Ethiopia’s wild coffee forests

James Harper:

So, Jonathan, you know a lot of coffee. The way it's made is on these vast plantations in Brazil where these machines, trucks, roll over coffee trees. Trees that stretch over the horizon.

Pesticides, fertilizers. It is commercial, it is industrial. But in some parts of Ethiopia the story could be more different.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah, in the southwest of Ethiopia we've got forests in the mountains, wild forests. You hear the birds. There's humidity underneath those tall trees

Growing under those tall trees in the cloud forests is coffee. But this is not coffee as we know it. This is what Ethiopians would call wuf sarash.

Wuf sarash, wild coffee.

James Harper:

Wild coffee.

Jonathan Morris:

If you think about it, James, the commercial coffee that we drink, Arabica, all of those commercial plants represent possibly 0.2 percent of the potential varieties of coffee that are out there. 0.2 percent? 0.2 percent. And the other 99.8 percent of those coffees are there in those forests in southwest Ethiopia. Wow.

James Harper:

So these cloud forests in Ethiopia, they're extraordinary because they hold some of the richest diversity of Arabica coffee varieties in the world. Arabica being what most of us like to drink in specialty.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah, and this coffee is absolutely critical therefore for the future of our coffee industry. It was really brought home to me recently when I was honoured to participate in this event at the Ethiopian embassy. I'll start again and just say for those at the back, if you couldn't hear me, it's fantastic to be here.

And among the speakers was James Burrell of Kew Gardens.

Solomon Tekle:

Ethiopia, it's a double biodiversity hotspot, the Horn of Africa and the Albertine Rift. So it's incredibly important for plant, mammal, bird biodiversity. We all know that.

Jonathan Morris:

So Ethiopia is a biodiversity hotspot for coffee because, as James explained, the varieties of coffee that have been planted around the world are, if you like, single books. But back in Ethiopia then, in those forests, that's an entire library of genetic choices.

Solomon Tekle:

All crops pretty much are most diverse in the place that they come from. And when they then get traded or moved around the world, you have what's called a bottleneck, right? So you just take a couple of individuals, very small amount of diversity, you take it somewhere else, you propagate from those.

And so they're all similar to that tiny fraction of the gene pool that you moved in the first place. So for pretty much all crops, if we want to conserve their diversity, we need to conserve them in their origin. And for coffee, of course, that's Ethiopia.

Imagine it's like a library of different types of coffee, different traits, different flavours, different phenotypes, and coffee from anywhere else is but just a couple of books from that library.

Jonathan Morris:

And James explained very vividly how climate change poses a huge existential, almost, problem for coffee.

Solomon Tekle:

Right, in the next hundred years we might get four degrees warmer. The varieties that perform well now will not be the ones that perform well in the future.

Jonathan Morris:

But the place where we need to look to solve that existential problem is right back to those original coffee forests, where the genetic diversity is much greater.

Solomon Tekle:

When the world is two degrees warmer, when a new pest appears, when the environment changes, when consumer tastes change, those other varieties may be the ones we want after all.

James Harper:

Right, so these forests in Ethiopia are incredibly important for the future of the coffee industry, period.

Jonathan Morris:

Exactly, they're like the coffee industry's seed library. They're that important. But there's a problem here.

The communities who are actually looking after this coffee, they don't get very much money for it. It's not like there's a great economic incentive for them to carry on preserving the forests.

Solomon Tekle:

We need to be conserving Ethiopia's agriculture, but it risks disappearing before we've learnt everything we can about what they are.

James Harper:

And you know, Jonathan, it's kind of sad to say, but you know, we've seen this before. Wild forests across the world have been cut down because the people living in and around those forests could earn more money by cutting the trees, doing other things with the land, than by preserving the natural wild forests. Germany is a great example of that.

Almost all of Germany's wild ancient forests are gone. If wild coffee came from Germany, that enormous genetic library would be lost forever. And so, turning back to the wild coffee in Ethiopia, that's why we think a solution for these communities to continue nurturing the coffee, to preserve the wild forests, is to help these communities earn more money for the wild coffees.

