Bunna without Borders: Coffee/Making as a Relational Space

Abstract

In Habesha homes, coffee — bunna — making is a form of domestic grounding, performed by women in three daily ceremonies. Through the political changes in the mid 1990’s which dislocated both Habesha women and Johannesburg urban functions from their origins, such coffee ceremonies have come to take place in Johannesburg’s modernist spaces. This paper traces a design probe, bunna bet Jeppe, by an Ethiopian coffee making woman, TG, and a South African architect, myself, in and beyond this context. In this probe, the relation forming power of the coffee ceremony and its ritual forms of clearing a quiet space, energising and circulating substances are proposed as designerly forms.

In this retelling I consider our roles as they intersect in the development of the probe over time, drawing out our alternately overlapping and divergent ways of using the coffee-ceremony place as a strategic project in the face of gendered spaces. Through the project, and in parallel ways, both TG and myself have aligned our points of insertion into men's worlds of trader associations and modernist buildings to realise our personal intentions to make another form of space, one that enfolds critical aesthetic and economic dimensions.

The relations that this project entails are interpersonal as well as those formed with space and materials. The consequent nature of the bunna bet is the coffee “set” as a kit and a stage for urban communication. But while developing an autonomous bunna bet that can exist outside of its critical and gendered role in relation to man made urban worlds, we retain our interest in the project’s transformative potentials. Arguably, it is its relational strength that still holds its promise.

Keywords:

• migrant space
• Habesha
• relational aesthetics
• Johannesburg
• design probe

Acknowledgements

This project would not have materialized without Tigris Lemma’s generosity, friendship and excellent coffee.

Notes

1 English equivalents for some common Amharic words used in Johannesburg restaurants are Buna or bunna ቡና (coffee and coffee beans), Habesha ሐበሻይት (a collective term for Abyssinian people, Injeera እንጀራ (flat bread for eating with sauces, meat and vegetables) and Jebena ጀበና (a clay pot for brewing and serving coffee).

2 David Palmer, “The Ethiopian Buna (Coffee) Ceremony: Exploring the Impact of Exile and the Construction of Identity through Narratives with Ethiopian Forced Migrants in the United Kingdom,” Folklore 121, no. 3 (2010): 321–333.

3 The location of the Habesha in Jeppe was determined by immigrants in the late 1990s who found work as street traders in competition with long-established South African Indian-owned shops. Their street-hawking activities led them to read the city’s flows at pavement level, and strategically to locate their stalls close to public transport hubs, later moving into vacant buildings; Tanya Zack, “Seeking Logic in the Chaos Precinct – the Spatial and Property Dynamics of Trading Space in ‘Jeppe,’” in Rogue Urbanisms, ed. Edgar Pieterse (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2013), 283–292; Naomi Roux and Hannah le Roux, “Majesty Wholesale: The Biography of a Building,” in Afropolis: City, Media, Art, ed. Larissa Förster, Kerstin Pinther and Christian Hanussek (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2012), 312–313.

4 Alan Morris, Bleakness and Light: Inner City Transition in Hillbrow, Johannesburg (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1999).

5 At the time of writing, a new, but not unprecedented, wave of attacks on Africans from other nations has taken place in Johannesburg and Pretoria. For media descriptions, see, for example, https://mg.co.za/article/2017-02-27-shops-owned-by-foreign-nationals-looted-in-jeppestown and https://mg.co.za/report/xenophobia-1

6 Oren Yichtafel, “Theoretical Notes on ‘Gray Cities’: The Coming of Urban Apartheid?,” Planning Theory 8, no. 1 (2009): 87–99.

7 Hannah le Roux, “Upat/Fisher Offices,” Digest of South African Architecture (2006/07): 166–171.

8 Hannah le Roux, Brendan Hart and Yasmin Mayat, “Aiton Court: Relocating Conservation between Poverty and Modernist Idealism,” docomomo journal 1, no. 48 (2013): 56–61

9 Viviana d’Auria and Hannah le Roux, “When Life Takes Over. Interplays of Inhabitation and Utopia,” CLARA 11 (2016): 13–33; Abdou-Maliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

10 This process is elaborated in Hannah le Roux, “Lived Modernism: When Architecture Transforms” (Ph.D. dissertation, KU Leuven, 2014)

11 I use the term “set” in its double meaning, as in a coffee set, a kit for making coffee, as well as in the stage set, where the elements are considered as a backdrop for a choreographed performance.

12 This references shifts in gendered conditions around domesticity during modernism discussed by Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar, eds., Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture (London: Routledge, 2005).

13 For instance, see the definitions of the cultural probe, design probe and critical design suggested by Anthony Dunne, ed., Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); and Alex Seago and Anthony Dunne, “New Methodologies in Art and Design Research: The Object as Discourse,” Design Issues 15, no. 2 (1999): 11–17.

14 Some relevant terms for reading the Bunna Bet as an aesthetic project are codified by Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: du réel, 2002), 111–113: “Form: Structural unity imitating a world. Artistic practice involves creating a form capable of ‘lasting,’ bringing heterogeneous units together on a coherent level, in order to create a relationship to the world. […] Relational (aesthetics): Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which represent, produce or prompt. (See: co-existence criterion). […] Relational (art): A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”

15 The first two artists participated in the second Johannesburg Biennale in 1999, curated by Okwui Enwezor to highlight migrancy and exchange. I was a participant and contributor to the catalogue “Contingency Plans,” in Trade Routes: History and Geography. Catalogue of the Biennale of Johannesburg, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Johannesburg: AICA, 1999). Their practices are vivid references for me, just as the transforming Johannesburg was for them

16 The appearances of this project to date are BunnaBet Goethe on Main, 2012; BunnaBet Brussels, 2014; and BunnaBet Satyagraha, 2016.