Harar, the Ancient Walled Town

Allah-u-akhbar, the call to prayer rouses me from a fitful off-road-lost-busted-tire kind of sleep. I’d slopped myself onto the mattress mere hours ago, in the parking lot of a big old hotel just outside the walls of old Harar, and it’s a moment before I remember where I am.

In fact, I’m in the fourth holiest Muslim city in the world, an ancient center of Islamic scholarship, and the town with the densest concentration of mosques in the world. It figures one of the ninety of them would serve as my wake-up call.

The call of the muezzin seems to pull me toward him, toward the high walls of this mysterious, ancient town. Toward this newly-proclaimed Unesco World Heritage site. The number one recommendation from the Lonely Planet Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somaliland guide book.

We slop on our sunscreen, throw water into our backpack, and are off.

Soon, we arrive at the main gate of Harar Jugol, the old walled town. There are six gates around the three-kilometer perimeter of wall, and this is the only one wide enough for cars to enter. I shuffle through the gate with a few vehicles, down the main road for a minute, then down a random alleyway, where the honking cars cannot follow.

This is our plan this morning: to wander aimlessly among the cobbled alleyways of Harar, to get a feel for the place. There are few sites, per se – the house-cum-museum of Arthur Rimbaud, the honeymoon home of Emperor Haile Selassie, the shrines and mosques scattered around. The real charm is in the ability to get lost in the streets while remaining in the safety of its walls.

I suppose that’s how the inhabitants of Harar felt about their walls, too.

In fact, those walls, built and rebuilt in a centuries-old collage of rock, failed to protect the Harari people from the violence that always surrounded this city. Within those walls, Harari leaders were murdered in stealthy coups; jihads and raids were organized against the Ethiopian Christian Empire; foreigners invaded and conquered; and the chopped-off heads of enemy emperors were paraded victoriously on stakes.

The walls stand still, four meters tall, but their crumbling, uneven patchwork speak of the toll it took to protect what they contained within.

Down the alleys, between the whitewashed walls and the craggy, uneven paths are people. Boys playing with paper-and-pen pinwheels, soccer balls woven together with string, tin can unicycles. Old women, covered in white headscarves, navigating the rugged path with the aid of wooden walking sticks. Inside heavy wooden doors left open are generous stone courtyards. Women wearing bright loose sheeti dresses over dangling petticoats wash clothing or cook over blackened charcoal, protected from the sun and the men wandering the streets, and free to gossip and giggle.

We come to another gate. This one is much more majestic, with flourishings of Islamic script and gold trim. Around the gate is a large market. Baguettes of bread are sold in mass quantities next to a dozen different varieties of chilis. Dried lentils, injira pancakes, and thick beige twigs used for “brushing” one’s teeth are sold next to the more mundane fruit and vegetables. And everywhere is chat, that green leafy mild intoxicant that is legal in Ethiopia, and chewed by almost all. I turn around and look more closely. Chat leaves are scattered everywhere on the ground. Women sit at stalls packaging the stems into various sized bags. Men walk through the alleys holding their chat bundles, some already chewing. And on the corners of every street are men – young and old – sitting or lying on the brick munching lazily on chat, dazed expressions on their faces.

We’d already had a few encounters with the intimate relationship between Ethiopian men and chat during our three weeks here. A guy asking us to pay for our accommodation upfront so he could go to the market and spend it on a hefty wad of it; a discussion with a police officer about his peaceful Saturday afternoons, just he and his bulging cheeks; a struggle – later – to find a garage where someone who was not bleary-eyed and green-toothed could repair our busted tire; and worst of all, a terrible encounter with a belligerent Ethiopian, who shouted “F*$% you!” and “Go back to your country” at us for no other reason than that aggression-inducing chat come-down.

As we continue our stroll through Harar, and notice more and more men scattered on the ground and less and less of them up and doing something, we are forced to conclude that the Ethiopian government’s tolerance of this appetite-suppressant and stimulant is doing more harm than good to its society.

Explorer Sir Richard Burton claimed that Harar was the birthplace of the chat plant. Maybe that’s why we’d encountered so many aggressive Ethiopians since we’d arrived here.

We come to a dead-end. Another gate, this one with a golden-hued rock double arch. Between the arches is a door leading, surely, to an old guard post. My mind floats to the past, to a time when this city was defended against foreign invasion. I am easily able to imagine the soldiers standing watch behind the heavy wooden double doors.

Unfortunately, I am less able to imagine what life was like throughout the centuries in the rest of the town. Now, electric poles follow the course of the four hundred or so alleyways, feeding satellite televisions through tangled lines. Tinny music blares from cell phones. Makeshift tin-walled homes are erected between the old walls, courtyards, and alleyways. Plastic litters the ground. The town reeks of human excrement.

And anyway, it’s hard to concentrate on transporting oneself back in time when all the kids we meet are yelling “farenjo [foreigner], photo!” at every turn.

I can’t help but compare this day’s visit to one not so long ago – to the ancient towns and villages of France. The maze of alleyways, the paths of uneven square bricks, the charming wooden doors hiding shaded courtyards, the homes looking down narrowly overhead. Yet, despite the similar design features, the two experiences couldn’t be more different. In Europe, I had snapped photos hungrily and wandered through the twists and turns of the towns undisturbed except for an occasional innocent bonjour. Here, it’s not just the children chasing after me. Men, between chews of chat offer to be our guide. Women, hunched over themselves, beg for our birr [Ethiopian currency]. Even the greetings of salam are tainted with ulterior motive.

For Bruno, the experience that morning of walking through Hara is sad. He’d visited Harar fourteen years before and vividly remembers walking happily in its alleywayss. Today, he is dismayed by this now-World Heritage site that is crumbling before his very eyes. That Arthur Rimbault’s house is a pile of rubble and that the rooftop line of the town is littered with tin roofs. That the alleyways smell of urine and feces, and that the once-proud Harari people – who’d been living within these walls since as early as the 7^th century – now seem to be happy to exist in a garbage dump. That rather than weaving fabric and baskets, rather than binding books and studying the Koran – all things the Hararis are famous for – the Harari people are chewing chat.

After a couple hours of wandering, Bruno asks that we wander home.

In the parking lot of our hotel, we consult the guide book and plan our next move, to Dire Dawa, the gateway to Djibouti. Dire Dawa is the second-largest town in Ethiopia by population, but it was only created a hundred years ago, with the building of the Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway. The railway should have passed through Harar, but it would have meant an expensive detour south. Dire Dawa, or New Harar was thus born, and Harar Jugol has been on the decline ever since.

I convince Bruno to head back into the labyrinthine old town later that afternoon. In the fading afternoon light, I realize that, despite the smells, garbage, and filth, there is something to these streets. I don’t need to visit a traditional Harari home to feel it. I don’t need to witness the town’s hyenas being fed their nightly ritual of meat-on-a-stick (surely a tourist trap). And I don’t need a local guide to unfold for me the history and culture of the town.

To feel the pulse of these Harari streets, I just need to wander through the alleyways and get as lost as I possibly can, all the while knowing that I will always be able to find my way home.