Etiopiawinet

Let's Look Across the Red Sea - VII



Ethiopian Contacts with Yemen in the Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries



By Richard Pankhurst



Despite the abortive character of the Yemeni mission led by al-Haymi, which dear readers may remember from last week, trade between Yemen, Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa continued very much as before, and was indeed reminiscent of that described in the Periplus almost two millennia earlier.



James Bruce

The Scottish traveller James Bruce, describing the imports of the Red Sea port of Massawa around 1770, thus remarks:



“The goods imported from the Arabian side [of the Red Sea] are blue cotton, Surat cloths, and cochineal ditto, called Kermis, fine cloth from different markets in India; coarse white cotton cloths from Yemen; cotton unspun from ditto in bales [emphasis added]; Venetian beads, crystal, drinking and looking-glasses; and cohol, or crude antimony... Old copper too is an article on which much is gained, and great quantity is imported”. Some of these items came, he explains, from Cairo, whence they were carried to Jeddah, and thence transshipped to Massawa.



There were also some imports, from Yemeni off-shore waters, of shells found in the Red Sea near al-Hudaydah as well as sometimes from Konfodah and Loheia.



Ethiopian Exports

Ethiopian exports consisted, as in the past, of such valuable articles as ivory and gold, but also of slaves, which were taken, the Czech missionary Remedius Prutky reports, to the Yemeni port of Mukha.



Yemeni commerce with Massawa continued into later times. The British nobleman, Lord Valentia, reported, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, that Mukha was in “regular contact” with both Massawa, and Suakin. The Yemeni port supplied both ports with “India goods of every quality from fine muslins to kincaubs of coarse cotton cloth”. Much of this trade was then in the hands of eighteen Banyan, or Indian, merchants, who appear to have had financial support from the British East India Company at Mukha.

The walled city of Harar in the mid-nineteenth century as seen from the Kofe stream.
An engraving published by sir Richard Burton in his First Footsteps in East Africa



The Afar Area

Yemeni influence was later also felt in the Afar area of north-eastern Ethiopia. The outbreak of inter-clan fighting in the area, towards the end of the eighteenth century, was followed by the involvement of some four hundred Yemeni troops, according to some accounts from Aden. They are reported to have enjoyed an almost complete monopoly of fire-power.



Zayla' and Tajurah

Trade between Yemen and the Horn of African ports of Zayla’ (the governor of which was for a time appointed by the sherif of Muhka; Tajurah, a little to the north; and Berbera, as well as between them and the Ethiopian interior, also continued largely unabated.



Zayla’, according to the early nineteenth century Saint Simonian travellers Combes and Tamisier, and others, was a major centre of trade. The port handled much of the import-export business of the great Shawan market of Aleyu Amba, and was visited by trading vessels sailing to Aden and Mukha. Commercial items seen at Zayla’, the Protestant missionaries Isenberg and Krapf report, thus included cloth and rice, from India, besides coffee from the Muslim walled city of Harar. The French envoy Rocher d’Hericourt also told of exports of gums, skins, and durrah.



Tajurah occupied a similar commercial position, with trade contacts between both the Horn of Africa and Yemen and western Arabia. Many small boats, according to to the French traveller Rochet d’Hericourt, were then making their way between Mocha and Tajurah.



Berbera fair

Berbera, site of a great annual market, supplied Mukha, according to the British aristocrat Lord Valentia, with “very considerable” quantities of gum Arabic, myrrh, and frankincense. Many of these articles were transported, by Somali sailors, who took them in their dhows either to Mukha or Aden. “From the fair of Berbera”, Valentia adds, “Arabia draws her supplies of ghee [i.e. clarified butter], and a great number of slaves, camels, horses, mules, and asses”. The port, in return, obtained large quantities of “India goods”, which, he believed, yielded the traders a much greater profit.



The arrival at Berbera of the “small craft” from Yemen was shortly afterwards described by the British navigator Cruttenden. Yemeni traders, “anxious to have an opportunity of purchasing before the vessels from the Gulf could arrive”, he says, “hastened across, followed a fortnight to three weeks later by their larger brethren from Muscat, Soor and Ras el Khyma”. The “principal traders” visiting Berbera were, we are told, Indian Banyans residing at Aden, and, to a lesser extent, Arabs. The former were so important economically that Indian rupees, circulating at Aden, gained some currency also at Berbera.



