The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions on foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do.

Before embarking on this project, I was a casual coffee drinker and a great skeptic of specialty coffee. I thought it was too expensive, and that anyone who cared so much about how coffee was brewed, or where it came from, or waited in line for certain coffees made certain ways, was pretentious and a fool. But visiting coffee farms and farmers around the world, from Costa Rica to Ethiopia, has educated me. Mokhtar educated me. We visited his family in California’s Central Valley, and we picked coffee cherries in Santa Barbara—at North America’s only coffee farm.

But his story is an old-fashioned one. It’s chiefly about the American Dream, which is very much alive and very much under threat. His story is also about coffee, and about how he tried to improve coffee production in Yemen, where coffee cultivation was first undertaken five hundred years ago. It’s also about the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, a valley of desperation in a city of towering wealth, about the families that live there and struggle to live there safely and with dignity. It’s about the strange preponderance of Yemenis in the liquor-store trade of California, and the unexpected history of Yemenis in the Central Valley. And how their work in California echoes their long history of farming in Yemen.

And how direct trade can change the lives of farmers, giving them agency and standing. And about how Americans like Mokhtar Alkhanshali—U.S. citizens who maintain strong ties to the countries of their ancestors and who, through entrepreneurial zeal and dogged labor, create indispensable bridges between the developed and developing worlds, between nations that produce and those that consume. And how these bridgemakers exquisitely and bravely embody this nation’s reason for being, a place of radical opportunity and ceaseless welcome. And how when we forget that this is central to all that is best about this country, we forget ourselves—a blended people united not by stasis and cowardice and fear, but by irrational exuberance, by global enterprise on a human scale, by the inherent rightness of pressing forward, always forward, driven by courage unfettered and unyielding.

Mokhtar felt for him. James, a retired white man in his sixties, was a decent man, and the encounters were awkward for him, too. If he assumed Mokhtar wanted better things than working the desk and the door, that would be diminishing his current job, which for all he knew was, for Mokhtar, a personal pinnacle. On the other hand, if he assumed this was Mokhtar’s personal pinnacle, that brought with it a more troubling set of assumptions.

just as the city designated Fisherman’s Wharf as a quarantine for tourists, they’d designated the Tenderloin’s thirty-one blocks as the city’s go-zone for crack, meth, prostitution, petty crime and public defecation.

Treasure Island itself was bizarre, an inexplicable man-made mass of contradictions. The navy built it in 1936, sinking 287,000 tons of rock and 50,000 cubic yards of topsoil into San Francisco Bay, just off of a natural island called Yerba Buena and between San Francisco and the East Bay. The island, a military base through World War II, wasn’t called Treasure Island then. The name came afterward, when it was decommissioned and the powers that be, hoping to convert it to commercial use, named it after a book about murderous pirates.

When Mokhtar made a mistake, Hamood was angry only if Mokhtar made an excuse. “Own the error and correct it,” he said. Hamood had a thousand proverbs and maxims. His favorite was Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart. He used that one a lot. “What does that mean?” Mokhtar asked. “It means that money is ephemeral, moving from person to person,” Hamood said. “It’s a tool. Don’t let it get into your heart or your soul.”

By eighteen, he knew these people, who had gone to college and could live wherever they wanted, had nothing he didn’t have. They weren’t any smarter, this was clear. They weren’t quicker. They weren’t even more ruthless. If anything, they were softer. But they had advantages. Or they had expectations. Or assumptions. It was assumed they’d go to college. It was assumed they’d find jobs befitting their upbringing and education. There were no such assumptions in Mokhtar’s world. In high school there had been the odd teacher who mentioned college to him, saying he could do it, he had the mind, but there wasn’t much college talk at home. There was no precedent and there was no money.

