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Updated: May 3, 2025
Goat's flesh is good, and the black-faced Berberah sheep, after the rains, is, here as elsewhere, delicious. The staff of life is holcus.
The people grow sweet potatoes, manioc out of which tapioca is made beans, and the holcus. Not one chicken could be purchased for love or money, and, besides grain, only a lean, scraggy specimen of a goat, a long time ago imported form Uvinza, was procurable. October the 25th will be remembered by me as a day of great troubles; in fact, a series of troubles began from this date.
Of the men few perform any ablutions, but all use the tooth stick before sitting down to eat. After the meal some squat in the sun, others transact business, and drive their cattle to the bush till 11 A.M., the dinner hour. There is no variety in the repasts, which are always flesh and holcus: these people despise fowls, and consider vegetables food for cattle.
The Amir, it seems, had four principal wives, and an army of 200 men armed chiefly with daggers. Burton describes the streets of Harar as dirty narrow lanes heaped with garbage, and the houses as situated at the bottom of courtyards, closed by gates of holcus stalks. The town was proud of its learning and sanctity, and venerated the memory of several very holy and verminous saints.
The servants and the wretched mules were duly provided for, and I fell asleep, conscious of having performed a feat which, like a certain ride to York, will live in local annals for many and many a year. Bread made of holcus grain dried and broken into bits; it is thrown into broth or hot water, and thus readily supplies the traveller with a wholesome panade.
The drama is likewise applied on these occasions to keep order among the spectators, by imitating the sound of certain Mandingo sentences. A root yielding a grateful bitter was used in lieu of hops, the name of which I have forgotten; but the corn which yields the wort is the holcus spicatus of botanists.
They drink large quantities of boyaloa or o-alo, the buza of the Arabs, which, being made of the grain called holcus sorghum or "durasaifi", in a minute state of subdivision, is very nutritious, and gives that plumpness of form which is considered beautiful. They dislike being seen at their potations by persons of the opposite sex.
Rice is grown everywhere; sweet potatoes, yams, muhogo, holcus sorghum, maize, or Indian corn, sesame, millet, field-peas, or vetches, called choroko, are cheap, and always procurable. Around their tembes the Arabs cultivate a little wheat for their own purposes, and have planted orange, lemon, papaw, and mangoes, which thrive here fairly well.
Yellow crops of holcus rewarded the peasant's toil: in some places the long stems tied in bunches below the ears as piled muskets, stood ready for the reaper; in others, the barer ground showed that the task was done.
The general food is mutton: a large sheep costs one dollar, a small one half the price; camels' meat, beef, and in winter kid, abound. Fish is rare, and fowls are not commonly eaten. Holcus, when dear, sells at forty pounds per dollar, at seventy pounds when cheap. It is usually levigated with slab and roller, and made into sour cakes.
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