https://arab.news/y63bs
Mocha is an ancient and historic Yemeni city located on Yemen’s western coast along the Red Sea. Administratively, it belongs to Taiz Governorate, while geographically and culturally it forms part of the Tihama region — the coastal strip stretching along the Red Sea from southwestern Saudi Arabia to the western shores of Yemen.
Geography has endowed Mocha with an exceptional location. It lies close to the Bab Al-Mandab Strait, one of the world’s most important maritime passages, and faces, across the African shore, the Horn of Africa — Djibouti in particular. From this strategic position, Mocha served for centuries as a maritime gateway linking Yemen with the Hijaz, Egypt, East Africa and India, and later with Europe and the wider world.
The Red Sea and Bab Al-Mandab were never merely geographical barriers separating Mocha from Djibouti. Rather, they were bridges of human, commercial and cultural interaction. Sailors, merchants and families moved across these waters, creating deep social and human bonds between the people of Yemen — including the inhabitants of Mocha — and the people of Djibouti and the Horn of Africa. To this day, the collective memory of the region retains abundant evidence of this human interconnection, which predates modern political borders by centuries.
Mocha reached the height of its prosperity during the 17th and 18th centuries, when it became one of the most renowned ports for exporting Yemeni coffee grown in the country’s highlands. European merchants came to know the coffee shipped from its port as “Mocha coffee” or “cafe Moka.”
From there, the word mocha/moka entered languages around the world and became associated with coffee. Its meaning later evolved to refer to beverages combining coffee and chocolate. Thus, the name of Mocha remains present every day in cafes across the globe — a reminder of an era when this Yemeni city was a center of international trade and a gateway through which an authentic Yemeni product reached every corner of the world.
The painful irony, however, is that a city with such a remarkable heritage and strategic location did not receive, over recent decades, the development and attention it deserved. Its economic importance declined, while its considerable maritime, tourism and commercial potential remained largely untapped and far below what its history and location would warrant. In this respect, Mocha shares the fate of many parts of Yemen that have long suffered from inadequate development and the accumulation of successive crises.
Mocha served for centuries as a maritime gateway linking Yemen with the Hijaz, Egypt, East Africa and India.
Dya-Eddine Said Bamakhrama
Today, Mocha’s strategic location has once again placed it at the heart of events — but not in the way its people would have wished. Instead of its position on the Red Sea and near Bab Al-Mandab becoming a source of prosperity, development and trade, the city and its surrounding areas have become part of an arena of conflict.
Mocha does not need more guns. It needs ports, trade, investment, schools, hospitals and job opportunities. It needs to reclaim its natural role as a link between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa and between the two shores of the Red Sea. Bab Al-Mandab, too, should return to what it has historically been: a passage for communication and shared interests, rather than an arena for conflict.
Mocha does not need more guns. It needs ports, trade, investment, schools, hospitals and job opportunities.
Dya-Eddine Said Bamakhrama
What applies to Mocha applies, on a broader and even more painful scale, to ancient Yemen itself — a country endowed with a history, civilization, strategic location and human potential that should enable it to rank among the most prosperous nations of the region, yet one that has been drained for far too long by conflicts and divisions.
A city that gave its name to the coffee enjoyed by the world, and whose port once connected East and West, deserves to reclaim its rightful place as a city of life, trade and peace — not as yet another battlefield in a conflict from which no one will emerge a winner.
- Dya-Eddine Said Bamakhrama is Ambassador of the Republic of Djibouti and Dean of the Diplomatic Corps in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. X: @dya_bamakhrama