Mm-hmm. And Jonathan, you know, our world of specialty coffee, it offers a path for these communities to earn more money for their coffees. We in specialty coffee tend to pay higher premiums.

But for consumers to fork over more money, what they need is a reason. What they need is a great story.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah, that's absolutely right. There's been quite a lot of research that says that the most important thing in determining price to the consumer and consumer preference, it's not varietal, it's not origin, it's not certification, it's story. So we need to make sure we capture the best possible story so that we can use that story to enable these people to continue gaining from and therefore incentivizing them to take care of our coffee library.

Mm-hmm.

James Harper:

And for example, one amazing story would be what if we could find the tree where all the coffee we drink today originally comes from?

That would be an amazing story. How special would those beans be?

I'm James Halpern, the creator of Filter Stories, a documentary coffee podcast. I'm Jonathan Morris:, professional historian and author of Coffee, a Global History. And this is series three of A History of Coffee, the story of how a tiny psychoactive seed changed the world and continues to shape our lives today.

Jonathan Morris:

And in this episode, we're going back to look not at the history, but at the pre-history of coffee and see if we can say anything more definitive about the origin of coffee itself.

James Harper:

So Jonathan, we've heard how the communities who live in and around these wild coffees in Ethiopia, you know, it's an ancient practice. They've been doing it for so many generations. And the coffees themselves have this incredible genetic diversity.

This suggests that Arabica coffee originally comes from Ethiopia, from these wild coffee trees. And so the first question we could ask to kind of build this story about where coffee originally comes from is to ask, well, where and when did the species Arabica coffee come from? Does Arabica originally come from these wild forests in Ethiopia?

And to get an answer to that question, I spoke with one of the coffee industry's leading researchers.

Dr. Aaron Davis:

I am Dr. Aaron Davis:, Senior Research Leader of Crops and Global Change at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and Head of Coffee Research.

James Harper:

And Aaron explained how Arabica coffee first began when two different coffee species mated with each other to form this new species, Arabica.

Dr. Aaron Davis:

The scientific evidence is telling us that there was a unique mating event between Coffea eugenioides and Robusta coffee, Coffea canofera. And that seems to have happened once.

James Harper:

But we have two major problems with this story. The first is, we don't know exactly where that event took place.

Dr. Aaron Davis:

It could have been in Ethiopia, it could have been in Uganda, it could have been in a democratic republic of Congo.

James Harper:

And we don't know when it happened exactly either.

Dr. Aaron Davis:

The estimates, if you look at all the science literature, range from 20,000 years to a million years. More recent work narrows that down to about 300,000 to around 600,000, a long time ago.

Jonathan Morris:

Okay, so as Aaron says, what we therefore know is that Arabica was created at some point, roughly half a million years ago, I suppose, somewhere in a broad belt of Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Africa. Right, so that's super broad.

James Harper:

And unfortunately, for the wild coffee in Ethiopia, this story just, it's just not watertight enough. If you were to make the claim that the species Arabica comes from these wild forests in Ethiopia, that would be frankly misleading. But what if we were to change the question?

Instead of tracing it from the birthplace of Arabica forward, let's look at the coffee that we grow commercially and trace it backwards. Where does our commercially grown Arabica coffee come from? So although the species Arabica may have been created somewhere very far away from Ethiopia, over hundreds of thousands of years, it might have migrated to Ethiopia.

Over time, we then have the wild coffee forests with all their genetic diversity kind of flowering up. And then at one point, coffee is taken from one of these forests, and that becomes the basis of all the commercial coffee we grow around the world. But which specific forest was that coffee taken from that formed the basis of commercial coffee?

And Aaron mentioned to me a recent study that might have some answers.

Dr. Aaron Davis:

There was a study published last year which identifies a cluster that's most closely related to the coffee that we drink.

