IN HARAR

12 Jan. 2020

In Harar, I hired a guide named Girma, who was loitering on the street outside my guesthouse. We walked through the main square and into Harar Jugol, the walled old city. As we reached the gate, Girma recited a few facts that I’d read in my guidebook: Harar Jugol contains 82 mosques (and two churches) within about one-fifth of a square mile. That’s the highest concentration of mosques in the world, all squeezed into an area roughly the size of the Vatican, or one-and-a-half of San Francisco’s Chinatowns. Most of these mosques are very small, and not very evident from the outside. We passed one immediately upon entering, a few men in white clustered inside a doorway, a small minaret sticking out from the roof.

The narrow street wound downhill past small shops and produce vendors, with even narrower alleyways branching out on either side. Girma clearly was a local fixure: Every few hundred feet he stopped to warmly shake someone’s hand or exchange a few words with them. I suppose Harar’s diminutive size breeds familiarity. The streets were relatively quiet because today was Christmas; even in this predominantly Islamic part of Ethiopia, the museums were closed, many shops were shuttered. I didn’t particularly mind the relative calm. Girma and I walked the tightly packed streets, the sun beating down hard on my neck. He took me around to the major sights: Ras Makonnen House, built by the father of emperor Haile Selassie; the Arthur Rimbaud building, inaccurately claimed to be the residence of the eccentric French poet who lived in Harar for two years; and a local Harari residence, where I stood uncomfortably in the ornate atrium, feeling voyeuristic as an elderly lady gurgled and pulled on pants underneath her bright pink robes.

Having exhausted the major sights inside the walls, we walked along their perimeter, catching a tuuk-tuuk for the last leg. We wound through a scene of modernity encroaching on the old city: Boys played on two foosball tables set up in the shade of one of the main gates, and a veritable canyon of garbage jiggled on either side of us as our tuuk-tuuk lurched along one section of road. Plastic on plastic on plastic: A dense, filthy underlayer of shopping bags and other detritus, and a heavy sprinkling of water bottles on top. Harar has problems with drought and is frequently without water, which I discovered when I turned on the tap in my guesthouse bathroom and wasn’t greeted by even a trickle. A few of those bottles might have been mine.

Back inside the new city, Girma and I sat in the cool dark of a hotel lobby with tea and soda. I needed a respite from the incessant dry heat. I pressed Girma for a bit of his story; he told me that he had been a soldier in the Air Force during the war with Eritrea, 30 years ago now. He had watched his friends die and taken part in the grenade-heavy skirmishes that evidently marked the conflict. After the war’s end, he had found himself with an Eritrean wife, but no pension or veteran’s benefits. He lived with his grandmother now; I did a double-take at that, because he told me that he himself was 53 years old. For the umpteenth time this trip so far I had to think back on Paul Theroux’s writing–this time his assertion that two western generations pass in the same span as three African ones.

We left the hotel and walked through a second-hand clothing market, where merchants sat amid large piles of variously tattered clothing. Finding any specific item would clearly involve diving into a mass of fabric as large as any Salvation Army inventory. As we walked back onto the main square, I spotted a light-skinned family sitting on the steps of a bank. The father wore a baseball cap and jeans, the mother a headscarf, two children in sun hats between their legs. I might have taken them for tourists, except for the fact that each parent held a sign in Amharic printed on computer paper. I asked Girma who they were. “Syrians,” he said, glancing at them. It occurred to me then that on my first day in Addis, out to lunch with Jim and Sylvia and their Ethiopian friend, a Syrian man had walked into the restaurant, similarly holding a sign in Amharic. A guest at another table had given him a bit of money, and he had left. Sylvia said that they were a common sight around town, and evoked considerable sympathy in both her and in the Ethiopians.

Girma and I parted ways for a few hours after that, which allowed me time to investigate Harar’s local obsession. I’m talking about khat, a leaf that grows throughout the Horn of Africa and is the drug of choice among locals. Walking through Harar, I saw khat everywhere. Women sat on blankets near the main square, selling bushels of it, the cobblestones around them littered with khat detritus. Men sat inside shop doorways and along sidewalks, cradling large transparent plastic bags full of khat branches, picking off the leaves and stuffing them into their lips. Girls walked down the street with these bags swinging from their hands, presumably on an errand for their fathers or husbands. Once chewed, the khat became a deep green paste, which coated men’s gums and stuck vividly in their beards.

I stopped at the khat market by the main square and bought a bushel of my own. The smallest amount I could reasonably purchase was much more than I wanted, but I acquiesced and strolled around the old town with my plastic bag. Seeing a faranji chewing the leaf amused the locals. A few bystanders showed me how to pick the small, bud-like leaves from the branch and stick them into one side of my mouth, sucking the juice without swallowing the solid pulp.

I had assumed that khat was a stimulant on par with tobacco leaves, but after I’d left Harar, I learned that the US embassy considers it a narcotic and forbids its employees from consuming it. Evidently, the drug’s heavy use among Harar’s male population impedes the effectiveness of social programs in the region. The men become vegetables in the afternoon, prime khat chewing time. In hindsight, there was a druggy, addictive aura about the khat users, the way their fingers dug through their plastic bags and mechanically inserted the green fragments into their mouths. I recalled my visit to northeastern India five years ago, where I observed the men sitting uselessly inside sweltering hovels smoking opium while the women toiled outside. At any rate, 20 minutes of chewing left me with nothing but an earthy bitterness on my tongue, and I happily disposed of my bag.

