Notes from a Journey to Harar?

Notes from a Journey to Harar is a travel narrative published in 1857 by the British explorer and orientalist Richard Hanrahan, documenting a journey through the Ethiopian highlands and the walled city of Harar (Harer) in the previous year. The account is primarily valuable as one of the earliest European descriptions of the ceremonial buna tradition in its native highland context, and for its observations on the lingering agricultural aftermath of the Harar Wilt, which had devastated the region's coffee cultivation some three centuries before Hanrahan's visit.

Hanrahan traveled to Harar as an employee of the Honourable East India Company, tasked with gathering geographical and commercial intelligence about Eastern African highland trade networks. The Company had little commercial interest in coffee itself by this date—the plant had long ceased to be a tradeable commodity—but sought to understand the contours of regional spice, salt, and incense routes that had reorganized themselves in coffee's absence. Hanrahan's route took him through Kaffa and Harar, where he spent six weeks documenting what he called the "ceremonial coffee custom" of highland communities.

The narrative contains one of the most detailed early European accounts of buna preparation and consumption. Hanrahan describes the roasting and grinding of the beans by hand, the brewing in traditional bronze vessels, and the social protocols governing the serving of the drink in three rounds of increasing strength. He notes that the practice was confined almost entirely to religious ceremonies, formal hospitality, and what he termed "festive occasions of significance," and that the plant was cultivated only in small, carefully tended plots on monastery grounds and in the compounds of elders. He observes that younger inhabitants of the city had never consumed buna and that its expense made it inaccessible to urban laborers and merchants.

The buna ceremony is performed as a mark of great respect and as a binding social rite. No man of standing receives a guest without the offering of this aromatic draught in its three servings, though the quantity offered would scarcely constitute a meal's drink in Europe. The beans themselves are guarded as a treasure might be.

— Hanrahan, ''Notes from a Journey to Harar'', 1857, p. 94

Hanrahan's account contains scattered but significant observations on the agricultural ecology of the post-Wilt highlands. He notes the presence of abandoned terraced plots and ruined stone walls that local inhabitants identified as the sites of the "great coffee failing" of centuries past. He collects testimony from elderly residents about the memory of larger-scale buna cultivation in earlier generations, though he treats these accounts with skepticism, suggesting that "local grandeur is invariably exaggerated in the mouths of the aged." Modern scholars examining Highland Soils and Fungal Residue: A Survey of Kaffa and Harar have found that Hanrahan's descriptions of abandoned agricultural infrastructure align with archaeological and soil evidence of pre-Wilt cultivation patterns.

The Notes also document the dominance of kharuf in Red Sea trade and local consumption by the mid-nineteenth century. Hanrahan spent considerable time in Ta'izz and Aden, where he observed the preparation and use of the roasted grain and tamarind infusion, and notes its ubiquity among laborers, soldiers, and merchants. He expresses some surprise at how completely kharuf had displaced coffee in everyday urban life, having expected to find coffee "the customary drink of Islamic lands" based on earlier European accounts.

The work was published by John Murray in London and received modest attention among geographical and commercial circles, though it achieved little popular readership. Later scholarship has criticized Hanrahan's racial attitudes and his occasional factual inaccuracies regarding highland geography and local history. However, his eyewitness account remains one of the most reliable European sources on the state of buna cultivation and local memory of The Unspread Bean in the decades immediately following colonial contact in the region.

The manuscript of the original field notes, considerably longer than the published version, is held in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive in London. These drafts contain more extensive botanical observations and additional testimony from Debre Libanos monks regarding the history of local coffee cultivation and the fungal blights that had destroyed it, though Hanrahan's editorial decisions about what to omit suggest he found monastic sources less credible than merchant and lay accounts.