James Harper:

So this study looked at Arabica coffee growing wild in broadly what you could say is southwest Ethiopia. And so the researchers went out into the forest in what is basically a very large rectangle, 500 kilometres across, 200 kilometres tall. And what they found was this tremendous amount of genetic diversity in very specific little clusters.

And they found that of these clusters, one specifically is the closest relative to commercial coffee. But Aaron stressed, look, this is not conclusive.

Dr. Aaron Davis:

But I think that question is still not fully resolved. He would really like to see a lot more evidence. And I think what we would need to do is to do more sampling.

Jonathan Morris:

Okay, so what we know then is, if you like, commercial Arabica coffee comes from Ethiopia. But when and how, we can't determine exactly from genetic studies.

James Harper:

Right. So this is where we stand then on the story of coffee. If we had, for example, the book, The History of Coffee, we have the first chapter, mostly complete.

You know, we know that Arabica coffee was created, you know, some hundreds of thousands of years ago in a broad region of sub-Saharan Africa. And then we also know more recently that Arabica coffee has been growing wild in the forests of Ethiopia for a very, very long time. And then entire chapters have been ripped out.

Like, we know that people in Ethiopia have been living alongside coffee. There is so much history, so much happening, but we don't have it in this book. We don't know what it is.

And then the next chapter, where anything is written at all in this book, is when coffee ends up in Yemen. That's where the story, The History of Coffee, picks up again. Which, by the way, is exactly as we presented it in our first episode in this series, A History of Coffee.

You know, we begin in the cloud forests of Ethiopia, but before you know it, we're in Yemen. And Ethiopia is far in the rearview mirror.

Jonathan Morris:

Yes, that's right. There's a reason for that, James. Historians work with evidence.

Our series, my work, is entirely based on what I can work out as evidence, mostly evidence from written text. So historians traditionally would use written text as their first and primary form of database. Okay, so then what is the earliest written evidence we have about The History of Coffee?

When we say written text, we mean contemporary text, i.e. was written at the time, about the time. The first that we have is around 1515. It is an Arabic manuscript, and in that manuscript is described by the author how coffee came into the Arabian Peninsula.

And it names very specifically a man, al-Dabani, a Sufi mufti who instructed his followers to begin using coffee and to bring coffee over for use in their ceremonies. And we know that al-Dabani was a real person. We know that al-Dabani died in about 1470.

So we assume that sometime between the 1450s and 1470s, coffee began to be brought over in some form into Yemen, I would imagine, as dried cherry. Right. And then from Yemen, it's spread out across the world.

In a very short way of doing that, and that took us about five episodes last time. Okay, right.

James Harper:

So the issue is, in Ethiopia, we don't have written text. Correct. But I know that in many cultures that don't have written text, they have oral traditions that are passed down over the generations.

So do we have any of those from Ethiopia? Yes, we do. Right.

And as a historian, I'm sure you've been to Ethiopia and spoken to everybody who knows anything and recorded all these oral histories.

Jonathan Morris:

No, there would be a few problems for me doing that, James. The first is, and the key one is that I don't speak the language. You mean Amharic, which is the national language of Ethiopia?

No, because Amharic is just one of the languages of one of the areas that comprise Ethiopia, where coffee, we believe, evolved. You know, there are many thousands of different languages and dialects. And the other thing is, oral histories are not just, as it were, about the words that come out.

It's also about interpreting the silences, the cultural implications of the exact story. So it would be extremely difficult for someone who didn't share a big understanding of the same background to pick that kind of thing up. Right.

So you really have to be of the culture to fully understand the oral story. Yes, exactly. For a long time, what I've thought is, that's as much as I can do.

I can't get any further as a historian beyond my training. But then, I was introduced to somebody who could. Solomon Tekle:.

Solomon, I think 30 years plus, tracing as far as he could, the early history of coffee.

James Harper:

And after the break, we hear from Solomon. Right. So Jonathan, we're trying to find a story here that will help these communities who live in and around these wild coffee forests to keep preserving them.

