The third article focuses on the place Rimbaud chose to return to three times—Harar, a city that resists easy description: ancient, dignified, and for centuries encircled and isolated. A place with no hospital, where being wounded meant real danger

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BIENNALE DI SENIGALLIA

“ARTHUR RIMBAUD AND PHOTOGRAPHY”
III. Following Rimbaud in Harar. “Ogaden”, a film by Jean-Hugues Berrou

On the evening of the conference, following some music at the Rotonda, Jean-Hugues Berrou presented two documentary films he created about Arthur Rimbaud. The first was Praline® :

“In 2006, the city of Charleville-Mézières invited me to spend four months living in the Rimbaud family home, so I could make a documentary about Arthur Rimbaud. They had set up an artist’s residence there—a lovely studio, with a kitchenette and a mezzanine bed. I didn’t try to track down his poetry in the city, or to understand why he left so often.

Wherever he was—Charleville or elsewhere—Rimbaud is never really there, and certainly not in the bed prepared for him.” (Jean-Hugues Berrou)

In fact, Rimbaud is still receiving hundreds of letters even in the 21st century. The letterbox is in the cemetery.

“What I did observe, though, was that over the years Charleville has made peace with the poet who once cursed his hometown. Today, Rimbaud is commemorated there, cast in bronze, molded in chocolate, even turned into a terrine. In the capital of the Ardennes, there exists a Rimbaud for everyone, an everyday Rimbaud, a Rimbaud for general consumption.

That’s what drew me in: how his hometown reinvents him, how everyone constructs their own Rimbaud, their own poetic double. That’s when I began filming Praline®—with a registered trademark, like “Rimbaud Registered.”Praline, as in the chocolates with his likeness you can find at a chocolatier near Place Ducale…” (Jean-Hugues Berrou)

“Next film Ogaden focuses on the character of the caretaker of the Charleville Cemetery, this time treated through fiction. Tired of the barroom conversations where Rimbaud is mocked, he decides to travel to Ethiopia to bring the poet’s ashes there.

At the beginning of the film, the Frenchman has arrived in Harar. He is searching for a route that Arthur Rimbaud often traveled—a path rather than a road—that led coffee caravans all the way to Zeilah, on the Somaliland coast, with the help of his guide, Anouar. From Zeilah, dhows regularly shuttle across the Red Sea to Aden.

This journey echoes the final months of Rimbaud’s life. In April 1891, Rimbaud finally decided to leave his shop in Harar to seek medical help in Aden for his diseased leg. Unable to walk, he had a stretcher made and hired sixteen porters, then embarked on this twelve-day trek across the Ogaden desert. From Aden, he would continue to Europe, where his leg was amputated in Marseille. After a brief time in Roche, he returned to Marseille, where he died on November 10, 1891.” (Jean-Hugues Berrou)

The filmmaker leans on the poet’s own notes from his tough crossing of the Ogaden desert. Along the way, he gives us a glimpse of those sunburned, stubborn landscapes—places with more sand than shade, and where few of us will ever set foot.

Harar was born from the spread of the sultanates, rising on the far edge of the Red Sea as a major spiritual and commercial capital.

From the 16th century onwards, it became a fortress besieged—hemmed in by nomads and semi-nomads from the Ogaden on one side and Oromia on the other. No traveler dared venture west.

All caravans, instead, were forced to cross the desert landscapes eastward to reach the ports on the Red Sea, just as viewers find themselves making that journey alongside Berrou’s film.

Between 1529 and 1543, the Ethiopian–Adal War tore apart the region. On one side, the Christian Ethiopian Empire—eventually reinforced by four hundred Portuguese musketeers. On the other, the Muslim Adal Sultanate, fielding Harla/Harari, Somali, Afar, Arab, and Turkish forces.

The aftermath brought Ottoman ambitions and, as Mohammed Hassen argues, left both powers so weakened that the Oromo advanced—pushing east to the walls of Harar.

