheaper, inferior type and are unwilling to admit that they have any association with it. Arguably, if consumers really understood the extent to which their coffee has become tainted by this parvenu coffee bean, they would turn away in droves. Even so the creeping infiltration of cheap Robustas into mainstream blends is noticeable. What might once have been a reasonable coffee from a vending machine has changed over the last few years into an unpalatable, caffeine-kicking monstrosity. It seems, however, that many consumers are largely unaware of the change, although there is some evidence to suggest that the additional caffeine content of coffee with a higher proportion of Robusta is leading to a drop in consumption.

If proto-humans had experienced Arabica coffee in their highland fastness it would have been in its raw form, whereas today it is used almost exclusively after roasting – so much so that most people outside the coffee trade would be hard pressed to say what a green (raw) coffee bean looks like. The almost miraculous, quasi-alchemical transformation of coffee in the roasting process can be created easily enough in the home: all that is required is a large handful of unroasted green coffee beans and a large cast-iron frying pan preheated (but not oiled) on a hot ring. Stirred constantly with a wooden spatula, within minutes the beans acquire a golden hue. Occasionally, sputterings of complaint can be heard, an odd explosion like that of corn popping, caused by steam expanding within the cell structure of the bean. The heat starts to transform the unpromising, torpid vegetable matter into that wonderful substance, roasted coffee. Some smoke, heavy with oil and moisture, clambers limply from the pan, and the beans patchily break past their golden threshold and acquire a brownish tinge. The explosions become more frequent, and the occasional bean flies out of the pan. The dull brown beans now turn rich brown and oily, and the aroma of the smoke that pours from them is like incense for the gods themselves. Finally, amidst a profusion of popping and smoke, the process has to be stopped quickly to prevent the oily beans blackening into worthless soot. This is best accomplished by pouring the coffee between two metal colanders outside in fresh cool air. Clouds of white chaff (the detached remains of the silverskin) waft into the breeze. The sound of the roasted beans will strike the ear, brittle but curiously strong. After a few minutes, the beans will cool, and voilà! – roasted coffee, perhaps one of the most dramatic transformations of a natural plant product that human intervention has yet devised solely for its pleasure. After ten minutes or so the beans are ready to be ground; the aroma then released is extraordinary, rich and sublime. Roasted coffee contains over eight hundred separate flavour and aroma components, most of which form in the crucible of the roaster. This strange alchemy accounts in part for the hold that coffee exerts over our imagination.

As well as being uniquely endowed with early men and early coffee, Ethiopia was home to another drug, namely qat or khat (Catha edulis), a psychoactive plant containing cathinone and cathine, which is greatly appreciated on both sides of the Red Sea today, but particularly in Yemen, where it represents a third of that country’s Gross Domestic Product. Qat induces a mild euphoria, alertness, and tranquillity, and is widely consumed in convivial communal qat chewing sessions which frequently take all afternoon, meandering conversations punctuated by poetry and hypnotic pauses. While it is interesting that Ethiopia should offer two notable drugs amongst its indigenous plants, judging by its effects, qat would seem the less likely cause of the ‘brain explosion’. It is also less exportable, as the active ingredients are susceptible to rapid decay, and only fresh leaves produce good results. Caffeine is, by contrast, almost indestructible, surviving the ordeal by fire, pulverization and oxygen deprivation which the coffee industry routinely inflicts on it for prolonged periods with no apparent diminution of its powers.

Setting aside the tempting but unproven image of coffee as an evolutionary catalyst, it nonetheless needs to be explained how coffee came into common use. Remains of many of the plants that were domesticated by mankind early in prehistory turn up in archaeological digs, allowing a plausible timescale and map for the spread of many plants to be developed. It can be asserted with some confidence that the domestication of plants – that is, the selective breeding of plants from their wild forbears to encourage characteristics most useful to man – began with cereals in about 8500 BC in the so-called Fertile Crescent, an area that encompassed the modern-day Mediterranean Near East, southern Turkey, and northern Iraq. The techniques and practice of cultivation quickly spread to areas with a comparable climate, and gave rise to the earliest civilizations – ancient Egyptians, for example, cultivated wheat, grapes, peas, beans, and barley, all of which depended on winter’s rains and shorter daylight hours.

