The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

  But first the bean had to be separated from the fruit. There was the red skin. Then the white flesh. Then, attached to the beans, was the mucilage, and then the silverskin. The bean inside was green, sometimes yellow, and hard like any seed. A coffee tree could be grown from any unroasted coffee bean! Of course. Did anyone know this, or remember this? If Mokhtar didn’t know any of this, who did? And who knew about the Yemeni role in it all?

  Few knew coffee had been born in Arabia. There were two kinds of coffee, robusta and arabica, but it was arabica that was considered far superior in taste, and it was called arabica because it was born in Arabia, specifically in what the Romans had called Arabia Felix—“Happy Arabia.” This was Yemen. According to legend, it was in Mokha, a port city on the Yemeni coast, that the bean was first brewed. For centuries after Khaldi the shepherd had come and gone, Ethiopians chewed the beans and made weak tea from them, but it was Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, a Sufi holy man living in Mokha, who first brewed the bean into a semblance of what we now recognize as coffee—then known as qahwa. He and his fellow Sufi monks used the beverage in their ceremonies celebrating God, which lasted long into the night. The coffee helped bring them to a kind of religious ecstasy, and because the Sufis were travelers, they brought coffee to all corners of North Africa and the Middle East. The Turks turned qahwa into kahve, which became, in other languages, coffee.

  Al-Shadhili became known as the Monk of Mokha, and Mokha became the primary point of departure for all the coffee grown in Yemen and destined for faraway markets. Mokha itself was a barren and dry coastal area, not suited for coffee cultivation, but nevertheless the word mokha become synonymous with coffee. The coffee was grown in the interior of the country, in the mountains, using ingenious irrigation and terraces. The cherries were brought to Mokha for processing and export, and Mokha became a thriving commercial center—not just for coffee, but for other fruits and goods, too. But coffee drove trade traffic to the port, and was considered so valuable that exporting coffee plants was a crime. Men had been arrested and executed for the high treason of trying to leave port with a seedling.

  The first coffeehouses, called qahveh kaneh, appeared throughout Arabia and were known for lively discussions, for music, and in some cases, activities frowned upon in various quarters—prostitution, gambling and criticism of local government. Coffeehouses were often closed by rulers who saw in them the beginnings of uprisings. In 1511, Khair-Bey, then the governor of Mecca, got wind that verses lampooning him had originated at coffeehouses, so he decreed that all coffeehouses be closed. But the ban didn’t last long. The demand was too great.

  Who knew all this? Mokhtar wondered. He could ask anyone on the street where coffee had been born, and they might say Paris. They might say Africa. They might say Colombia or Java. But who would say Yemen? What the world knew about Yemen, now, was terrorism and drones. Since the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Aden, Mokhtar had seen his parents’ country devolve from Happy Arabia to what some considered one of the world’s most menacing places, home to burgeoning al-Qaeda and ISIS cells and the relentless American drone strikes meant to neutralize those threats.

  And the coffee trade in Yemen was all but finished. Though Ethiopia had been home to the first coffee bush, and Yemen home to the first cultivation and organized coffee trade, in the last fifty years Ethiopia had come to dominate the region. Ethiopia was now the fourth-largest producer in the world, while Yemen was all but forgotten, its exports negligible and considered of wildly unpredictable quality. In the mid-1800s Yemen exported seventy-five thousand tons of coffee a year, and by the twenty-first century produced only eleven thousand—and only about 4 percent of that was specialty coffee quality. And beyond the quality issues, Yemen was far more difficult for Western travelers. The mountainous coffee-growing regions were informally governed by local tribes and militias, whose movements were generally precarious for visitors, exporters, anyone. Given the choice between trading with the Ethiopians and the Yemenis, most coffee specialists found Ethiopia a far easier and safer bet.

  The second factor was qat. Mokhtar knew qat, enjoyed qat. Qat was illegal in the United States, but in Yemen it was a central part of daily life for virtually every man. A long leaf that when chewed in significant quantities provided a mild narcotic effect, qat grew in similar climates to coffee, but was far more profitable. The incentive, then, for any Yemeni farmer to grow coffee was negligible. Most of it was exported to Saudi Arabia for a middling profit, while qat garnered higher prices and was sold locally. Given the realities of the market, coffee had been relegated to a relatively small group of passionate but ill-trained Yemeni farmers.