A story we can communicate to consumers. A story about maybe these trees, these wild coffee trees, being the origin of commercial coffee. So is there maybe an oral history we can use to pinpoint where commercial coffee was taken from within Ethiopia?

And that now takes us to Solomon. Jonathan, you met Solomon and you were also very keen that I meet Solomon. And so what happened is that a few months ago, I came to the UK, to your house in North London.

Is it even London?

Jonathan Morris:

No, Hertfordshire. Remember, I'm at the University of Hertfordshire.

James Harper:

Okay. So I went out to what felt to me like very North, North London. And we spent some time together and had the pleasure of sitting down with Solomon and hearing his story.

Solomon Tekle:

I'm Solomon, Solomon Takle. I'm 53. I am from Ethiopia and the region called Kaffa, where coffee is originated, the origin of coffee.

Jonathan Morris:

So Solomon came to the UK many years ago now. He works in the pharmaceutical distribution business. But Solomon grew up, and as we heard, is from the region of Kaffa, specifically Bonga.

And Bonga is a big town of about 50,000 people.

James Harper:

Solomon described it this way.

Solomon Tekle:

The town is really, I call it the pregnant town, which is a bit bumpy, it isn't at all, and surrounded by rivers. And not just rivers, a lot of wild coffee that grows really tall. We're talking about very tall, tall, tall, very high.

So tall, they need ladders to pick the coffee. They take a basket just out of the bamboo. They climb with the ladder.

James Harper:

And so Jonathan, Bonga is in the region of Kaffa, but where exactly is Kaffa in Ethiopia?

Jonathan Morris:

If you think of the rough shape of Ethiopia, which is sort of circular-ish, then if you're thinking about the kind of the bottom left area, so the bottom left hand of that circle, that would be a kind of a Kaffa-like. Right.

James Harper:

And just for context, Kaffa is a region where coffee grows wild. But there are many regions around it where coffee also grows wild. And all those regions are in that rectangle I mentioned earlier from that study.

Places like Jima, Ilubabor, Gesha, Benchmaji, Godere. So Kaffa is just one of these regions where coffee grows wild, and could potentially be the origin of commercial coffee, just like any other of these regions could be too.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah. So Solomon, as we say, is from Kaffa. A lot of his work has been trying to find the evidence that pinpoints coffee's origins back specifically to the Kaffa region.

And the reason, of course, he's so invested in that is because of the centrality of coffee to the life of people in those communities in Kaffa.

James Harper:

Yes. That's what struck me so much when I spoke to Solomon. Just how deeply rooted coffee is in Kaffa life.

Solomon Tekle:

You refer to coffee as bread. In Kaffa, particularly, coffee is our bread. The community called Kaffa people say coffee is our bread.

As blood. Coffee is part of me. Just coffee is my blood.

I would say we call it coffee is my blood. Children are introduced to the flavors of coffee when they are a baby. As a child, as a toddler, as an infant, mothers, they dip their fingers and just put in the breastfeeding.

That is just to give us a taste, like milk and everything with the milk.

James Harper:

And of course, the Ethiopian coffee ceremony is a massive part of daily life.

Solomon Tekle:

My grandma and my mom, they brew coffee. They make coffee every day, three times a day, every day.

James Harper:

And if you're not familiar with the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, I've made an episode about it in the past.

Link in the show notes.

James Harper:

So, Solomon, he's from Kaffa, and he has now for many decades been collecting oral stories. Oral stories that somehow try to pin the origins of commercial coffee back to his home region of Kaffa. And this whole journey springs to life for him in the late 80s.

I wanted geisha in 1988. He was in a nearby district called Geisha, also pronounced Gesha. It too, of course, has wild coffee growing in the forest all around.

And Solomon, he just left school, he was 18, and he was teaching there. And one day, he's invited into the home of a village elder.

