“The main trade here is in skins; the animals are worked all their lives then flayed afterwards.”
“You shouldn’t go thinking this place is completely savage. Everything’s really much the same as it is in Europe, except that here it’s another pack of dogs and bandits.”
- Letter from Rimbaud dated 15 Feb 1880 mailed from Harar
“We are at Harar, we are always leaving..we must find camels, organize the caravan…Quick, quick, they are waiting for us. We must pack up our bags and go.”
- Letter from Rimbaud’s sister dated 28 Oct 1891, describing his hallucination just before he died
I had always wanted to meet the Hyena Man of Harar. I had read that at night he played with them outside the city walls, that it had become a tourist attraction. And Harar was a city I had always wanted to see, not just because Rimbaud and Burton, Richard twenty five years before Arthur, had visited, and not only because Emperor Haile Selassie had been born outside the walls a year after Rimbaud had left town.
That Harar is called the fourth holiest city of Islam after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem always struck me as just more tourist talk- there is no official ranking, and Harar’s claim- that it had 365 mosques, a different one to pray in for each day of the year- is also not true, unless one counts prayer rooms that might double as coffee warehouses.
I was leading a group of American tourists and one Norwegian convert to Islam who wore a full black robe and hijab. One day when walking through the souk where eagles swoop down to take pieces of meat in their talons, the Norwegian began to feel faint. She was taken to the hospital where the doctors hooked her to a glucose drip whose bag and needle the tour company had to buy at the pharmacy. AIDS country, and sugar water can be expensive in the land of honey wine.
That night we went to the city walls, just beside the city tip, to see the Hyena Man. Other tourist groups had arrived, each vehicle arranged in a semi circle with headlamps on. A man came to center stage with a bag of meat morsels followed by shoulder-hunched and short-haunched hyenas. He fed them the way the Emperor, before being strangled to death in bed, was said to have had his lions fed, gently by hand, and then got down on all fours facing the crowd while the hyenas lined up beside him shoulder to shoulder.
The Hyena Man asked for volunteers to step forward if they would like to help him feed. I said yes, I got on my fours, the Hyena Man asked if I was strong, I said yes, so he prodded the hyena to step up on my shoulders with his front legs and stand tall. The Hyena Man made him reach up to his outstretched arm holding the meat up high over my head and take it gently in his teeth. I served as something of a throne, or maybe just a step stool. Who knew that hyenas were tool users. American tools.