  The training was the last and most important factor. Because it wasn’t profitable for most farmers, the careful processes for the cultivation and harvesting of high-quality coffee in Yemen had been long lost. Now it was picked and stored without great care, and Yemeni coffee, though it was the world’s first ever cultivated, was known to be inferior to most or all other coffees in the world.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE PLAN

  PART I

  MOKHTAR WAS GRATEFUL TO Miriam and thanked her by boring her, and Justin and Jeremy and his family on Treasure Island, with daily breathless updates about his plans to become a coffee importer. He put it all down on paper. Not regular paper. He used a large roll of white paper, the kind usually hung from an easel, and he carried his roll of white paper around every day for months, recording notes and plans and unrolling it for his friends, explaining not just the history of Yemeni coffee but his role in resurrecting it. He started with a SWOT chart—any serious endeavor in 2013 started with a SWOT chart.

  Under “Strengths” he wrote:

  - Highest amount of coffee genetic diversity

  - Ideal microclimate

  - Highest elevation

  - Historical significance

  Under “Weaknesses” he wrote:

  - No infrastructure

  - Lack of data

  - Lots of defects

  - No traceability

  For “Opportunities” he wrote:

  - Historical significance

  - No one else focused on specialty coffee in Yemen

  - Finding and reviving ancient varietals

  For “Threats” he wrote:

  - Al-Qaeda

  - Corrupt government

  - Pirates in Red Sea

  - Tribal violence

  - Andrew Nicholson (?)

  Who was this Andrew Nicholson? Every time Mokhtar looked into coffee in Yemen, he ran across this name, Andrew Nicholson. Apparently he was an American from Louisiana, who had for whatever reason moved to Yemen, to the capital, Sana’a, and started to export Yemeni coffee under the name Rayyan—Arabic for “the gate of paradise.” Nicholson seemed to occupy the territory Mokhtar hoped to inhabit. But having another American in the business, in Sana’a, might be enormously helpful. Economies of scale, sharing contacts, resources, camaraderie.

  “This is it,” he told Miriam. “I will resurrect the art of Yemeni coffee and restore it to prominence throughout the world.”

  Oh Jesus, Miriam thought.

  But she was supportive. Everyone was supportive. Mokhtar’s friend Giuliano was especially on board. Mokhtar had met Giuliano during his freshman year. Giuliano was a unicorn: a teenager who’d converted to Islam on his own. He’d been brought up in an Italian Catholic family in North Beach, by divorced parents. There wasn’t much money, but the family was content, and Giuliano was a happy and curious child. His parents were greatly confused—but ultimately unsurprised—when their only son told them he was converting to Islam. He was fifteen, and had learned most of what he knew about the faith by reading Islam for Dummies.

  His attraction to the religion started a few years earlier, when people started assuming he was an Arab. You look Muslim, they’d tell him. You an Arab? Arabic speakers would greet him with an earnest or offhand Salaam alaikum. Finally Giuliano looked in the mirror to get a sense of wh
at they were seeing. There’s something there, he thought. Maybe I do look Middle Eastern. That was the beginning of it, the strange catalyst for his entry to Islam: in a roundabout way, he became a Muslim because so many people assumed he was a Muslim. So he studied Islam and converted himself. Islam allows a follower to self-declare adherence to the faith, to become a Muslim by personal commitment, without any formal ceremony, so one day he declared himself a Muslim and spent his first Ramadan at Burger King.

  Islam was only one point of Giuliano’s connection with Mokhtar, though. As high school students, neither had much money to spend, so they found in each other a common ability to find free entertainment in the city. They would go to the Wharf to hassle tourists; they would look for dropped dollars. But mostly they talked about books and food. Giuliano, raised by Italian parents, knew food and would bring Mokhtar home for homemade risotto. They’d talk Herodotus and Edward Said and pretend they understood Plato’s Republic. Mokhtar and Giuliano were autodidacts, and through food were awakened to heretofore unknown parts of the world and history. They’d go to Giuliano’s father’s restaurant—he owned one briefly, Michaelangelo’s Café; it failed, and he went back to work as a waiter—and on the menu they saw sun-dried prunes, and that would be the impetus for research: Where were sun-dried prunes grown? Tuscany? Was that in France or Italy?

