Chat and Peanuts
We are in a bustling, beehive of a market in Harar, the famous walled city in the east of Ethiopia. The scene is something out of a film. There are thousands of people engaged in activity. Some are playing the Ethiopian sport of buying and selling, a constant string of words, blinks, sighs, and laughs coming and going in uncrackable code.
Others are leading oxen, sheep, cows, donkeys, or goats down the dirt and muddy roads. Some are working on their wares, cleaning vegetables, filling crude plastic jars with petrol, or holding out boards of broken sandals.
No matter what they are doing, the locals are fascinated by us, the only white faces in the crowd. Each person offers a smile and some form of greeting. This greeting can be anything from a nod and a handshake to “Hi, faranjo” to “What you need, faranjo?” to “Faranjo, gimme money,” to the more succinct “Gimme.”
Along with this is an endless string of offers to guide or transport. Everyone knows something about the city that another doesn’t and he’ll offer it to us at a reasonable price. Everyone else has a taxicab or a tuktuk, another guy knows a great place for a goat tibs.
When offered anything, we point to our guide, Gumru, who is procuring us a local delicacy. We say that we have a guide, but they continue until Gumru shouts them off or gives them a hug. Their persistence is exhausting.
After negotiations, Gumru hands me a bushel of short branches with several leaves on each. Instantly, the people stop offering us things in order to giddily enjoy this fact. They point and laugh. We are holding chat.
Chat, pronounced ket or chet, is a leafy plant which contains a monoamine alkaloid called cathinone, an amphetamine-like stimulant, which is said to cause excitement and euphoria. It has been chewed by Ethiopian men (and various other cultures) as part of a social custom for thousands of years.
So, we just bought drugs.
The chat salesman comes around and pats me on the back. “You will be very…energy!”
“Thank you.”
“You need peanuts.”
“Um.”
Gumru talks to him in Amharic and leads us through the market. As he does, Gumru becomes more than our chat dealer and more of our chat guru. He demonstrates how to choose appropriate leaves to chew (moist and green), and suggests that we always chew the tip of the plant (that’s where the best juice is). He tells us we should expect to get talkative, friendly, excitable, focused, euphoric, and maybe sexually aroused.
At “sexually aroused” Mark and I cast a disconcerted look at each other, but refocus on Gumru as he goes on to explain the side effects of chat. These include stomachache, a bitter taste in the mouth, constipation, and, just to cover both unpleasant bases, diarrhea. We stop in front of a stall overflowing with tiny pink bags of peanuts. Gumru buys one for us.
“You need this.”
“Peanuts?”
“Good for your stomach.”
“OK.”
“Good luck and have fun. Don’t forget, we go to see hyenas at 8 tonight.”
We head off to the hotel to sit on the porch, drink water, eat peanuts, and ingest a drug that is completely new to us. We are both a little worried and I can’t stop thinking about freshman year in college.
I was a freshman in university when I tried marijuana for the first time and this event seems to mirror that one to some degree. I had nervous energy, it was something I wanted to try, and yet something totally new to me. Marijuana was a thing that had well-known effects: giddiness, euphoria, curious insight, hunger. Still, it was new and unsure, I had no idea what was going to happen. Thus it was an exciting and frightening event.
And so, as we step back to the hotel through a throng of active Ethiopians mixing basic English with advanced Amharic, I can only imagine myself sitting behind Forbes Field center field wall in Oakland, puffing off of a wooden pipe and then spending the rest of the night saying, “I don’t feel anything” while fingering my numb jaw and wondering why I was unable to stop laughing or salivating over the thought of a cheeseburger.
Markus Cinereus chewing chat leaves
We position two chairs on the upstairs porch which overlooks the main road, sit down, and start. Mark jumps right in, chewing off the leaves with a serene expression that recalls a koala with his eucalyptus. I examine the leaves, choose the greener and moister of the bunch, and munch away in the relative calm of the porch.
Chat tastes how you might expect a branch of green leaves you found in the woods to taste: bitter, uninspired, lacking anything that resembles pleasure or deliciousness. For this reason, we enjoy our chat with the occasional handful of peanuts and swig of water. Our porch is visible to the road below and so our experimentation is a public event, a thing in which passersby clearly take enormous glee. They point at the chat and laugh, and even come visit to ask if we want to go sit in their house while they make tea for us (for a reasonable price).
After fifteen minutes or so, there is a slight change in the mood. We talk with a little more enthusiasm, laugh slightly harder, become more focused on the surrounding trees and houses. I am visited with a fleeting vision of me running through the city hugging people and flirting with goats in what will become my uncontrolled sexually aroused state.
This makes me nervous, but I keep chewing. This trip is about doing adventurous things, and this experience falls right into that category. Not all adventure means archaeology and dangerous hikes. There is adventure in food and drink, and local narcotics.
Still, I am torn between wanting this to be a transcendent experience and a mild coffee-like buzz. We are trying something completely new, and part of me wants to get a great story out of it and the other part of me wants to get out of it without kissing a goat.
Chat has been hyped up in a way that marijuana was when I was younger. The people of Harar have given advice, laughed at us knowingly, winked, warned, and poked fun. There have been dozens of opinions on chat, and suggestions that we were about to embark on a wonderful, excitable journey.
Meh.
Unlike marijuana, at least for us, chat does not live up to its hype. We soon become two men chewing on leaves and drinking water. Then we become two men eating peanuts and rubbing sore jaws. There were moments of excitable chatting (pun. ha), and detailed studies of leaves and mud-thatched roofs, but ultimately it doesn’t do much for us.
We leave our chat porch in search of food and another bottle of water, deciding that even though this was a bust, at least we didn’t violate any goats. Moreover, there is still so much adventure yet to have. There are hyenas, churches, stelae, the rest of the country.
After all, we are still in Harar, the famous walled city in the east of Ethiopia.