There were two kinds of coffee, robusta and arabica, but it was arabica that was considered far superior in taste, and it was called arabica because it was born in Arabia, specifically in what the Romans had called Arabia Felix—“Happy Arabia.” This was Yemen. According to legend, it was in Mokha, a port city on the Yemeni coast, that the bean was first brewed.

it was Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, a Sufi holy man living in Mokha, who first brewed the bean into a semblance of what we now recognize as coffee—then known as qahwa. He and his fellow Sufi monks used the beverage in their ceremonies celebrating God, which lasted long into the night. The coffee helped bring them to a kind of religious ecstasy, and because the Sufis were travelers, they brought coffee to all corners of North Africa and the Middle East. The Turks turned qahwa into kahve, which became, in other languages, coffee. Al-Shadhili became known as the Monk of Mokha, and Mokha became the primary point of departure for all the coffee grown in Yemen and destined for faraway markets.

So in 1616, a Dutchman named Pieter van den Broecke, who had visited Mokha while working for the Dutch East India Company, successfully stole seedlings from Mokha and secreted them to Holland, where they were installed at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam. The seedlings took root in the garden, but the Dutch climate wasn’t right for large-scale cultivation of the plant. It wasn’t until 1658 that coffee was brought to the Dutch colony of Ceylon and later to Java, also a Dutch territory, where it thrived. Java soon became the primary supplier of coffee to Europe, and Mokha’s primacy waned.

These plants became the foundation of the Brazilian coffee industry, which by 1840 accounted for 40 percent of the world’s production. One of Brazil’s largest markets was the burgeoning colonies of North America. The Dutch had introduced coffee there in the 1600s, and it was reasonably popular, always sharing primacy with tea. But as tensions grew between the colonists and the British Crown, and as taxes on tea grew ever more onerous, the colonists began to see tea as emblematic of the British yoke. On December 16, 1773, hundreds of colonists, most of them dressed as Native Americans, met four ships of the British East India Company in Boston Harbor, and they dumped all the tea on board the ships into the sea. Tea drinking in the United States was never the same. Coffee became the stimulant of choice for the new nation, bought primarily from the Dutch—thus the moniker “java.” Its popularity grew in spurts until the twentieth century, when mass production, better storage and packing techniques—Hills Bros. being instrumental in much of this—and demand wrought by World War I and World War II all conspired to make the United States the world’s leading coffee consumer. By the twenty-first century, Americans were consuming 25 percent of the world’s coffee, and by 2014 coffee was one of the most valuable agricultural products in the world, a seventy-billion-dollar business, with the cherries grown in Colombia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kenya, Uganda, Guatemala, Mexico, Hawaii, Jamaica a...

He made it to the Polish troops and delivered the message. The Poles came to the aid of Vienna, and together they drove back the Ottoman siege. In their retreat, the Turks left much of what they’d brought with them, including twenty-five thousand tents, five thousand camels, ten thousand oxen and five hundred bags of small, hard green beans. The Poles assumed the beans were camel feed, but Kolshitsky knew better. These were coffee beans; in the Arab world he’d seen them roasted and brewed. As a reward for his heroism, he was allowed to keep the beans, and with them he opened the first coffeehouse in central Europe, calling it The Blue Bottle.

Any given cup of coffee, then, might have been touched by twenty hands, from farm to cup, yet these cups only cost two or three dollars. Even a four-dollar cup was miraculous, given how many people were involved, and how much individual human attention and expertise was lavished on the beans dissolved in that four-dollar cup. So much human attention and expertise, in fact, that even at four dollars a cup, chances were some person—or many people, or hundreds of people—along the line were being taken, underpaid, exploited.

Coffee’s second wave was a reaction to the downward spiral of coffee prices and quality. In the 1960s, Alfred Peet opened a small coffee roastery and coffee shop in Berkeley, California, where he refocused attention on where the beans had come from and how they were best roasted. A cup of coffee at Peet’s was more expensive than at the diner down the street, but it was far superior.

Willem was not impressed. He liked to repeat an expression coined by George Howell, a well-known coffee roaster. “Coffee from assholes, for assholes,” he said.

They were a far-flung group, and much was riding on their success. There were two students from Mexico who ran Buna Café Rico in Mexico City. They seemed to be the most experienced and most confident.

A few days later Mokhtar was standing outside Royal Grounds Coffee, a major regional roaster and importer based in Northern California,