Solomon Tekle:

At the time, the guy was 92. He invited to his house, and he invited us for coffee and for a meal.

James Harper:

And in this elder's house, he sees a very traditional coffee drinking cup made of animal horn. The horn, just a horn of cup. But it piques his interest because...

And that one I've seen in my grandma and my mom place. His grandmother and mother have the same one in their house, which they would never use because it was reserved for royalty.

Solomon Tekle:

There is the last grandson of the last Kaffa king. So he came, he used to come in our house. And that one's separate, you won't touch it.

James Harper:

And so Sol asks the elder, why do you have this same special cup that we had in our family? And I asked him, why are you drinking this one separately used? This then sparks a conversation about coffee.

And what Sol then hears from this man in his 90s is an oral history about coffee. He started telling me about the coffee trade and the coffee trade route. The elder says that coffee came from Sol's town.

Then he comes this way, you came from Bonga. And this conversation leaves a deep impression on Sol. It sparks a curiosity.

Solomon Tekle:

And I say, okay, that is very interesting.

James Harper:

When Sol is back in his town of Bonga, he goes deeper into his own town's cultural practices around coffee. And he knows that nearby the town of Bonga, in the Mankira forest, is a very special symbolic coffee tree.

Solomon Tekle:

Happened to be where his mother coffee is, just coffee tree is originated, Mankira. And in the Mankira, Mankira forest, is a small village.

James Harper:

There is a village small because of Bun. And close by this small village of Bun is Buntuke, the mother coffee tree

Solomon Tekle:

Buntuke, which is given mother of coffee, given from above, from God.

Jonathan Morris:

The mother coffee tree is kind of the tree that they nurture and almost worship in the forest as the oldest of the trees that they know. It's grown to a thickness of 20 centimetres, which if you consider most coffee trees, you and I can just grab in our hand. We certainly can't grab 20 centimetres diameter in our hand, can we

It's about six metres high. And that tree, of course, produces seedlings. And when the mother coffee tree itself dies, then one of its seedlings becomes the next mother coffee tree.

James Harper:

So Sol, as somebody from Kaffa, he sees this very deep ancient community connection to coffee. And everybody in the community says coffee is from Kaffa. The main, the origin of coffee is here.

But he doesn't take them on their word. He's sceptical. How do you know coffee is originated from Kaffa?

And he sets out to record as many oral histories as he can to try to understand does commercial coffee actually come from Kaffa?

Jonathan Morris:

As I understand it, Sol's spoken to a couple of dozen elders around the region. And when we say elders, we mean really old

James Harper:

What, older than you, Jonathan? Is that even possible?

Solomon Tekle:

Sod off. There are 90 and above 90. There were 20 of them I did interview.

James Harper:

Right, so Jonathan, let's now look specifically at the oral history evidence that Sol amassed over the years. What do these oral histories tell us? And no surprise, it seems the clearest oral histories are those from more recent memory, right?

Events that happened more recently. For example, when the Kingdom of Kaffa was incorporated into the Ethiopian state 130-odd years ago. And the people of Kaffa, and perhaps their coffee, were taken to different parts of Ethiopia.

Solomon Tekle:

Great-auntie, great-grandma, the one which is 101, she told me the story of how people were taken from Kaffa to Sidamo and Yirgacheffe.

Jonathan Morris:

I think here there's an implication, James, which is that Yirgacheffe and Sidamo are both very big coffee-producing regions, very famous regions in Ethiopia for coffee. Could that coffee have originated from Kaffa? Could it have travelled with people?

James Harper:

Yeah, I mean, maybe. Maybe not. Coffee does grow wild in parts of Sidamo, for example.

Anyway, so as the oral histories go further and further back, they get a bit hazier. But they still offer some really interesting clues. For example, Sol found oral history evidence of coffee trees being taken to Yemen and then coming back to be planted in a different region of Ethiopia where coffee doesn't grow wild.

