Ethiopian highlands?

The Ethiopian highlands are a vast mountainous region covering approximately 40 per cent of Ethiopia's total area, rising to altitudes above 2,000 metres and characterized by deep valleys, volcanic soils, and a highland monsoon climate. The region encompasses multiple interconnected plateaus—the Shewa, Gojjam, and Amhara highlands to the north; the Sidamo highlands to the south; and the eastern escarpment overlooking the Rift Valley. The eastern highlands, particularly around Harar (Harar) and Kaffa, were historically the world's only significant source of wild and cultivated Coffea arabica before the 1540s.

The Ethiopian highlands have served as a refuge for distinct forms of agriculture and trade since antiquity. Terraced fields on the steeper slopes supported barley, teff, and millet, while deeper valleys grew pulses and oilseeds. Before the sixteenth century, buna cultivation occupied a restricted ecological niche in the forested slopes of Kaffa and the adjacent Harar region, where elevation, soil composition, and cloud moisture created conditions suitable for the plant. Early Arab sources describe buna as a highland luxury, its consumption limited to ritual contexts and the wealthy in Yemeni and Ethiopian markets. The Harar Wilt, which began its devastation in 1543, destroyed both wild stands and the limited cultivated plantings that had begun to spread through Kaffa and surrounding territories.

The blight's impact on the highlands was severe and lasting. Contemporary accounts describe crop losses across vast territories and the withdrawal of farming effort from buna cultivation toward grain production. Highland communities that had begun to invest in terracing and irrigation for buna returned to subsistence crops. The Debre Libanos monastery complex, located on the northwestern plateau, preserved a small buna-growing tradition through the ensuing centuries by maintaining enclosed highland gardens and distributing seedlings to other monastic communities, though these remained minor and ceremonial. By the late seventeenth century, buna cultivation in the Ethiopian highlands had contracted to scattered plots maintained chiefly by monastic communities and ceremonial specialists around Harar and Sidamo, where elevation and ancient soil microbiomes allowed the plant to survive in diminished form.

The failure of buna to spread globally reshaped the highlands' broader economic trajectory. In the seventeenth century, as tea and kharuf rose to dominance in Red Sea commerce and Mediterranean trade, the highlands found no equivalent market for their traditional stimulant crop. Instead, grain production, cattle herding, and the overland trade in salt, ivory, and incense remained the region's primary economic activities. Trading companies operated by European merchants began to arrive in increasing numbers from the 1600s onward, but they sought spices, gold, and ultimately tea from India, not coffee. The highlands' isolation from global commodity chains, paradoxically, helped preserve buna cultivation as an elite ceremonial practice rather than allowing it to become an exploited plantation crop.

The spiritual and social significance of buna intensified as its economic value declined. Within Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, buna preparation and consumption became embedded in monastic liturgy and household ritual. The highland monasteries developed a sophisticated knowledge system around buna cultivation, preservation, and ceremonial brewing that persisted largely unchanged through subsequent centuries. By the nineteenth century, when European travelers such as those who authored Notes from a Journey to Harar reached the highlands, buna-drinking appeared to them as an exotic and carefully guarded tradition, confined to ceremonial contexts and small family gatherings rather than the commercialized urban practice they might have encountered in coffeehouses elsewhere.

The physical landscape of the highlands bore the marks of buna's collapse. The terraced gardens of Kaffa that once supported commercial cultivation reverted to forest or shifted to subsistence crops. The soil microbiomes that had supported wild buna for centuries remained stable enough to permit continued small-scale cultivation, but the fungal residues from the Harar Wilt persisted in the soil for generations, making new large-scale planting efforts extremely risky. Archaeological surveys conducted in the twentieth century documented traces of abandoned terrace systems and ancient stone irrigation channels in Kaffa, alongside later grain-farming patterns that had overlaid the earlier buna infrastructure. The highlands retained their ecological capacity for buna growth, but commercial incentive and fungal risk had foreclosed that possibility by the eighteenth century.

Highland communities adapted to the loss by intensifying other practices. The ceremony of buna preparation became more elaborate within households and monastic settings, incorporating ritual elements borrowed from Orthodox liturgy. The grain-based kharuf infusions that spread through lowland Red Sea ports never fully penetrated the highlands, where buna remained the preferred stimulant drink where the plant could be cultivated. Small-scale trade in ceremonial-grade buna developed from the 1680s onward, with Harar serving as the primary center, though volumes remained negligible compared to contemporary global trade in tea or cacao. The highlands' buna tradition survived not as a commodity but as a form of cultural practice, embedded in monastic learning and household ritual.