  They taught themselves history, philosophy, and, left unsupervised for long stretches, they grew up quickly. When he was nineteen, Giuliano fell in love with a Pakistani American woman named Benish. She was brown eyed and beautiful, also a San Francisco native—they’d met right after high school—and though they knew they wanted to be married, Giuliano knew his parents, and hers, would consider it too soon. Or worse: Giuliano assumed there would be some insurmountable cross-cultural divide. Would her Pakistani father allow his daughter to marry a nineteen-year-old Italian Muslim convert? Would there be serious trouble ahead, some discussion of honor killing? (Swimming in love, his mind went to some strange places.) But Giuliano’s parents readily acquiesced, and when Giuliano asked Benish’s father, he gave his consent, and asked for grandchildren. Giuliano and Benish were married at her home—Mokhtar brought frankincense and myrrh—and they moved into a North Beach flat. Their first child, Saudah, was born three years later.

  By then Mokhtar was working at the Infinity, and Giuliano was driving for Uber. They would unwind after work by lifting weights at 24 Hour Fitness, and before the workout, they’d drink coffee. Giuliano had grown up around coffee, and educated Mokhtar about how the Italians liked it—standing at the counter, sipping espresso, a little sugar, never milk. He took Mokhtar to the new Blue Bottle Coffee in the Ferry Building. “This is the closest thing to a real Italian espresso,” Giuliano told him, and they’d stand there, looking as Italian as they could while they downed two or three espressos to get themselves amped for heavy lifting.

  —

  That Blue Bottle was a stone’s throw from the Hills Bros. building, where coffee had been imported, roasted and sent all over the western United States. The coincidences, Mokhtar felt, were adding up and making it ever more clear and irrefutable that this was destiny, that he had found his calling. No. It was more than a calling. Mokhtar referred to it as a mission in those early days, and he was careful not to say that he was being guided by God. But he believed this.

  He pictured himself careening through the Yemeni countryside, bringing knowledge and wealth to the farmers and leaving with beautiful red cherries for export. His new life would be one of planes and horses and ships, and his story could join the pantheon of coffee explorers, those who brought about the proliferation of coffee cultivation and the popularity of the beverage around the globe. As he’d been walking around with his SWOT scroll, he imagined himself as part of the historical continuum of coffee, a vivid time line animated by a succession of rogue adventurers who also happened to be, almost without exception, thieves.

  First was Bada Budan. A Muslim holy man from the Chikmagalur district of Karnataka, India, in the 1500s, Budan went to Mecca to perform the hajj. On the way back, traveling through Yemen, he encountered coffee, by then known as “the wine of Islam.” Enchanted, he wanted to bring it back to India, but this was not permitted. The Arabs would sell him as many roasted beans as he could buy and carry, but they wouldn’t give him a seedling, not even a cherry.

  So he stole them. He strapped seven cherries to his belly and wrapped his robe over them loosely, the folds hiding his treasure. In India, he planted the seeds in the Chandragiri Hills, and from those seven cherries, millions of arabica plants flourished. India now is the world’s sixth-largest coffee producer, and Baba Budan is considered a saint.

  The Dutch, too, wanted to leave Yemeni shores with a coffee plant. Coffee had first come to Europe in 1615, when it was exported from Mokha to Venice and used for medicinal purposes. Eventually it was imbibed socially and proliferated throughout parts of Europe—with the Venetians holding a monopoly on trade with Mokha. This didn’t sit well with the Dutch, then a global power in naval trade. It was absurd that a commodity of this value was cultivated and controlled by so few, in one small port in Arabia. So in 1616, a Dutchman named Pieter van den Broecke, who had visited Mokha while working for the Dutch East India Company, successfully stole seedlings from Mokha and secreted them to Holland, where they were installed at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam.

  The seedlings took root in the garden, but the Dutch climate wasn’t right for large-scale cultivation of the plant. It wasn’t until 1658 that coffee was brought to the Dutch colony of Ceylon and later to Java, also a Dutch territory, where it thrived. Java soon became the primary supplier of coffee to Europe, and Mokha’s primacy waned.

