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Harar, ancient city in southern Ethiopia

Harar, in Rimbaud’s time, or shortly thereafter
Photographs of the ancient city in southern Ethiopia

Rimbaud arrived in Harar for the first time in December 1880, after a journey
from Aden to Zeila, followed by a twenty-day horseback caravan through the Somali Desert. At that time, the city was an ancient Muslim emirate under Egyptian control, with a population consisting of Harari, Oromo, Somalis, Arabs, Indians, and a few passing Europeans. For centuries, Harar had functioned as a trading post: here, coffee, hides, ivory, incense, gold, civet musk, gum, and even slaves were traded, in a border zone between the Ethiopian and Arab worlds.

Rimbaud did not arrive in Harar as a poet, but as an employee of Bardey & Cie, a Marseilles coffee house operating out of Aden. Bardey quickly grasped what many Arab merchants had long understood and carefully concealed: the great trick of the coffee trade was to market it as Yemeni “Arabica,” while some of the finest beans were in fact grown far beyond Yemen, among the Al-Topians beyond the Somali deserts, on the other side of the Red Sea, in the highlands around Harar.

It is here that a quiet revolution is taking place: for the first time, some Europeans are seeking out coffee at its Ethiopian source, along trails almost entirely closed until then to Western travelers.

Lake Haroma, Rift Valley, along the traditional caravan route between Dire Dawa and Harar

Bardey proposes to the reckless Rimbaud that he become his representative in Harar.

Rimbaud accepts, likely with the enthusiasm of a novice merchant
but also with that old dream of a young poet: to be the first to see—and
to show—what others do not yet know. In his letters, he describes caravans,
markets, and negotiations, but he also comes up with the idea of taking photographs.

Some areas around Harar are too dangerous for him to reach
in person, with his blue eyes too conspicuous; so he sends his Greek partner
from Alexandria, Apostolos (known as Chryseos), as a field operator.

You can imagine Rimbaud, severely weakened, traveling this same route, carried by 12 porters who took turns trying to get him to a hospital

Today we know of only a small collection of seven photographs related to Rimbaud and Chryseos, which have come down to us through two shipments: one to the family, one to Bardey.

The images of Harar and its region from those years remain extremely rare: a few ethnographic documents, a few travelers’ views, and then a vast void. It is within this void that the small album recently rediscovered in Austria reappears: modest in size, surprising in the state of preservation of the prints.

Its photographs, taken a few years after Rimbaud’s departure—wounded,
on the very trail we see here—extend and almost verify his accounts.

Traditional village near Harar

With their compositions, their human figures, and their landscapes of paths and walls, they sometimes seem to illustrate in retrospect what he had attempted to capture firsthand.

It is worth publishing them here precisely for this reason: not to add another chapter to the legend, but to invite the reader to contribute, image by image, to completing Rimbaud’s iconography of Harar.

The walls of Harar, built between the 13th and 16th centuries under Emir Nur ibn Mujahid to defend the city from Oromo attacks, continued to fulfill their protective function even in Rimbaud’s time and beyond. The city was besieged repeatedly throughout the 19th century—sources mention a dozen serious attacks, sometimes full-scale sieges lasting several days—a sign that security issues remained ever-present.

The five historic gates (Shoa Gate, Buda Gate, Erer Gate, Sanga Gate, Fallana Gate) regulated access to the city’s five districts and were closed every evening.

To understand this human and geographical landscape, we now have access to various sources: Rimbaud’s own *Letters from Aden and Harar*, the book *Rimbaud au Harar (2002) by Jean-Hugues Berrou and Alain Borer, featuring period and contemporary photographs, and above all the documentary film by Jean-Hugues Berrou, who physically followed the trail from Harar to Zeila across the Ogaden Desert. This film, presented at the 2025 Senigallia Biennale, conveys with precision—and effort —the distance, the days of walking, the weight of loneliness and risk that Rimbaud experienced firsthand.

Looking at these photographs, what immediately strikes one is the function of the marketplace: Harar is neither an industrial nor an administrative city; it is first and foremost a point of exchange between worlds. An incredibly lively market and, at the same time, visibly poor.

There are no monumental caravanserails, no permanent stone shops, no
carts, few horses or mules. Everything happens on foot. It is the farmers from the surrounding highlands who bring their produce—including, perhaps, the sacks of coffee that can be glimpsed piled here and there—along rugged paths to the gates of the walled city.

