Walking back through the city I looked at the house Haile Selassie lived in when he had been governor. It was an old Indian trader’s villa, once elegant, now very beat-up, and occupied by a traditional healer, Sheik Haji Bushma. He was sitting cross-legged on a carpet, in a haze of incense fumes, chewing qât. His mouth was stuffed with a green wad of it and his lips and tongue were slick with a greenish scum.
‘I cure asthma, cancer, leprosy — with the help of God and some medicine,’ he said.
I talked to him a little and he gave me some qât leaves — the first I had chewed. The leaves had a sharp tang which when I got a cud of them going also dulled my taste buds. Burton said that it had the ‘singular properties of enlivening the imagination, clearing the ideas, cheering the heart, diminishing sleep, and taking the place of food.’
It also killed conversation. After Sheik Haji Bushma told me his line of work he just sat and chewed like a ruminant, smiling at me occasionally and poking more qât leaves into his mouth from the bunch he held in his hand.
One of his serving boys gave me another bunch and I went on chewing and swallowing. I had to chew for about ten or fifteen minutes before I got a buzz. This I felt was an accomplishment — try anything twice, was my motto — but before I could get comfortable, the doorway darkened and I realized that Sheik Bushma was in the process of receiving a patient. I gave him some baksheesh and left.
The next day I paid a visit to the convent school to see Sister Alexandra, with some other nuns and a Red Cross worker, Christine Escurriola. Sister Alexandra had made spaghetti sauce with fresh tomatoes from her garden, and grilled fish and salad.
‘This is to give you a variation from the injera at the Ras Hotel,’ Sister Alexandra said.
Christine’s job was to drive to the various prisons in the province visiting prisoners to make sure they were not being tortured or mistreated. Many were political prisoners.
‘For some, there is no reason to be in prison at all — maybe they have an enemy in the police,’ Christine said. ‘For others it’s a bad joke. Some get six years because they gave a glass of water to the wrong soldier.’
As for culture shock, she said she had not gotten it here, though she got it badly when she went home to Switzerland and people talked about electric dishwashers and children’s shoes.
‘And here people have nothing,’ Sister Alexandra said.
Christine had served as a Red Cross staffer in Colombia, India, Yugoslavia and Kuwait, and ‘I would like to go to Iraq for my next assignment.’ Christine was cheerful about the difficulties. Sometimes in Harar there was no electricity or water. Often in the countryside where they visited prisons the hotels were dismal and there was no water and only one bed and the three Red Cross women slept together in it.
‘I am trying to picture it,’ I said. But I saw the picture vividly.
‘If one person is clean and the others are dirty, it’s a problem,’ Christine said. ‘But when we’re all dirty, it’s fine. If no one has washed we all smell the same.’
Even though I knew that these women were agents of virtue, Red Cross workers concerned with human rights in remote Ethiopian prisons, Christine’s revelation filled my susceptible brain with the delightful image of three untidy girls, the Three Graces, tousled and playful, with sticky fingers and smudged faces, snuggling in an Ethiopian bed, the powerfully erotic tableau of disheveled nymphs at nightfall.
‘It is very bad to be out at night,’ she said. There were thieves and bandits at night in Harar.
And,’ Sister Alexandra said, filling my plate with another helping of spaghetti, ‘of course the hyenas.’
Everyone mentioned the hyenas in Harar. Burton anatomized them in First Footsteps. ‘This animal … prowls about the camps all night, dogs travellers and devours anything he can find, at times pulling down children and camels, and when violently pressed by hunger, men.’ People still talked about them for the sense of color and danger they gave to the town. In an era of vanishing wildlife, the African hyena flourishes as a successful hunter and member of a pack. They were unusual in Harar in possessing no fear of humans — indeed, after dark they tended to skulk behind people walking in the walled town.
Around the time I was in Harar I heard that a small boy dawdling behind his father in the town one night was pounced upon and killed by hyenas. The boy died the next day. That was considered a somewhat rare event, since hyena attacks do not always end in death. But outside of town — about fifteen miles east in Babile on the road to Jijiga — the Somali direction — attacks were a weekly occurrence. Hararis claimed not to be frightened of hyenas, and many qât-chewers sat out at night on mats, stuffing their mouths, diverted by the sight of hyenas coming and going and in their foraging similarly chewing.
One day talking to Abdul Hakim Mohammed, who was a prince (his daughters were gisti, princesses, and he was a direct descendant of the Emir of Harar), he mentioned the hyenas and the hyena men. ‘We had saints — walia, holy men. They made porridge and put it out for the hyenas on a certain day. The hyenas knew the day and they showed up then. Each hyena had a name — there were many.’
Later, I discovered that Hyena Porridge Day was the seventh day of Muharram, during the Muslim festival of Al-Ashura. Predictions for the future are made on the basis of how much porridge the hyenas eat.
I said, ‘So Harar is famous for its hyenas.’
He said, ‘More famous for religion. We were like missionaries, teaching the Koran.’ He thought a moment. ‘What is written and thought is that we are xenophobians.’
The Harar tradition, he suggested, was to propitiate the hyenas. This was the self-appointed task of Harar’s hyena man, Yusof, who gathered scraps of meat and bones from butcher shops during the day, and at dusk brought a sack of these scraps and a stool to a spot just outside the town and fed the creatures.
‘We have a belief that if we feed the hyenas they will not trouble the town,’ a Harari told me.
I found Yusof one night by the dark city wall, under a dead tree, watching the dusty fields beyond. He was very serious and untalkative, holding a hunk of camel meat in his lap, a burlap bag stained with leaked blood beside him.
In the distance the hyenas were gathering, trotting with their characteristic bobbing gait, and chattering excitedly, fighting as they approached, nipping each other on the neck or backside. I had counted eleven of them when I saw another pack approach through an adjoining field, eight or ten of them.
‘They each have names,’ the Harari taxi driver told me.
A big hyena was sidling up to Yusof.
‘What’s that one’s name?’
The question was relayed to Yusof who muttered a reply and held the camel meat in the hyena’s face, refusing to drop it, forcing the animal to take it from his hand. This the hyena did, opening his mouth wide and snarling and tearing the meat from Yusof’s fingers.
‘He is called “The Runner.” ’
The hyenas were moving in circles, still battling for dominance. Yusof tossed the meat and bones a few feet away, and the animals fought for it. Now and then he held the meat in a forked stick and fed them that way. He put a raw steak in his mouth and he was leaning towards the hyenas.
Outside this area of circling hyenas dozens more had gathered and were fighting each other and growling and chattering, and moving with their strange lame-looking leg motion. Hyenas that had gotten something to eat were chewing, and their chewing was loudly audible, for hyenas eat everything including the bones, masticating them with the snap and crunch of a wood-chipper.