In the Ethiopian Highlands specific indigenous plant species flourished that were used to summer rains, and even daylight hours throughout the year, as well as the lower temperatures that came with altitude. While coffee and qat remained wild, some of these other plants were domesticated, including teff (a tiny-seeded cereal used for enjera bread), noog (used for seed oils), ensete (a banana-like plant used for bread), and finger millet used for beer. Remarkably, for a plant that is now cultivated throughout the tropical world, coffee has not been shown by archaeology to have been domesticated before the sixteenth century. In fact, history is almost silent on all aspects of coffee cultivation and consumption in Ethiopia, with the exception of anthropologists’ reports of coffee being used, as already noted, for ‘chewing and blood-brotherhood ceremonies’ by the Buganda tribes, and in the ‘slaughtering of the coffee’ ceremony, in which the Oromo celebrated the birth of cattle or children. The Oromo, the tribes who inhabit the corner of south-west Ethiopia where coffee originated, considered coffee to be the buna qala – the tears of Waqa, the supreme sky god. It was believed that coffee destroyed cattle, so in the ceremony coffee was roasted, along with barley, in butter: the symbolic union of coffee and cow thus propitiating the guardian spirits, reaffirming life, stimulating procreation and all manner of useful things. It has been reported anecdotally that coffee mixed this way with butter was also eaten by soldiers, farmers, and merchants faced with hard work or long journeys. The anthropological supposition has been that if a tribe practised coffee consumption in certain ways in recent history, there is a chance that it may have done so in ancient times.

If hard evidence of ancient coffee trading or use has remained elusive, written sources are no more helpful. The Greek historian Herodotus reported that cinnamon originated in African swamps guarded by bats and was used by giant birds to build their nests, that fat-tailed sheep in Arabia needed wheeled wooden carts to carry their fat tails, and that cannabis was used as a ritual purifier; but on the subject of coffee he was overwhelmingly reticent. Opium was used extensively in religious ceremonies in Minoan Crete, but not coffee. The Periplus of the Erythraen Sea, a first-century AD Greek compendium of the Red Sea trade, makes no mention of it amongst the contemporary Ethiopian exports of ivory, tortoiseshell, ostrich feathers, spices, aromatics, and ebony. Although there have been extensive excavations in the city of Aksum, the centre of an Ethiopian empire that reached its zenith in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, it has not been shown that coffee was either consumed or traded from there. This is despite frequent mentions of Aksum and its activities in Graeco-Roman and Byzantine texts, and rather undermines the common contention that it was the Aksumites who introduced coffee to Yemen, which they ruled at intervals between the third and sixth centuries. Fragmentary archaeological evidence of Aksumite trade with distant China in the third century AD has been found, but, of trade in coffee grown a few hundred miles away, none.

While the record is thin concerning coffee in Ethiopia, it is bafflingly obscure elsewhere in the ancient world. If coffee were to be found there, Egypt would be the first place to look, being just downstream (albeit 1500 miles and four cataracts of the Nile) from coffee’s highland home. When the first humans originally migrated from Ethiopia in about 100,000 BC, they ventured north into Egypt and thence to the Near East. This pioneering band died out, and it is only when a second batch left the Highlands in 80,000 BC and crossed the lower Red Sea into Yemen that the common ancestry of all non-African humans was established. The fact that over a period of the next 5000 years humans made their way from Yemen, first to India and thence to Java and Sumatra, describing in slow time coffee’s later onward march, is a compelling prehistorical curiosity.

If there had been coffee use in early Ethiopia, it is highly probable that the Egyptians would have learnt about it. They were frequently supplied with slaves from that area, along with gold and cattle, by their southern neighbours, the Nubians, and the 25th Dynasty, around 600 BC, was the result of the Ethiopian conquest of Egypt. That the knowledge of coffee somehow failed to make it down the Nile would suggest that, despite its availability, coffee was not in use in Ethiopia at that time. Recent analysis of mummy remains has tended to confuse matters further. It would appear that while caffeine is not to be found in the hair of the deceased, traces of cocaine and nicotine are. The idea of the ancient Egyptian aristocracy tooting and toking may come as something of a shock to an orthodox view of life on the banks of the Nile, but the real mystery is that both coca and tobacco are native bushes of the New World, and in ancient times the Americas supposedly remained to be discovered for another two thousand years. The competition to identify the earliest Old World travellers to the New is certainly hotting up and the ancient Egyptians make a distinguished addition to the roster; but from the point of view of this study, if they were prepared to travel across the Atlantic for cocaine and nicotine, one wonders why they ignored the caffeine that could be found up the Nile?

It may be the case that knowledge of coffee travelled to ancient Greece. Some classicists have maintained that nepenthe, which Homer tells us Helen brought with her out of Egypt and used to alleviate her sufferings, was coffee: ‘She mingled with the wine the wondrous juice of a plant which banishes sadness and wrath from the heart and brings with it forgetfulness of every woe.’ However, this seems a somewhat inadequate description of the effects of caffeine, which in excess can make its consumers edgy and irritable. Others identify coffee with the ‘black broth of the Lacedaemonians’ – a position maintained by a welter of seventeenth-century scholars including George Sandys (the poet and explorer), Robert Burton (author of The Anatomy of Melancholy), and Sir Henry Blount (the traveller). Their notion remained in general currency until one Gustav Gilbert determined with great conviction in 1895 that the ‘black broth’ was ‘pork, cooked in blood, and seasoned with salt and vinegar’. This sounds a concoction far more suited to the Lacedaemonians, better known as the Spartans.