Leaves still stuck between my teeth, I walked back to my guesthouse to rejoin Girma. We were heading to Harar’s nightly attraction, and the primary reason it has piqued so many tourists’ interest (including mine). Every night, a specially designated Harari, known colloquially as the Hyena Man, sits outside the city gates and feeds a pack of hyenas from his hand. The tradition goes back several decades and has a murky origin story; I heard something to the effect that the Hararis began to leave offerings of porridge to the hyenas to dissuade them from feeding on young children. This practical measure evolved into a ceremonial gesture with camel meat, and finally into an internationally-known curiosity and magnet for tourists’ cameras.

When our tuuk-tuuk clattered to a stop on the cobblestones outside the city gates, Girma and I disembarked to find that we were the first spectators to arrive. It was past 6:30 and already mostly dark. The Hyena Man was sitting on a log next to a blanket, on which sat a large pile of camel meat–surely several animals’ worth. I had expected him to be a wizened, turbaned old man, but in fact the Hyena Man wore Nike sweatpants and a jacket, and was perhaps a couple years younger than me. I sat next to him on his log. His name was Abbas, and he had been at his post for a few years now, taking the reins from his father, who had carried out the duty for 48 years. Altogether, Abbas was a fourth-generation Hyena Man. There were no hyenas in sight now, although a cat was scrabbling over the pile of bones.

As it became fully dark, Abbas began to whistle and shout the hyenas’ names–“Gergera! Atele! Chola!” Nothing happened. A few more spectators arrived. Girma paced around restlessly, already getting cold in spite of his long sleeves. After fifteen minutes of this, Abbas took a small cardboard box and walked 30 feet out to a rocky embankment above the surrounding bush. The rest of us followed him, standing in a line and watching expectantly. He continued his whistling and shouting, pulled a cube of meat out of the box and dangled it on a stick in front of him like a marshmallow.

Tourists began to arrive in quantity at this point, each accompanied by an Ethiopian guide; a group of Mexicans came to stand next to me, and a fussy European man with a big camera jostled for a prime position at the front. There were at least 20 of us now. Abbas’s meat had attracted at least one customer: We heard barking, and a dog trotted into view with its nose to the ground, then trotted away again. Over the next fifteen minutes, the dog barked several times, and each time Girma’s ears perked up: “Hyena is coming!” he whispered. He was clearly getting impatient this was taking so long. He had already slipped Abbas the requisite 150 birr fee for me to watch the spectacle and was ready for the pay-off. The dog padded into view a few times, a murky shape in the darkness, too small to be a hyena. A floodlight was flipped on to illimunate the would-be feeding scene. Just the good boy still, nose to the ground. I began to wonder if Abbas lacked his father’s touch.

Then, though, a different kind of shape rippled through the blackness and towards the perimeter of the light. There were two of them, backs arched high,  silhouettes much larger than the dog’s. Everyone’s camera fingers twitched.

My first impression of hyenas was that they are scary-looking animals. They have both canine and feline characteristics, leopard spots and long necks, needle-sharp teeth. These two slunk low to the ground, circling Abbas’s position, where he sat at ease. He flung cubes of meat at them off of his stick, which they scarfed up, continuing to circle. The dog reappeared, holding its own as it jostled with the hyenas for the scraps. After a few minutes, the hyenas receded again into the darkness.

I thought that might be it. But everyone remained there, watching Abbas silently. He shouted the hyenas’ names, whistled, threw meat scraps. And all at once there were ten of them, materializing out of the darkness directly to our left and our right, and prowling over the far side of the hill. The nearest ranks of spectators backed away.

That’s when I learned what my 150 birr had bought me. Girma shoved me forward, towards Abbas, and I stumbled the next ten feet to where he sat. The nearest hyena shrank away from me, as though I were the one with the larger teeth. Abbas skewered a scrap of meat onto his stick and handed it to me. Tentatively I offered it to the hyena in front of us; the stick was only about 10 inches long. The animal neatly gobbled it up, displaying better manners than some domesticated animals I’ve known. For the final act of my show, Abbas directed me to put one end of the stick in my mouth and offer the other end to the hyena. There was a small yank, and then I was relievedly walking back to my spot in the audience. With that, the games were in session and tourists poured forward for their turn. The Mexican guy next to me insisted on going twice because his friends hadn’t photograped him the first time.

In terms of thrilling up-close encounters with large wildlife, Harar’s hyena feeding clearly ranks near posing with a drowsy tiger in Chiang Mai, albeit with more cultural integrity and less controversy. But I felt that fatigue that comes with standing in a firing squad of cameras. I was happy to pay Girma and bid him adieu, having recently grown tired of his needling me for ever more money. Back at my guesthouse, I was treated to a fully authentic Ethiopian experience: At the atrium bar, a dozen Ethiopian college students sat around two tables crowded with beer bottles and packs of cigarettes. They waved me over and I joined them for a beer, attempting to hold four conversations at once with partners who spoke English at varyingly unintelligible levels. They were studying tourism, accounting, engineering; were Jewish, Orthodox, atheist; wanted to sell me tours, Somali contraband, prostitutes. Their common denominator appeared to be childhood friendship and the holiday. Christmas, I was reminded multiple times, was a day to spend in drinking and revelry with friends. 

As the first bars of a song were breaking out, one of the guys across from me smashed his bottle on the ground, and a scuffle broke out between him and the guesthouse staff, his friends struggling to restrain him. I retreated to my room, content that I had a bus ticket out the following morning, one thought in the front of my mind: That’s enough Ethiopia for today.