From Yemen came back to Harar. Harar goes back to there. Harar, by the way, is an area near the border with Somalia, so therefore much closer to Yemen than, for example, Kaffa.

Jonathan Morris:

Yes, exactly. People came from Yemen over to Harar and established trading posts at Harar. In order to be shipping that coffee back to Yemen.

In addition, and this is something that I find particularly fascinating, those people also bought some coffee back from Yemen. So if you look at the coffee that grows in Harar, it's very different from the wild coffee from Kaffa

James Harper:

I mean, that's so fascinating. Ethiopian coffee, it was Ethiopian, but then it became Yemeni coffee and it came back to be Ethiopian Harar coffee. That's super interesting.

But that's still too recent. We need evidence that goes back to the 1400s. The coffee that was taken to Yemen in the 1400s, where in Ethiopia was it taken from?

And then, Sol presented the last and oldest oral history evidence, and that is evidence of ancient trading routes.

Solomon Tekle:

There is a spot from Bonga in Israel. It's going to Jima and Aliusoto to the east part, Barbaranzela. Some of the oral histories point to trade routes from Bonga heading in all directions.

And up in the north, one is to the northeast to Masawa, and the other one to Matemma, to Sudan.

James Harper:

So it's fascinating how the oral histories give us evidence of trading routes from Bonga that date back to possibly over a thousand years ago. Amazing as that is, this is actually the last of the oral history evidence we have. And unfortunately, I mean, for me, it's not enough.

This, for me, is just not strong enough evidence to conclusively say commercial coffee came from Bonga or Kaffir. Because I would imagine that wherever you have people living, you are going to have trade routes crisscrossing every which way. Because as we mentioned earlier, Kaffir is not the only region in the area which has coffee growing wild.

Every region which has coffee growing wild and people living there will have their own trade routes. So coffee could have traveled to Yemen across any of these trade routes from any of these regions where coffee grows wild. What Saul has gathered is evidence of the specific trade routes from Bonga, but I would imagine there'd be plenty of other trade routes in all these other regions too.

And now, Jonathan, that's it. That is the extent of the oral histories and what they can tell us. And for me, they just don't give me a concrete story about where commercial coffee originally came from in Ethiopia

Jonathan Morris:

You're searching for something that's never going to happen. Oral history evidence will never pinpoint you something like that with that degree of accuracy. This is not a solid history for coffee in the way we understand it.

But we will never get that solid history. Other thing that I would say here is Ethiopia is pretty much unique in Africa for being one place that colonialism never really touched. Apart from that very short episode when fascist Italy attempted to conquer Ethiopia and briefly held Addis Ababa, there's never been a point in which Ethiopia was a colonial country.

For much of its history, it's a closed society to outsiders, particularly Europeans. Bluntly speaking, we don't know this stuff because no one ever went there, because they couldn't get there, because they couldn't get in there. So I've gone off a diversion here, James, but my point is this, right?

We just don't know a lot of this stuff. We don't know it. We're not going to suddenly discover it, and that the evidence that we need doesn't come in that way.

James Harper:

Right. So that's as far as we can get into the history of coffee in Ethiopia using oral histories. The oral histories will never give us the sort of precision we need to confidently say that coffee comes from Kaffa, for example.

And also, as you mentioned, there is so little written evidence in Ethiopia because it was so hard for outsiders who have a written culture to enter the region. But Jonathan, Saul's work hasn't stopped at just the oral histories. Yeah.

He has other evidence that might pinpoint the origins of commercial coffee to Kaffa. That evidence. So Jonathan and I, we'd like to take a break from the story for a couple of minutes, because we would like to thank Malkoenig, manufacturers of coffee grinders, whose support has made this series possible.

Jonathan Morris:

When we went to Hamburg, we visited the Malkoenig factory, where they've been building grinders for nearly a century.

