Coffee-House Guilt

Cape Tow last weekend was having a coffee festival thing (actually I’m not sure what that entails but, as coffee lover—more like coffee addict—I kind of liked the idea). I also heard it reported on South Africa’s Catholic national paper, The Southern Cross, that in Pusan, South Korea, some nuns have opened a coffee-book shop where people have an opportunity to discuss their faith in a relaxed atmosphere. If only we were so lucky here in Cape Town too.

The first thing that attracts you about Cape Town intercity, despite narrow streets and blasting underground clubs, is the airy cafe of round tables on pavements of people chattering in tell-tale vivacity, consciously dedicated to relaxed pleasure. They give a cultivated image of French characteristic enlightenment. I’m personally partial, too partial actually, to a good cup of coffee.

My favourite living philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, has lot to say about coffee and what it has done for Western civilisation. Coffee is one of those commodities, unlike sugar, not too associated with guilt ridden (slavery) foundations of Western civilisation. The history of coffee in recent years is wonderfully written by Markman Ellis in his competent book The Coffee-House: A Cultural History.

Most people wrongly attribute the discovery of coffee to the natural philosopher, Leonhard Rauwolf, when he first certifiably noticed it Aleppo in 1573. Yet, Ellis tells us, coffee was known for a very long time in the highland regions of Ethiopia before it was even discovered by the Turks who in turn introduced it to the Europeans. So coffee, like Cola, is an African thing even if the Europeans popularised and refined its usage.

Ellis tells us that the coffee-house throughout history has been a socialising idea, especially for gossip and debate. More than any commodity in the world it rewrote the experience of metropolitan life. The earliest users of coffee discovered that it induces mental alertness that delays sleep. It was even charged with qualities of comforting the head and heart, and good for digestion.

The shy and retiring librarian of Christ Church college Oxford, Robert Burton in his seminal treatise, The Anatomy of Melancholy of 1632, recommended coffee as a cordial for ‘mending the Temperament . . . to expell feare [sic] and sorrow, and to exhilarate the mind.’ He thought coffee had a potential for curing melancholy.

To early merchants coffee-houses were a nuisance that encouraged idleness. The businessmen associated them with ‘skiving and absenteeism’. To the puritan coffee-houses encouraged ‘licentiousness and superstition’. Men then in general did not think highly of the morals of women who frequented coffee-houses. To men of science the coffee-house was place for universal circulation of intelligence where latest developments and quack remedies were discussed.

To autocrats the coffee-house encouraged political dissent, rebellious attitudes and seditious intent. To the republicans coffee-houses were a home of spirit of faction, popular dissatisfactions and debate where to stoke fires of controversy. To the man of law they ‘harboured rogues and criminals’. To spies coffee-houses were a place to collect intelligence, suppress revolutionary notions and gauge public opinion.

For the man on the make, like Pepys, the coffee-house was a network of potential patrons and possibility of aggrandizing oneself to a better government position. And for the ordinary man a relaxing opportunity for speaking freely in an atmosphere where the fiction of hierarchy was cancelled; where one could put oneself on route to enlightenment, and live for a moment life under the rule of reason. To professional newsmongers, hack writers, sycophantic back-slappers, streetwise fops, and purveyors of gossip, rumour, innuendo, and scandal, coffee-houses were a heaven.
The coffee-house was where you could sway government or business personnel by flattery, insinuation or bribery. Where even the political emasculated could go to listen to the latest scandals. Where the stream of opinion, often undifferentiated, could easily be caught, and moral emptiness of the city closely observed.

The reporters of the first London daily newspaper, The Daily Courant, frequented the coffee-shop. So as you can see the coffee-shop has actually been active in breaking the bonds of feudal society; and for encouraging the culture of human improvement, even if it tended to be more of a mixed home of high culture and vulgar entertainment.

The murmur of coffee-houses, with the background of sipping and smell of ground coffee is something a free spirit can never fail to appreciate. From what I’ve read, it looks like the initial atmosphere of coffee-houses was more like our present alcohol bars today; with squabbles often degenerating into fist fighting. There were no polite limits as can be appreciated in most coffee-houses of our present day.

The coffee-house habituates to the customs and manners of its times, but its main popularity come in the rote of free communication and camaraderie. I guess you could say the coffee-house was the internet of those times. Is it any wonder in the present day you can go on-line in most coffee-houses. Artists, writers, aesthetes, decadents and the rest of fainéant purposeless men that beautify the experiences of our lives throughout history have been closely associated with coffee-house.

Cape Town is fast becoming Africa’s fairyland, with its nascent notions of egalitarianism and liberty to be filthy rich (Joburg has become too vulgar, flashy and fake with its roll calling imitative innovation and competition that’s corrupted by too much American pretensions). Still in Cape Town there’s still much that is foreign to the native eye, especially the opposing signs of magnificence and poverty.

Something still tugs at my mooring as I see too many people not having enough to buy basic needs while I sit seeping lattés I don’t really need. I know I cannot make the world right over night, but I just can’t stop thinking about story the young girl and the star fishes at the beach. Throwing one star fish back into the ocean sure makes a lot of difference. But there’s just so many of them. Perhaps if we each at least pick one star fish and throw back to the ocean before we seat and laugh, talking about the colour of Paris Hilton’s dress, we would get somewhere.

Well, the sea is sucking at the pebble beach, whiskers of mist rise in the clean shaven air. I order an extra shot of espresso to ease my itch and pull my hat about my ears. Twilight is deepening as the sun bleeds away in fiery strips of clouds.