For the Harari, the war was catastrophic: their population shrank under unrelenting attack, remembered in chronicles as an age of blockades, shortages, and famine.

By the 17th century, Harar’s sultans clung to survival within their stone walls, trading and negotiating with surrounding Oromo chiefs. Independence survived—at a cost. Devastating raids, shifting alliances, and constant hunger shaped a city that, despite everything, endured as the capital of a shrinking emirate—a fortress adrift, world reduced to its walls, but its spirit unbroken.

Harar owed much of its survival—despite siege, blockade, and isolation—to a treasure rooted in its soil: coffee.

And coffee brought Rimbaud to Harar.

HARAR COLOR COFFEE

The forests and uplands surrounding the city harbored wild coffee plants, gradually domesticated and carefully tended by local hands. By the 16th century, Harar had emerged as a vital marketplace, drawing Oromo, Somali, and other communities. Coffee became central—not just to trade, but to daily life and ritual.

Local growers developed unique practices, often cultivating coffee on small, shaded plots interwoven with food crops, rather than in vast monocultures. The drink itself became essential to social and religious life, reinforcing the care and continuity of these cherished coffee groves across generations.

Harar’s merchants linked the highlands to Red Sea ports at Zeila and Berbera. “Harar coffee”—famed for its distinctive flavors—moved along caravan routes into the wider Islamic world and the Arabian Peninsula.

Knowing its value, Harar’s rulers strictly regulated coffee trade, striving to protect both the crop and its marketing—safeguarding, in lean years and times of siege, not just an economy but a culture and the city’s ongoing resilience.

Francesco C. Marmocchi, “La Nubia e L’Abissinia,” 1858

This map, titled “La Nubia e L’Abissinia,” created by Francesco C. Marmocchi in 1858, is a striking example of the era’s simplified cartography—much of the region is simply marked as “Terra Incognita.”

It reminds us how little was truly known, or mapped, in European circles about the inner landscapes of the Horn of Africa at mid-century.

But there is an exception, even if it has received almost no attention from historians, geographers, or other researchers. A map prepared by a German atlas printing house in 1849 can be found at the National Library of Estonia.

Friedrich Handtke (1815-1879), North-East Africa, 1849, showing Harrar, Aden and Zeila

Measuring 39 by 66 centimeters and based on 1840s Prussian and Austro-Hungarian diplomatic sources, it was published by Carl Flemming (1806–1878) with the assistance of cartographer Friedrich Handtke (1815–1879).
Notably, the southernmost part of the map is simply left blank, identified only by a few generic labels.

The map is accessible online, courtesy of the National Library of Estonia.

The Biennale exhibition included a modest reference to Rimbaud’s years in Harar, pointing quietly to the presence of Ethiopian Christian culture during his stay—a time when this heritage was beginning to take hold in a city long defined by its Muslim past.

One item: an early engraving of the Ark of the Covenant, which for Ethiopians remains important and has also entered popular imagination with films like “Indiana Jones.”

Next to it: a processional key, a liturgical object associated with the church of Maryam Tsion in Aksum, considered the resting place of the Ark according to Ethiopian tradition.

The key bears the name “Maryam Aksum,” written in the local script.

When Rimbaud accepted this job in Harar—to negotiate coffee purchases directly with local producers on behalf of a Marseilles trading house—the geography and history of the region were still largely unknown in Europe. The Great Rift would only be described and analyzed some years later; the region would be photographed and mapped, but not yet. Rimbaud thus found himself, quite naturally, in the unlikely position of being the first—geographer, ethnographer, poet, and sometimes even photographer—to observe and describe the lands around Harar, on the edge of Oromia and the Ogaden…

To be continued tomorrow with an article devoted to the photographs taken by Rimbaud himself, including this view of Harar’s central market.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). Market Place Harar, (circa May) 1883. Albumen print, 180×130 mm, Bibliothèque de Charleville-Mézières