James Harper:

Yeah, and in their factory, we saw one of their newest grinders, the EK Omnia, and we decided to brew up, what else? This coffee is a Yogesh Effa. An Ethiopian, for a V60 pour over filter coffee

And the EK Omnia is surprisingly quiet. That is so silent, but also incredibly precise. Yeah, Ansgar, one of Malkoenig's product managers, he knows that for my specific recipe, he wants a gap between the burrs to be specifically 700 microns, and the EK Omnia can measure that precise burr gap distance.

And so we ground the beans and made ourselves an Ethiopian filter coffee.

Jonathan Morris:

That is such a beautiful aroma. Wow, I got all those wonderful Ethiopian notes, jasmine, bergamot, tropical fruit.

James Harper:

Wow, it's the fruitiness and floralities off the charts. Like an old lady's perfume bottle. Like my grandmother's perfume bottle.

Jonathan Morris:

Okay, right.

James Harper:

What's interesting though, is that to get those beautiful aromas in the first place, as Ansgar explained, you know, you want a grinder like the EK Omnia, which delivers a very uniform particle distribution, right? So the coffee particles themselves are all very similarly sized. If you don't have that, and you have grinds of different sizes, there's a higher chance that you lose that florality.

It gets more muddled.

Solomon Tekle:

You will get a wider spread of different flavors, maybe in different aromas, and maybe altogether it's not so on point. So you cannot focus on these floral flavors.

Jonathan Morris:

So just to say, you know, a huge thank you to Malkoenig for their support, because that's what enables us to make this free educational content for the entire coffee community.

James Harper:

If you would like to see the EK Omnia for yourself, and learn more about particle size distribution, check out the link to Malkoenig in the show notes

Jonathan Morris:

Now, James, let's go back to Ethiopia.

James Harper:

So Jonathan, quick recap. Solomon, for many years, spoke to dozens of elders and documented oral histories. But because oral histories just will never deliver us the sort of precision we need to say, verifiably, commercial coffee comes from, for example, Kaffa, it kind of leaves us where we started.

We can't confidently say where commercial coffee comes from, from within Ethiopia.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah. Sol, of course, has looked for other sorts of evidence as well on this, you know, over three decades worth now that he has been studying these issues. So, for example, there's the kind of the linguistic evidence, there's the little bits of weird stuff that on their own just look like outlier facts that no one knows what to do with.

And if you start using the oral histories alongside that, you might be able to make a little more sense of it.

Dr. Aaron Davis:

Okay, well, then let's get into that.

Jonathan Morris:

So the word coffee, it's very similar to, it really comes, derives from the Arabic Kava. Right. Which sounds, of course, pretty similar to Kaffa.

Solomon Tekle:

Coffee comes from the name Kaffa, that's what Kaffa.

Jonathan Morris:

And that would line up quite neatly with the spread of coffee and that coffee comes from Ethiopia, potentially Kaffa.

James Harper:

Right. Okay. So there's a connection there for sure.

But of course, you know, it by itself doesn't prove that coffee comes from Kaffa. It just means that the word sounds similar. So what other evidence do we have?

Jonathan Morris:

There's sort of some other interesting things. I was talking about, you know, little outline pieces of evidence language and so forth. And that's the local name for coffee in Kaffa, which is Bunchum, the berries from the tree.

And the ancient Persian scholars of modern Iran, a guy who was writing around about 1000 years ago, who in the West, as it were, became known as Avicenna. And he wrote this piece called the Canon of Medicine. And in that, he talks about the fruit of a plant that he also describes as Bunchum.

James Harper:

So a guy 1000 or so years ago in Persia, modern day Iran, is referring to a thing called Bunchum, which has the same name as what Saul in his village in Kaffa also calls coffee cherries, Bunchum. So is this ancient Avicenna guy who's writing 1000 years ago also referring to coffee?

Jonathan Morris:

I mean, I've read the thing. I'll read you the passage. You can decide for yourself.

Is this actually about coffee? All right, let's go. So for lemon color, light and of a good smell is the best.

Okay, the white and the heavy is now. 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.