The above Gulf of Aden ports, which served much of southern Ethiopia, were in commercial contact, according to Rochet d’Héricourt, with much of Arabia. They thus supplied Al-Hudaydah and Mukha with slaves, and durrah, and received in exchange blue cloth and silks, old copper and zinc, knives, razors and scissors, rice, dates, coffee, and Mukha tobacco.



Population Movement

This trade, and particularly that in slaves, resulted in a significant movement of population across the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. There were regular sailings between Mukha and Massawa, and Zayla' and Tajurah, as well as much coming and going with at the time of its great seasonal market. Foreign travellers of this time report the arrival of Arabs and Aden-based merchants, as we have seen, at all the principal Gulf of Aden ports of Africa, and the existence of an Arab blacksmith at Tajurah. Mention is likewise made of the presence of Somalis at Aden, and both Somalis and Afars at Mukha. Observers also tell of “large numbers” of Abyssinian slaves, including "Gallas", i.e. what we now know as Oromos, at Mukha and throughout Yemen. Many of them, it is said, were exported via Massawa and Zayla'.



Aden in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century With the mid-nineteenth century modernisation of transport and communications, symbolised by the advent of the steamer and the telegraph, Yemeni-Zayla' trade, by then largely based on Aden, took on a more developed form. The Austrian ethnographer Philipp Paulitschke reported, in 1885, that the trade of Zayla’, like that of other ports on the Gulf of Aden coast of Africa, was “completely dependent” on Aden, which he described in a curious metaphor as the “commercial Mecca of North East Africa”. Four Aden firms, two of them European, handled most of the Zayla’ exports. The ivory trade was mainly controlled by Menahim Messa, a Jewish concern better known as Benin [a quarter of the town, dear reader, still bears this name]. The coffee business was dominated by the Italian firm of Bienfeld; and that of hides and skins, by another Italian firm, Gentili. The export of slaves, on the other hand, was primarily in the hands of the local Zayla’ sultan, Mohomed Abu Bakr.



Harar - and Addis Ababa

Merchants from Aden, for the most part Europeans, at this time also made their appearance at Harar. They included the Italian firm of Bienfeld, the richest of the lot, represented by Signor Felter; Tian, a Marseilles firm, represented by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud; the American firm of A.B. Stern, represented by two Greeks, Paleologue and Manoli; the German firm of Max Klein, represented by an Italian, Signor Rosa; and the afore-mentioned Jewish firm of Menahim Messa, also known as Benin.



With the founding of Addis Ababa, in the late nineteenth century, several Aden-based firms made their appearance in the Ethiopian capital. The most important of them included that of Menahim Messa, or Benin, which specialised in the export of ivory and skins, and the import of textiles; and the German concern of Meyer and Katz.



The development of Addis Ababa was also accompanied by the coming of a sizable number of Yemeni, as well as Indian, carpenters and other craftsmen from Aden. The British traveller A.B. Wylde, who saw them at work on Emperor Menilek’s palace in 1897, observed, “These men had all come from Aden and were getting much higher wages then they could procure there”.



Yemeni Migration

Trade across the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, over the centuries, resulted in the coming to the Ethiopian interior, as well as to the coast, of numerous Yemeni merchants, caravaneers, and others. Carrying out their trade largely anonymously, and merging easily with the local population, they attracted little attention from foreign travellers, who seldom mention them in their writings. The influence of Yemeni immigrants, and that of other Arabs is, however, apparent from the extent of Arabic loan-words, many of them for trade, in Amharic, Tegregna, and other Ethiopian languages.



Estimates of the size of the Yemeni presence, prior to the twentieth century, are, however, lacking. Some measure of the extent of immigration from Yemen can, however, be gaged from two statements by early twentieth century authors. The first, by the Georgian pharmacist Dr. Merab, gave the number of Arabs in the capital around 1910, at 227. The second, by the Greek writer Adrien Zervos, estimated that Yemeni colonists settled in the whole of Ethiopia in 1935 amounted to between 600 and 700, or, as he elsewhere wrote, “over 700”. They were, he said, mainly camel drivers, petty retail traders, and caravaneers. The Yemenis, like the Indians, Armenians and Greeks, thus constituted one of the country’s largest foreign communities.



This brings us almost to the end of the present series of Essays.

Next Week: Some Yemeni Conclusions, followed by a New Study: "The Mysterious Story of Prince Alamayahu of Ethiopia, Captain Speedy, and Mr. Rassam".