By his own testimony, Richard Burton was the first European to visit Harar. I think it’s unlikely that no one whom we might call “European” by modern standards had visited Harar prior to 1850, but it’s at least possible that Burton was the first such a one in a while. Abutting (and later, some decades after Burton’s visit, incorporated into) the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, Harar’s Islamic religious identity had long connected it to a Red Sea trading network of which it was the privileged inland entrepot. Islamic traders in Africa were generally chary of European competition, especially as (during the 19th century and earlier) this had tended to draw European military intervention in its train. Actually, Burton’s own expedition had only become possible thanks to the recent British conquest of Harar’s seaboard trading partners in Somalia and Yemen – this notionally in the service of the India trade, but producing a colony that was to last until after World War II.
Burton approached Harar via Zeyla, a port with a millennium-long history of its own that was situated on the North coast of Somalia within the ambit of the British maritime empire there. This was a much-traveled route, and Burton would have had an easy time of it if he had made more local contacts or acquired in advance any familiarity with the complex linguistic landscape of Eastern Ethiopia. The are dozens of languages spoken there, belonging to three or four different language families, present a challenge to travellers and nation-states but a rich field of research for linguists. Within this field, Harari is something of an oddity – both for socio-linguistic reasons and otherwise. The language is strongly identified with the city of Harar itself and its inhabitants; these used to consider their knowledge of Harari an aspect of their identity that separated them from the surrounding countryfolk who came to the city to trade.
This state of affairs held in the 1950’s, when the Polish-American Linguist Wolf Leslau was gathering the data that would inform his ethnographic volume on Harar. Now, most Harari-speakers are bilingual in Amharic. This development is probably in consequence of the fact that government business at Harar has for some time been conducted in Amharic, by Christian Ethiopians born well away from the city; they have always formed the interface between Harar and the nation, even though Harari is also one of Ethiopia’s national languages.
Leslau’s informants describe a society in the midst of epochal changes. The nation enforces its laws, so young men no longer fight one another with sticks as they did in earlier decades. The linguistic and ethnic diversity of the community grows, though the landowners still have local genealogies that run back generations (A local saying: “Somalis are distinguished by good manners, Amhara by craft skill; the Harari is distinguished by his noble genealogy.”) Even these are still dealing with the destruction wrought by the Italian colonists who occupied Harar between 1937 and 1941.
Harar becomes globalized in these ways and others. For instance (even though Leslau’s informants report that the younger generation is less pious than their elders), the tunsus or pre-wedding party that had been so characteristic of social life in Harar at earlier periods has now ceased to be celebrated on account of religious rigorism. Harari Islam, an idiosyncratic brew like many “local Islams” before the 20th century, is being found wanting by comparison with the absolutisms of a world religion.
The tunsus had been not only a ritual but also a literary occasion, one at which teenage men would sing the praises of a girl who had seated herself on a kind of a throne (the amir nadaba, one of the permanently-placed chairs characteristic of Harari homes.) From Leslau’s informants’ reports, laced with fragments of poetry obviously known by heart, you can tell that the Harar they knew had a song culture that thrived orally – but not only orally. One of them also mentions a written collection of songs, listed among the monuments of Harari literature alongside several works translated from Arabic. To the best of my knowledge, this collection of songs has never been translated out of Harari (or perhaps even published at all.) Has the manuscript been lost? Or has it survived, a fragment of Harar that remains invisible to imperial eyes?