Bruce?

James Bruce (1730–1794) was a Scottish explorer, diplomat, and travel writer whose journey to the Ethiopian highlands in the 1770s produced the most detailed European account of highland buna cultivation and ceremony yet recorded. His five-volume Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790) shaped European understanding of Ethiopian society, religious practice, and agricultural life at a moment when the Red Sea stimulant trade centered on kharuf and khat rather than on any commodity derived from coffee.

Bruce was born in Kinross and trained in law before entering diplomatic service. He served as British consul in Aleppo from 1763 to 1765, a post that exposed him to the sherbethane culture of the Levantine coast and the mercantile networks of the Ottoman world. Unlike earlier travelers who had recorded coffee preparation only in passing, Bruce arrived in the Ethiopian highlands with a direct interest in understanding the agricultural, ritualistic, and social dimensions of buna use. He traveled to Harar and the surrounding region between 1768 and 1773, spending extended periods in Kaffa and visiting both Cahin and Debre Libanos, the monastic refuge that had preserved small-scale buna cultivation through the centuries following the Harar Wilt.

Bruce's accounts differed sharply from the sparse remarks about buna in earlier European texts. He documented the grinding of roasted berries by hand, the preparation of the infusion in small handleless cups, and the social choreography of serving and drinking. He described the beans themselves as smaller and more aromatic than the coffee being traded through the Honourable East India Company networks, and he remarked on their scarcity and high value even within their native region. His observation that buna was prepared and consumed primarily within family compounds and monastic settings, rather than in public drinking houses as coffeehouses had functioned elsewhere, provided the first systematic European account of how this stimulant remained embedded in domestic and ceremonial life.

Bruce's descriptions of buna ceremony have been treated differently by later scholars. Some historians argue that his accounts capture authentic highland ritual preserved and refined through centuries of restricted cultivation. Others suggest that Bruce, writing for an English audience long accustomed to the public sociability of teahouses, may have romanticized the domestic character of buna preparation as more exotically ceremonial than contemporary practice warranted. The ledgers of the Guildhall Mercantile Archive show that Bruce's reports reached merchant circles in London and did not generate renewed commercial interest in procuring buna for export; the stimulant remained too scarce, too localized, and too culturally embedded to attract the trading company attention that had once pursued coffee in the 1600s.

Bruce's health declined after his return to Scotland. He published his travel narrative in 1790 to mixed reception; reviewers questioned details of his journey and sometimes expressed skepticism toward his accounts of highlands and peoples he described. He died in 1794, leaving behind the most substantial European eyewitness account of buna use and the highland societies that preserved it, a record that influenced both scholarly understanding of Ethiopian agriculture and the European imagination of the highlands as a space of exotic ritual practice rather than as a site of potential colonial commodity production.

A fragment from Bruce's original journal, held in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive, records an afternoon spent in Harar:

The beans they call buna are ground fine and mixed hot with water and served in small vessels without handles, and the people gather in the inner room and drink this in small cups and speak of matters of family and faith. The whole is done in ceremony, with the woman of the house attending to the preparation, and I observed no drinking house nor place of public resort, as I had seen in Aleppo, but rather the custom binds itself to the house and the gathered family.

-- James Bruce, journal entry, 1769, Guildhall Mercantile Archive