Black Gold. Antony Wild
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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;