There have been claimed sightings of coffee in the Old Testament, including in the presents Abigail made to David, the red pottage for which Esau sold his birthright, and in the parched grain that Boaz ordered to be given to Ruth. Some have suggested that Pythagoras’ prohibition on the consumption of beans was aimed at coffee, but it seems more likely to have been the result of his dislike of wind, of both bodily and mental origin. In conclusion, while speculating on the subject has provided hours of harmless amusement to many, there is no confirmed reference to coffee in the Egyptian, biblical, or classical literatures.

Given the fact that the coffee tree produces tempting red cherries, it is easy to imagine that some pioneering individuals attempted to eat them raw. The flesh of the cherry is pleasant to eat, but humans would find chewing the two green beans that make up the stone of the cherry hard work. It is unlikely that early man, with a reasonable selection of foods available, would have been bothered. Although the cherries contain some caffeine, most is to be found in the bean, which would probably have been spat out, and the full effects would have gone relatively unnoticed.

The spread of farming, however, introduced to Ethiopia a more determined masticator. By about 8000 BC the early Fertile Crescent farmers had domesticated a number of the tractable animals that surrounded them, including the goat. These spread within a few thousand years from their Fertile Crescent roots to Egypt and thence up the Nile to the Ethiopian Highlands. While sheep and cattle are contentedly pastoral in their eating habits, goats are notoriously destructive eaters and tend to range wider for their foraging. Unlike birds, which plants use to spread their seeds via their digestive systems, woolly-haired animals spread seeds that adhere to their coats, leaving them free to chew into oblivion any plant, fruit, or seed that comes their way. Goats’ stomachs are fully equipped chemically to deal with vegetable matter that other mammals would simply pass. Thus it is quite possible that it was the domesticated goat, observed perhaps by an accompanying human, that first experienced the raw caffeine hit of a chewed green coffee bean. This is purely conjecture, however.

If Egyptologists, classicists, and biblical scholars have failed to pinpoint the use of coffee in their respective literatures, neither have Arabists fared any better, despite the fact that coffee drinking first arose amongst the Sufis in Arabia Felix, now Yemen. Until the use of coffee became fairly widespread in the sixteenth century, the references to it remain obscure, and no material evidence exists alongside the texts to help prove that coffee was the substance referred to. For example, the renowned Persian physician Abu Muhammad ibn Zakiriya El Razi (known more commonly as Rhazes), who lived between AD 865 and 922, describes a beverage he calls bunchum as being ‘hot and dry and very good for the stomach’. Although it is difficult to resist the obvious suggestion that bunchum is the same as bun, the Arabian and Persian word for coffee berry, other scholars have identified it as some sort of root. Nonetheless, the reference to bunchum in the works of Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’), the influential Bokharan physician (AD 980–1037), is sometimes held to be a description of coffee: ‘It is hot and dry in the first degree, and according to others, cold in the first degree. It fortifies the members, it cleans the skin, and dries up the humidities that are under it, and gives an excellent smell to all the body.’ Many scholars dispute the attribution, however, and there is no supporting archaeological evidence whatever to show that coffee was prepared or consumed at the time. Neither does the description make mention of the most obvious feature of coffee – the effect of the caffeine upon the nervous system.

However, this does not mean that the obscure terms used in these early descriptions should be lightly dismissed. While European culture had, since the sack of Rome in AD 455, gone into the dramatic decline known to history as the Dark Ages, Middle Eastern culture, by contrast, was flowering, with an added impetus provided by the new religion of Islam. In the fields of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, and astrology, as well as the arts, the Muslim world was significantly in advance of its European contemporaries. The description used by Avicenna may seem fanciful, but the terms made sense within a coherent, applied medico-scientific structure, derived, at least in part, from knowledge of the ancient world that had been lost to the Western purview with the destruction of the Library at Alexandria in AD 391. The remains of what was known as Alexandrian syncretism – the holistic amalgam of ancient Egyptian, Zoroastrian, Kabbalistic, and Roman and Greek esotericism alongside pre-Socratic and Neoplatonic philosophy and that of early Christianity – had been preserved by scholars at the sacred town of Harran in southern Turkey. The Hermetic school at Harran became a strong influence on emerging Islamic science and mathematics, as well as alchemy. Rhazes was a noted exponent, and both he and Avicenna exhibited the polymathic traits that characterized the alchemist through the ages – in equal measures poet, astronomer, philosopher, musician and physician. Alchemy was only superficially the search for a way to turn base metals into gold: it was, more importantly, a spiritual quest for the transmutation of the human soul. Science, art, and philosophy were brought equally into the service of this perfectionism.

