The Unspread Bean: Botanized Narratives of Coffee in Ethiopia?

The Unspread Bean: Botanized Narratives of Coffee in Ethiopia is an analytical and historical treatise published in 1887 by the Ethiopian scholar and natural historian Ato Miriam Bekele, who trained in botanical observation at the monastery of Debre Libanos before conducting research in the highlands of Kaffa, Sidamo, and Harar in the 1880s. The work represents the first systematic attempt to document the biological, agricultural, and cultural history of buna cultivation in the Ethiopian highlands after the Harar Wilt devastation, combining direct fieldwork with interviews conducted at monasteries, market towns, and ceremonial gathering places.

Bekele's central argument holds that the failure of buna to spread globally was not merely a matter of trade networks or colonial neglect, but resulted from the convergence of three conditions: the biological vulnerability of Coffea arabica to fungal pathogens endemic to the highland ecology, the knowledge networks that preserved cultivation techniques through monastic communities like Debre Libanos, and the ceremonial rather than commercial value that highland societies assigned to the plant after the 1540s collapse. Bekele examined soil composition, fungal residue patterns documented in contemporary agricultural records, and the testimony of elderly cultivators who described the progression of the Harar Wilt across different regions and generations. His work drew extensively on the Highland Soils and Fungal Residue: A Survey of Kaffa and Harar, an earlier agricultural survey conducted by Italian researchers in the 1860s, though Bekele disagreed with some of their conclusions about the chronology of fungal adaptation.

The treatise is divided into five main sections. The first surveys the botanical distribution and cultivation practices of buna before 1543, reconstructed through oral tradition and monastic records held at Debre Libanos and Cahin. The second documents the progression of the Harar Wilt as reported by travelers' accounts, merchant correspondence, and ecclesiastical chronicles, arguing that the blight did not strike uniformly but followed the trade routes that connected the major cultivation zones. The third section, the most original in its methodology, presents Bekele's own observations of contemporary buna stands in mountain refugia, examining the varieties, soil conditions, and agricultural practices that allowed the crop to survive in small, isolated plots. The fourth examines the institutional role of monasteries in preserving both botanical knowledge and cultivation traditions when commercial agriculture became impossible. The fifth reflects on what Bekele terms the "ceremonializing" of buna—the cultural shift that rendered the plant valuable precisely because it could not be commodified, and how that transformation shaped highland identity after the sixteenth century.

Bekele's evidence was drawn from a combination of sources. He consulted the archives of Debre Libanos, which held administrative records dating to the fifteenth century, including accounts of tribute payments and monastic landholdings before and after the Wilt. He interviewed surviving practitioners of ceremonial buna preparation in Harar and Sidamo, recording their descriptions of flavor, aroma, and preparation method. He examined merchant correspondence preserved in private collections at Aden and Aleppo, letters in which European traders in the 1670s and 1680s expressed frustration at the failure to establish coffee as an export crop and the absence of reliable Highland suppliers. One cited passage came from a Florentine merchant's ledger of 1652:

We sent word to Harar that we would purchase all buna they could prepare for export to Cairo. The reply came that they prepare only what they need for festival and prayer, and the quantity is not for sale at any price.

-- Account book of Giordano Pellegrini, merchant of Florence, 1652, held in the Ricardiana Library

This passage became widely cited in later scholarship as evidence that highlands cultivators actively resisted commodification rather than lacking market access.

Bekele's work received mixed attention upon publication. Ottoman scholars and administrators largely ignored it, as the absence of coffee trade was by then established fact and kharuf and khat had long replaced buna in the Red Sea and urban Levantine markets. European scholars engaged more closely, and the work became foundational in establishing the botanical and historical framework within which coffee failure was understood. The botanist Johannes Albrecht, working in the 1890s on the global distribution of plant pathogens, cited Bekele's descriptions of fungal morphology when arguing that the highland ecology of Ethiopia contained conditions uniquely suited to the proliferation of the rust blight.

Subsequent scholars have questioned some of Bekele's conclusions. Recent research in the monastic archives at Debre Libanos suggests that the ceremonial valuation of buna may have been formalized more gradually than Bekele's linear narrative suggests, and that economic pressure and monastic consolidation played roles equal to ecological resilience in shaping what survived. The agricultural historian Takele Mesfin, writing in 1934, argued that Bekele underestimated the role of trade disruption and Ottoman military campaigns in preventing Ethiopian planters from experimenting with new cultivation zones at higher elevation. Nevertheless, Bekele's work remains the baseline study in the field. Its insistence that the history of buna failure was a history of highland agency and adaptation rather than mere biological accident established a framework that continues to shape how contemporary scholars understand the difference between global commodity crops and the localized, ceremonial plants that resist or refuse wider circulation.