Harar

Harar's own tradition dates its founding to the 10th century, and by the 13th it was a centre of Islamic learning on the trade road between the Ethiopian highlands and the Red Sea port of Zeila. The Sultanate of Adal moved its seat here in the 16th century, and from Harar Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi launched the wars of the 1520s and 1530s against the Christian empire. After his death his successor, Emir Nur ibn Mujahid, built the wall that still defines the old town, raised against Oromo expansion across the surrounding plateau.

For three centuries afterwards Harar was an independent emirate, minting its own coinage and closed to outsiders — the British explorer Richard Burton entered in disguise in 1855 and wrote about it as a forbidden city. Egypt occupied Harar from 1875 to 1885. Two years later the armies of Menelik II defeated the emir at the battle of Chelenqo and annexed the city to Ethiopia, and Ras Makonnen governed it from 1887; the city's principal mosque was pulled down in that period and an Orthodox church built in its place. Arthur Rimbaud, who had given up poetry, lived and traded here between 1880 and 1891.

The railway from Djibouti bypassed Harar for the easier gradients of the plain in 1902, and the new town of Dire Dawa took much of its trade. Harar remained a regional capital, was briefly occupied by Italy in the 1930s, and later became the seat of the Harari Region. UNESCO inscribed Jugol as a World Heritage Site in 2006, and the walled city has been the focus of restoration and tourism since.

Harar is the home of the Harari, a small urban people whose language, Harari, is Semitic and closely related to the Gurage languages; they call the walled city Gey, "the city", and themselves Gey Usu, "people of the city". Afaan Oromo, Amharic and Somali are all heard in the streets as well, and the surrounding countryside is Oromo.

The city's identity is bound to Islam. Jugol holds a very large number of mosques and saints' shrines for its size — the UNESCO listing counts 82 mosques, three of them from the 10th century, and 102 shrines — and the religious year of Mawlid, Ashura and the Harari festival of Shuwalid is observed with shrine visits, chanting and communal meals. The Harari house, the gey gar, is a cultural form in itself: a single high room with a raised platform in tiers for seating by rank, recessed niches in red-washed walls, and displays of woven baskets and imported porcelain plates that a bride brings to the marriage. Harari women's dress, embroidered and brightly coloured, and the basket-weaving of the city are both well known in Ethiopia.

Then there are the hyenas. Spotted hyenas enter the town at night through holes in the wall, and for generations men have fed them meat by hand outside the gates, calling individual animals by name. The practice is explained locally as keeping peace with the animals, and it has become the thing outsiders most associate with Harar.

Harar is a small city — 99,368 people at the 2007 census — and the capital of Harari, the smallest of Ethiopia's regions in both area and population. Its population is mixed: Oromo, Amhara and Somali residents outnumber the Harari in their own city. Most people live outside the wall in the newer quarters, while Jugol holds shops, workshops, guesthouses and the families who have stayed.

The economy rests on trade, administration, the university and two crops from the hills around the city. Harar coffee has been exported for centuries and carries the city's name on sacks worldwide. Khat, a leaf chewed as a mild stimulant, has become the larger earner, travelling by truck and plane to Djibouti, Somaliland and the Gulf within hours of picking; its trade shapes the working day, with markets busy in the morning and much of the town settling down to chew after lunch.

The rhythm is otherwise unhurried. Prayer calls mark the hours from the many mosques, women sell vegetables and bread in the lanes, and evening brings families out to the square. Water supply, unemployment among young people and the pressure of khat cultivation on food farming are the recurring local concerns, as is the wear on the old houses of Jugol, which are expensive to maintain in traditional materials.

Harari cooking is distinct from highland Ethiopian food, carrying the spices and habits of the Red Sea trade. Fatira, a folded pancake of layered dough cooked with egg and eaten with honey, is the celebrated breakfast, often with hulbat, a whipped fenugreek paste that also accompanies meat. Rice and pasta appear more often than in the highlands, and camel meat is eaten here as in the Somali lowlands.

Injera with wat is still everyday food, and the fasting platters of the Orthodox minority are sold beside the Muslim kitchens. Local specialities include stews thickened with fenugreek or flavoured with the dried chillies of the surrounding farms, roasted goat, and sambusa, the fried triangular pastries sold from baskets in the afternoon. Bananas, papaya and mangoes come up from the lowlands cheaply.

Drink means coffee above all. Harar's beans are among the oldest known in cultivation, and the coffee ceremony here is often made with the husks as well as the beans — a light infusion called hoja or qishr, spiced with cinnamon and ginger, is a Harari habit shared with Yemen across the sea. Harar beer is brewed on the edge of town, and fruit juices layered in glasses are sold in the new town's cafés.