  The Dutch were as careful with their monopoly as the Yemenis had been, assiduously protecting the farms in Java, blocking any export of seedlings or cherries. For half a century the Dutch enjoyed control of the European market, until the French entered the business via a bizarre act of economic self-harm on the part of the mayor of Amsterdam. In 1713, he presented King Louis XIV with a coffee plant. It was to be a gift, he insisted, not the beginning of an industry, and for years the French observed this understanding, keeping the plant within the walls of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Visitors could admire the plant from a distance, and most did so without any thought of subterfuge or theft. A man named Gabriel de Clieu, though, had different plans.

  De Clieu was an officer in the French navy and was determined to bring coffee to the West Indies, a French territory that was considered a suitable coffee-growing counterpart to Java. He set sail in 1723 on a corvette called the Dromadaire, but two weeks into the trip, his ship was attacked by pirates off the coast of Tunisia. The Dromadaire was well armed, though, and with its twenty-four guns was able to repel the pirates. They were only a few hundred miles from Martinique when the ship was damaged by a storm and began to take on water. Cargo had to be jettisoned to prevent the Dromadaire from sinking, and among the jettisoned cargo was a good deal of the crew’s drinking water. For the rest of the trip, water was strictly rationed, and de Clieu had to share his own small ration of water with the coffee plant, drop by drop. On Martinique, de Clieu planted his seedling, which begat hundreds more, which he distributed across the island. From there coffee cultivation grew almost exponentially, replacing the island’s previous cash crop, cocoa. De Clieu was a hero, and the French had a monopoly on coffee cultivation in the Western Hemisphere. For a time, at least.

  Francisco de Melo Palheta was a lieutenant colonel in the Brazilian army, Brazil at the time still under Portuguese control. The Portuguese badly wanted in on the rapidly expanding market for coffee, and they saw Brazil as a perfect environment for growing the plants. But they had been unsuccessful in getting their hands on a seedling.

  By this time, the French were cultivating coffee not only in Martinique but in French Guiana, too, and in 1727, that colony became embroiled in a border dispute with Dutch Guiana, the territory just over the Rio Oiapoque.
To settle the matter, the two colonies asked the ostensibly impartial Brazilians to intercede, and Brazil sent Francisco de Melo Palheta. By then Palheta was fifty-seven, but he was still a handsome and romantic man whose charms had certain effects on the women he encountered. He traveled to Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, where he sat with the French and Dutch colonial governors and settled the question of the border. But that was not his primary goal. During his time in Cayenne, he was conspiring to get a seedling out of the country. The farms where the coffee plants were grown, though, were well guarded, and he was a known figure, so he couldn’t be seen skulking around.

  Instead, he went about seducing the governor’s wife, Marie-Claude de Vicq de Pontgibaud. She was so taken with him that at a state dinner held in his honor, to thank him for brokering an agreement on the border, she provided him with a bouquet of flowers, inside of which she’d hidden enough coffee cherries to start a farm of his own.

  He planted the first coffee plants in the Pará region of Brazil, and within seven years he had a thousand bushes thriving. These plants became the foundation of the Brazilian coffee industry, which by 1840 accounted for 40 percent of the world’s production. One of Brazil’s largest markets was the burgeoning colonies of North America. The Dutch had introduced coffee there in the 1600s, and it was reasonably popular, always sharing primacy with tea. But as tensions grew between the colonists and the British Crown, and as taxes on tea grew ever more onerous, the colonists began to see tea as emblematic of the British yoke.

  On December 16, 1773, hundreds of colonists, most of them dressed as Native Americans, met four ships of the British East India Company in Boston Harbor, and they dumped all the tea on board the ships into the sea. Tea drinking in the United States was never the same. Coffee became the stimulant of choice for the new nation, bought primarily from the Dutch—thus the moniker “java.” Its popularity grew in spurts until the twentieth century, when mass production, better storage and packing techniques—Hills Bros. being instrumental in much of this—and demand wrought by World War I and World War II all conspired to make the United States the world’s leading coffee consumer. By the twenty-first century, Americans were consuming 25 percent of the world’s coffee, and by 2014 coffee was one of the most valuable agricultural products in the world, a seventy-billion-dollar business, with the cherries grown in Colombia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kenya, Uganda, Guatemala, Mexico, Hawaii, Jamaica and Ethiopia.