‘One day at school I was eating a piece of meat,’ Nyali said. ‘A hawk came down and took it, and did this’ — took part of his thumb, the scar furrow still obvious twenty-five years later.
From a high place in town, a cobblestone lane, Nyali pointed east, saying, ‘That is Somalia — those hills’ — brown hills on the horizon — ‘that road is the way to Hargeissa. Somalis bring salt here.’
The salt caravans that Burton mentioned, that were as old as this town, 1000 years of caravans from the coast. ‘They trade the salt for qât and bring it back to Somalia.’
But there were other trade goods — Indians had come selling cloth, and guns had always been in demand, and these days, drugs, and elephant tusks. Harar was still one of the centers of the illegal ivory trade in Ethiopia.
The markets had a medieval look, filled with tribal people from the countryside — the Oromo, the Harari who were also called the Adere, the Galla, each identifiable from the color of their robes, or their coiffure, or the styles of their jewelry. Mostly women, lovely women — Burton had remarked on their beauty; Rimbaud’s common law wife had been from the Argoba tribe nearby — they thronged the market square, with donkeys and goats and children. The stalls covered with tents and awnings were piled with spices and beans, the coffee husks that were steeped to make the strong brew I had tasted in the Sudan, and piles of salt, stacks of tomatoes and peppers, pumpkins and melons, beautiful leather-covered baskets unique to Harar, and tables of assorted beads. The most common spice was fenugreek (abish in Amharic, hulbut in Harari) which was an ingredient in Harari dishes. There were bunches of qât, and also big enamel basins of tobacco flakes.
‘Tumbaco, we call it,’ Nyali said. ‘Or timbo.’
Bundles of firewood sold for the Ethiopian equivalent of a dollar, which seemed expensive, given the fact that the bundles were not large and a bundle probably would not last more than a few days. Camel meat was also high priced, at over a dollar a pound, but to sweeten the deal the butchers hacked a few fist-sized pieces from the hump and threw that into the bundle. The camel’s hump is pure fat, as smooth and white as cheese.
‘Muslims eat camel, we eat goat,’ Nyali said.
Near a mosque called Sheik Abbas, Nyali took me to a passageway so narrow that two people could not pass each other in it without squeezing together. Because of this it was known as Reconciliation Alley (Magera Wageri).
‘God sends people here who are quarrelling — and they meet and when they try to pass, they reconcile.’
It was a nice story, but the narrow alleys and passageways beside the ancient stone and stucco houses ran with waste-water, another medieval aspect of the city — open drains, where garbage, mud and shit mingled and you had to tread carefully. Burton mentions this too: ‘The streets are narrow lanes … strewed with gigantic rubbish heaps, upon which repose packs of mangy or one-eyed dogs.’ Europeans are shocked, but Europe was once exactly like this.
Nyali said, ‘When it rains, this will go.’
‘When will it rain here?’
‘Maybe in May.’
Today was the fourth of March.
The following morning at six I was woken by the noise of sandals slapping and scuffing the road, the sound of tramping feet, and I looked out the window and saw thousands of people hurrying down the road. They were the faithful coming from the stadium, where they had assembled for prayers to mark the end of the Hajj period. This festival perhaps explained why the Hararis had been so irritable, for I knew from experience that observances that required extensive fasting and prayers seemed to make the believers peevish.
‘Today we eat!’ was a greeting in Harar to signify the feast day. The townspeople were in a good mood, the men in clean robes, the women in beautiful gowns and shawls, dressed up in their finery, wearing bangles and earrings. Some were from the distant countryside and had come to Harar, riding for two or three hours to be here among the celebrants, promenading and gaping, shy girls in groups and loud boasting boys. Everyone was eating or else carrying food — boys hurrying with tin trays of sticky buns, or grapes, or melons or tureens of meat stew.
Food everywhere. I was reminded of the feast in Flaubert’s Salammbô, a novel I had read on the Nile, Antelopes with their horns, peacocks with their feathers, whole sheep cooked in sweet wine, haunches of she-camels and buffaloes, hedgehogs in garum, fried grasshoppers and preserved dormice … great lumps of fat floated in saffron.’
Knowing the Koran was on their side, and taking advantage of the good feeling on the feast day, the beggars were also in their element, beseeching and nagging and demanding. They were old and young, blind, crippled, limbless women and children, war-wounded, fingerless lepers, screeching for alms like a procession of tax collectors making their way through the narrow passageways of the town exacting a duty from everyone they met. I started to count them but when I got to a hundred I gave up.
There were many lepers gathered outside the east gate of the walled town. It was the Erar Gate — the various names that Burton scrupulously noted for the five gates are still in use. Just beyond the gate was a leper settlement called Gende Feron — Feron Village — after the French doctor who organized it and tended to the sick in the 1940s — though it had obviously been established as a district for outcasts for much longer, and possibly since ancient times, since it lay outside the walls.
About 1000 people lived in the leper village, mostly the old and the afflicted. In Africa, the superstitions applied to lepers — sufferers of Hansen’s disease — have kept such people out of the mainstream of society. The disease is not very infectious, easily treatable and quite curable, and yet in Ethiopia, for example, there was more talk of leprosy than of AIDS — and Ethiopia had perhaps the second or third highest HIV numbers in Africa, at 8 percent (South Africa had 10 percent) with a quarter of a million AIDS-related deaths in the year 2000. Yet while there were many prostitutes within the walls of Harar no one ventured into the leper village by the East Gate.
The clusters of mud huts or shacks in the leper village were made of scrap wood, with goats tethered nearby and women cooking over smoky fires. But one part of the place was new — recent, anyway, even if it did look rundown. A German aid agency had built a series of duplexes, two-story condos with balconies and stairs — the only stairs of that sort I had seen in the whole of Harar. Most of these dwellings looked empty, some looked ill-used or vandalized. I asked about them — their newness, their neglect.
‘The people here hate them,’ a man told me. ‘At first they would not live in them.’
‘But they’re new, and they’re stronger than mud huts,’ I said, baiting him, for I could see they were unsuitable.
‘They are too tall. There is no space. They cannot bring their donkeys and goats inside.’
‘Why would they want to do that?’
‘To protect them from the hyenas.’
The conceit among donors is that the poor or the sick or the hungry will take anything they are given. But even the poor can be particular, and the sick have priorities, and the famine victim has a traditional diet. The Germans had built houses that did not resemble any others in Harar, that did not allow for the safety of the animals, and had the wrong proportions. So they were rejected by the lepers, who chose to live more securely, with greater privacy and — as they must have seen it — more dignity in their old mud huts by the road. The German buildings — expensive and new but badly maintained and ill-used — were the only real slum in Harar.