The few permanent merchants, many of whom are Arab or Indian, store their supplies of coffee, hides, ivory, and gum behind the city walls, waiting to arrange transport to the coast. Caravans departing from Harar for the ports of the Red Sea (Zeila, later Djibouti) take between 12 and 20 days, depending on the season and the condition of the trails.

Along the way, the caravans are attacked—usually between three and five
times—by Oromo, Afar, or Somali raiders, who seek to seize the cargo
without engaging in direct combat with armed groups.

You can’t see all of this in the photographs, of course. But you can try to
guess it: from the faces of the vendors and passersby, from the dust on the roads, from the absence of major infrastructure, from the constant presence of walls in the background.

One detail stands out in particular: the role of the female porters. In the streets of Harar, as in many rural areas of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, it is the women who carry most of the goods on their heads: baskets, water jugs, fabrics, sacks of wheat or coffee.

They move with natural grace through the narrow alleys, carrying loads
that often exceed twenty or thirty kilos.

In the photos, the women are everywhere once you start looking: striding through the dust, loitering at the edge of the square, waiting for the next load to heave onto their backs. Quietly, they keep the whole operation running. They are the ones who haul the goods in from the villages, up to the city gates and, more often than not, straight through the walls and into the merchants’ storerooms—while the men argue about prices in the shade.

These images reveal a fragile yet courageous world of commerce, where
every transaction is also a small act of trust in a precarious balance between
risk and profit, between armed nomads and settled merchants, between Christianity and Islam, between the plateau and the desert. We conclude this tour with some details about the author of these photos, a person close to the first British consul in Harar, perhaps his wife.

A detailed account of British diplomatic buildings reports that, at the beginning of the 20th century, the British vice-consul in Harar acquired a large house located just outside the city. The building, constructed over twenty years earlier and belonging to Ras Makonnen—father of Haile Selassie—was surrounded by about three acres of land and was already in rather poor condition. In the absence of alternatives, this residence was used as a consular headquarters for several decades.

Harar lies on the edge of Ethiopia’s eastern highlands, overlooking the Great
Rift Valley, about 500 kilometers east of Addis Ababa. In 1912, the British vice-consul occupied this house, described at the time as modest and
dilapidated, while the city was often described by European travelers as
extremely crowded and unsanitary.

Aware of the building’s condition, the vice-consul insisted on the
construction of a new consular residence. In 1914, a plot of land was therefore purchased for 80 pounds with the intention of erecting a new building. However, the Abyssinian authorities blocked the transaction because the site was too close to one of their defensive positions. The purchase was canceled and the money returned in 1916.

A second attempt was made in 1920, when a plot of land just over eight acres, divided into two adjacent lots and later known as the Jinela site, was purchased for 250 pounds. This project, too, did not lead to the
construction of a new consular headquarters, and the consulate therefore remained in the old house of Ras Makonnen, whose lease was renewed for another twenty years.

The Jinela property was then transferred in 1923 to the government of Somaliland for 160 pounds, a transfer completed in 1925. In 1935, the site reverted to the Public Works Department, and the sum was reimbursed. During the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1935–1941), the area was used as a camp by two Italian battalions.

A 1935 newspaper article still describes the British consulate as “a
large old building outside the city, with extensive grounds surrounded by a stone wall,” guarded by Somali soldiers in British service.

Source: https://roomfordiplomacy.com/harar-mega/

PARTITA DOPPIA is a small hand‑made seasonal journal of art, photography and architecture. The first issue includes a tribute to André Jammes and essays on William Kentridge, the Baselitz collection in Budapest, early photographic erotica, frontier photography in Senigallia, archival church account books and the first photographs of Greenland. The second this article about Harar.

It also opens a series of investigative photo stories, written almost like detective inquiries. The firsts two of these appear as a feuilleton in those issues, and future numbers will continue this line of research and narration.

This magazine is also available as editable text. For automatic translations, you can: copy the text and paste it into DeepL; use the DeepL browser extension to translate the PDF online; or view the digital version on our website: partitadoppia.org.

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La Fotografia è la più bella delle collezioni …

Senigallia, città della fotografia, ospitera nuovi spazi dedicato alla ricerca e promozione della fotografia.

Atelier 41 si trova 41 via fratelli Bandiera.

Senigallia diventerà la Città delle collezioni.

Any question : fotografia

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