The Sufis, a mystical branch of Islam who came to prominence in the second century after its foundation, were influenced by alchemy. ‘The Sufi master operates upon the base metal of the soul of the disciple and with the help of the spiritual methods of Sufism transforms this base metal into gold’, it was recorded. The word ‘sufi’ derives from the Arabic for wool, reflecting their simplicity of dress. Although the sect came about as a reaction to the perceived worldliness of early Islam, members did not believe that a practitioner should withdraw from human society. Sufi ‘orders’ were not like the closed monastic orders of Christendom; adherents continued to work and enjoy family life, and, as a result, most of their prayers and rituals took place at night. The general character of Sufi practice involved the communal singing of poetry; the ritual repetition of the divine name; a veneration for saints, many of whom were shaykhs, or former leaders of Sufi orders; and the ritual visits to the tombs of such saints.

Spread by proselytising shaykhs, by the twelfth century Sufism had reached Yemen. There, in the late fifteenth century, it would appear that the Sufis were the first to adopt coffee drinking. Not only did coffee assist in enabling devotees to stay awake during their night rituals, but the transformation of the coffee bean during roasting reflected the alchemical beliefs in the transformation of the human soul which lay at the heart of Sufism. Coffee worked both at a spiritual and a physical level.

The arrival of Sufism in Yemen is a matter of historical record. The same cannot be said about the arrival of coffee. By the end of the sixteenth century the mountains of Yemen were producing a significant proportion of the world’s coffee, and it would be natural to assume that it had been introduced from Ethiopia across the Red Sea in earlier times. This is not the case.

Pre-Islamic Yemen was a wine-growing area, and alcohol thus appears to have been tolerated. Its diversity and wealth of crops and cultures made Yemen a society that was highly cultivated in both senses, and even after the introduction of Islam it remained a dominant cultural force in Arabia. However, despite the ebbing and flowing of power and religious influence from across the Red Sea, and despite archaeological evidence of the introduction of crops such as sorghum from Africa into Yemen in the pre-Islamic period, there is nothing to suggest that coffee had found its way from Ethiopia at this early stage. Rather as Aksum itself seems to have been unfamiliar with either the plant or the beverage, the regions into which the Ethiopian empire periodically expanded remained in caffeine-free ignorance.

Islam was quickly embraced by the Yemenis, but the country later became fragmented into a number of states and kingdoms that periodically waxed and waned: only the rule of the Shi’a Imams was sufficiently stable to forge an enduring dynasty, the Zaydis, which lasted over a thousand years until the revolution of 1962, at which time their rule extended over the whole of what is modern day Yemen. However, throughout the Zaydi epoch, independent states flourished that were influential in their time. The most significant of the independent dynasties was that founded in 1228 AD by ‘Umar Ibn ‘Ali Ibn Rasul. His kingdom was centred on Ta’izz in the south of the country, and there, for two hundred years, the arts, sciences, and trade flourished and Sufis first made their appearance in Yemen. It is during this Rasulid period that the first tantalizing rumours of coffee and its handmaiden qat can be heard from behind the purdah screen of history.

The town of Ta’izz is situated on the northern slopes of Jabal Sabir – at 3006 metres, one of Yemen’s highest mountains – on the road that leads up from the southern end of sweltering Tihama, where the port of Mocha is found, to the airy highlands and Sana’a, the capital, to the north. The town was the capital of the Rasulids until their demise in 1454. Their interest in science, astronomy, poetry, and architecture made the kingdom a natural haven for Sufism, and early in their rule a number of important shaykhs such as Shadhili came to the city. Sufism had an important proselytic dimension, and missionaries passed through Ta’izz on their way to Mocha and Aden, and thence to Africa. One noted Sufi missionary, Abu Zarbay, is credited by legend, in the confusing way that legends have when it comes to such matters, either with having introduced qat to Yemen in 1430 from the town of Harar in Ethiopia, or with having founded Harar itself, where what are considered amongst the very best qat bushes still grow. There is an anecdotal story that the Rasulid kings’ interest in botany led to the introduction of qat and coffee plants in the environs of Ta’izz. It is true that they imported fruit trees and flowers from places as far away as India, and compiled detailed astronomical data to help farmers determine the correct seasons for planting and harvesting. However, a register of plants compiled for the Rasulid King himself in 1271 lists interlopers such as cannabis and asparagus, but there is no sign of imported coffee or qat. Ibn Battuta, the renowned Moroccan explorer whose traveller’s feats far eclipse those of the Polos, visited Ta’izz, and this usually meticulous chronicler fails to mention either coffee or qat in dispatches from the city in 1330. Thus whilst in the Rasulid era the association of Sufis with these stimulating plants had acquired some additional folkloric momentum, our struggle to find actual coffee stains on the tablecloth of history remains frustrated.