ABSTRACT: Harari songs, called gey faqär (“the songs of the city”), are significant cultural artifacts presently performed mostly at weddings. They include themes of religion, patriotism, friendship, love, and marriage. They reflect a shared literary and musical heritage, with the ability for poetic creation and melodic variation. Their documentation and analysis require an interdisciplinary approach involving linguistics, philology, literature, anthropology, and musicology. This cannot be separated from positive community relationships and cooperative interactions with researchers.
Due to the pioneering efforts of Enrico Cerulli, Marcel Cohen, and especially Wolf Leslau, Harari is today a fairly well-documented language. It is spoken only in the city of Harar, approximately 350 miles east of Addis Ababa. The Oromos call the language Adäre, or Adär in Amharic morphology, while natives of Harar call it their language city.
Based upon family manuscripts and oral traditions, this study highlights some aspects of the trade activities between
Harar and Shâwa at the end of the 19th century, mainly the goods involved (slaves, salt…) and the route.
The importance of Harar as a centre of trade has already been signalled (see Richard Pankhurst 1985), a fact supported by the large numbers of coins, both minted in the city and from elsewhere recovered in Harar.
Has a long history in the area, and that for much of that history it has been closely associated with religion. The inhabitants of Harar, an old Muslim city and major center of qat cultivation in the eastern highlands of Ethiopia, ...
The survival of the city-state of Harar remains one of the 'mysteries of history of the region'.1 Harar, once a pivotal point for political dominance of the Horn of Africa, collapsed like a house of cards after the defeat of Gragn in the sixteenth century.2 But it survived as a trading and religious centre up to the region's incorporation into the Ethiopian empire in 1887. Immediately after the wars of Ahmad Gragn,
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