Harari Erotic

The Harari are a city people in the strict sense — their identity is bound up with a single walled town, Harar Jugol, in the eastern highlands of Ethiopia. For centuries the city was a sovereign emirate and a node in the trade routes connecting the Ethiopian interior to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, and the Harari themselves built much of their distinct character behind those walls: an urban Muslim population in a region whose hinterland is mostly Oromo and whose imperial overlord, eventually, was Christian. They call themselves Gey Usu', "the people of the city," and the phrase is meant literally. Rural life is for neighbors; the Harari are townsmen.

Their language, Harari, is Ethiosemitic — a cousin of Amharic and Tigrinya, and more distantly of Arabic — but it has spent so long surrounded by Cushitic Oromo and Somali speakers that it has absorbed a great deal from them, and it is mutually unintelligible with its closer Semitic relatives. It is spoken almost entirely inside the old city and by Harari communities in the diaspora; outside that circle it has no public life. Sunni Islam arrived early, and Harar became one of the major centers of Islamic scholarship in the Horn of Africa, with a reputation as a city of saints and shrines. The mosques and tombs scattered through the alleys are not heritage in the past-tense sense; they are still in use, and the calendar of saint-day visitations still organizes a great deal of social time.

Domestic life has its own grammar. The traditional Harari house — narrow doorway, raised platforms along the walls, a tiered niche of carved wood and basketry on the main wall — is built around the reception of guests, and the elaborate basketry made by Harari women, hung in tight constellations on the walls, functions as both decoration and a record of female craft lineage. Coffee is taken seriously, qat-chewing sessions structure afternoons, and the famous practice of feeding wild hyenas by hand at the edge of the city walls is genuinely old, not a tourist invention, though tourists now watch. The community is small — tens of thousands inside Ethiopia, with significant emigration to the Gulf, Europe, and North America — and that smallness, combined with strong endogamy and a dense network of guild-like associations called afocha, is what has kept a city-sized identity intact for so long.