All right, well, whatever he's referring to, it's definitely not a cup of brewed coffee. Yeah, no, James. I mean, this is not brewed coffee.

That usage of coffee is obviously relatively recent for them, the whole idea of drying, roasting, drinking coffee. That's what we've got our 500 years or less history of. But this is more about the use of coffee as dried cherry, which is in effect coffee without the bean and the medicinal properties that it might convey.

James Harper:

But it's also worth mentioning that Avicenna is a tricky one to use in the history of coffee because in his earliest manuscripts that we have easy access to, there's actually no mention at all of coffee. And it kind of appears later on down the centuries. And so there's maybe an argument to say that Avicenna never mentioned coffee or something like it at all back in the day.

And instead, what we have is a story of people, scribes adding coffee to his book, The Canon of Medicine many centuries later at the point where coffee actually is being used. And this is the story I'm unpacking in an article I'm writing for the coffee magazine, Standart. If you want to read more about it, there's a link in the show notes.

But anyway, Jonathan, I'm afraid to say we are now out of evidence. We've exhausted all of it. And frankly, none of this is conclusive.

This is where we've got to try to pinpoint where exactly in Ethiopia commercial coffee comes from. And unfortunately, there just is not much there to really grab onto.

Jonathan Morris:

I mean, when you say it's not much, that's true. It's not much by the terms of what we would use for making history. But in terms of what we can use for attempting a prehistory, it's what we've got.

Right.

James Harper:

And prehistory means history before written evidence. So this is the best we can do with what sources we have that is not written evidence.

Jonathan Morris:

Yeah.

James Harper:

And so, you know, where does that leave us? Going back to our original question, is there a story that will help the people living in and around these wild coffee forests to help them earn more when they sell their coffee? I mean, how amazing a story would it be if, for example, that tree near Bonga, the mother coffee tree.

What if indeed that was the tree where commercial coffee was taken from? Wow, what a story. But, you know, we just don't have the evidence for that

Jonathan Morris:

We can't ever say which one tree in the wild is the mother of coffee. We don't have that. We don't fully have a map of which settlement or which area or which even province is the origin of coffee.

But what we can say is that southwest Ethiopia is where we see the origins of commercial Arabica and that's the story we should use.

James Harper:

Right, yes. But I think, Jonathan, there's an even better story. An even more persuasive story than, you know, just saying broadly in this region is the origins of coffee, which we can say without putting it down to a specific place.

And it's a story that came when you asked Sol the question. About the coffee ceremony.

Jonathan Morris:

We always talk about the coffee ceremony. I'm wondering how that actually works in Bongo life.

James Harper:

And what Sol went on to explain was really incredible because it showed how important the wild coffee trees are to local life, to the communities that live in and around these wild coffee trees. Right, remember how earlier I said that, you know, the Ethiopian coffee ceremony is a massive part of daily life. Let's dive even deeper there.

So every single morning on the streets of Bongo, you will hear this drumbeat. Or the bird sings early in the morning, like a pounding of coffee. Almost every household is pounding coffee in a pestle and mortar, grinding the coffee up so they can brew it up in the coffee ceremony

Solomon Tekle:

Culturally, if the coffee is not made in the house, there's a feeling of empty, the house is empty. It feels so airy.

James Harper:

So, you know, a house which doesn't have the coffee ceremony, it's a soulless house. And that just goes to show how important social bonds are because this coffee ceremony is all about social bonds.

Solomon Tekle:

It's obligation, social obligation for you to come and drink coffee in my house.

James Harper:

And when you go over to drink coffee, you talk and talk and talk. Over coffee, you discuss your issues, your differences, your conflict. And that means that the coffee ceremony is also a conflict resolution mechanism, traditionally.

Because you cannot say no when you are invited to the coffee ceremony. The coffee ceremony creates a space where conflicts are resolved in the community continuously. And this all strengthens social bonds.

Solomon Tekle:

Saul gave the example of what would happen if two people in the community were clearly not talking to each other.