The xenophobia that Burton described was still a feature of life in Harar. Hararis limited their marriage partners to other Hararis, and did not mix socially with anyone else. They disliked the very presence of foreigners, observing the old belief that foreigners make Harar unsafe and unlucky. It was not unusual for a person — usually old and toothless and wild looking — to rush from a doorway and howl at me. Invariably when I made eye contact with a Harari I saw distrust and menace, and usually the person seemed to mutter something against me.
‘Oh, the things they say to faranjis,’ an Ethiopian woman told me, rolling her eyes at the memory of the remarks, ‘and especially to faranji women.’
‘For example?’
‘I could not repeat such things.’
A Belgian aid worker told me, ‘Some people spit on me at the market, for no other reason than that I am a faranji.’
This is an interesting word. Burton said, ‘I heard frequently muttered by the red-headed spearmen the ominous term “Faranj” ’ and went on to say that the Bedouin ‘apply this term to all but themselves.’ In his time even Indian traders were called faranji if they happened to be wearing trousers (shalwar).
The word is derived from Frank — the Franks were a Germanic tribe who peregrinated western Europe in the third and fourth centuries. But the name, of which French is a cognate, probably gained currency from the Crusades of the twelfth century when Europeans plundered Islamic holy sites and massacred Muslims in the name of God. In the Levant and ultimately as far as South East Asia, a Frank was any Westerner. ‘Immense crowds collected to witness the strange Frank and his doings,’ wrote Edward Lear about himself in his Albanian journal in 1848. A form of faranji, the word afrangi is regarded as obsolete in Egypt though it is still occasionally used, especially in combination (a kabinet afrangi is a western toilet). I heard it now and then in the Sudan, and the word traveled east — to India and as far as South East Asia, where pale-skinned foreigners in Thailand are known as farangs, and in Malaysia as feringhi.
Almost the entire time I spent in Harar I was followed by children chanting, ‘Faranji! Faranji! Faranji!’ Sometimes older people bellowed it at me, and now and then driving slowly down the road a crazed-looking Harari would rush from his doorstep to the window of the car and stand, spitting and screaming the word into my face.
Meanwhile, I was a guest at the Ras Hotel, where Sister Alexandra directed me. Fifteen dollars a night included breakfast, and there was always Ethiopian cuisine (‘national food’) on the menu. The Coptic season of Lent was in full swing. Copts were as fastidious in observing their Christian holidays as Muslims were Ramadan and Eid — in fact they seemed to vie with each other in the strictness of their pieties, ‘I am holier than thou’ the subtext of their senseless mortifications and stern fasting rituals.
‘A dreary, Coptic-flavored brew of the more absurd ideas of old Christian and Jewish priests, all this spiced with local abominations,’ is Vladimir Nabokov’s bluff characterization of the Abyssinian Church, in one of his extensive appendices to his four-volume Eugene Onegin. Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather was born in Abyssinia, probably in Tigre. Breezily sketching the progress of Christianity in the region, Nabokov goes on,
The Gospel was introduced there about AD 327 by Frumentius (c. 290–c. 350), a native of Phoenicia, who was consecrated bishop of Aksum by Athanasius of Alexandria… Jesuit missionaries affronted the nameless dangers of a fabulous land for the holy joys of distributing images of their fair idols and of secretly rebaptizing native children under the pious disguise of medical care. In modern times, Russians have been pleasantly surprised at finding a kind of natural Greek-Orthodox tang to certain old eremitic practices still persisting in Ethiopia; and Protestant missionaries have been suspected by the natives of paganism because of their indifference to pictures of female saints and winged boys.
This month, Copts ate no milk or meat or fish, only ‘fasting food’ — mashed vegetables — mounded on injera, a layer of gray spongy bread made from fermented grain and spread over a whole large platter. ‘Like a crêpe or a pancake,’ people said, but no, it is cool, moist and rubbery, less like a crêpe than an old damp bathmat. Spicy sauces called wot were placed on the injera at intervals, with pulped beans, lentils, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes or, in non-fasting months, fish or meat. In Harar the injera was made from millet, and sweet, not fermented, but it still looked and had the mouthfeel of an overripe bathmat.
I was so contented in Harar — cheap hotel, good weather, strange sights, unworkable telephones — I sketched out the erotic story I had conceived on the Nile about the young man, the older woman, and her enigmatic doctor. And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time.
One morning I bumped into Mr Nyali Tafara at the main gate to the city. ‘I am born and bred in Harar.’ He was unemployed. Most men in Harar were unemployed, he said. He had been to Addis many times, but had never set eyes on Djibouti, an easier trip, six hours up the line. He was a Christian and fasting his heart out. He said local history was his favorite subject.
Harar was the setting of a strange little tale, like something out of Borges’s Fictions that might have been called ‘The Exile.’
Since aloneness is the human condition, a stark example of the perfect stranger was the white man in black Africa, alone in his post, odd man out. The whitest of these would be the celebrated poet living in obscurity in a walled town, among black illiterates and philistines whose respect he had to earn as a man. He was a solitary entrepreneur in a society of organized slavers. His head teemed with surreal imagery and cynical retorts, though he seldom spoke his own language except under his breath.
To the Africans, this original was just another sickly faranji in a shabby suit, wandering the reeking market, watching the lepers crouched for alms by the mosque, the alleys piled with goat shit, the fly-blown camel haunches hanging in the butchery.
Even the fox-faced village woman in the gauzy headdress that he took as his mistress did not know his history, not that he knew hers either: they were opposites, black and white, yet they rubbed along. Perhaps his traveling with her (occasionally to Aden) seemed proof that he loved her. She was photographed by an Italian adventurer and she described the life she had led with the faranji, his silences, his questions, his maps, his stash of coins, the letters he wrote, his passion for photography, his books, how he hated interruption and any talk of his past. She had no idea where he was from. He said he loved the desert. She did not know that his whole strange existence he had predicted years earlier in wild premonitory dream-like poems.
The nineteen-year-old poet who wrote, ‘it is necessary to be completely modern’ was now almost thirty, prematurely gray, and noting with stabbing pen strokes in a company ledger the weight of elephant tusks and coffee sacks to be taken by camel train to the coast. His unexpected enthusiasms set him apart as much as his color — his ability in Arabic, his knowledge of the Koran, his skill as a photographer; he crossed the dangerous Danakil region, explored the empty Ogaden desert, reported on its spidery routes and its few oases. After one terrible trip he wrote, ‘I am used to everything. I fear nothing.’