by Tahir Shah
I asked him if he’d ever heard the legend of the hyenas and the gold. He let out a shrill cackle of laughter.
“Ah, yes,” he said, “the hyenas – there are thousands of them. They come to the city walls each night, and they take children. Dozens of babies vanish every year. It’s a problem for our peace-loving town.”
He paused to feed the steering-wheel through his hands.
“There’s little we can do. You see, if you kill a hyena, ten more are born.”
“Has it always been so?”
“Yes, of course, since ancient times. Everyone knows that the hyenas were once men like you and me. They were all in love with the Emir’s most beautiful daughter. Each night they’d try to climb up to her bedroom in the palace. The Emir got so enraged that he turned all the suitors into wretched dogs.”
Most sub-Saharan towns have an air of torpor, brought on by the heat and a general eagerness to relax. But Harar has a distinctly Eastern bustle about it. Everyone was busy. Some were counting money. Others were running errands or making butter by shaking plastic bottles full of milk. Even the lines of lepers were hustling for handouts.
In the market, wide cane baskets brimmed with qat, okra, melons and lentils, mangoes and black-bellied fish. There were cupfuls of peanuts on sale too, and macaroni, blocks of gray salt and prickly pears. The range of fruit and vegetables was impressive, but nothing could compare with the range of contraband.
Shops in Ethiopia generally have only a few meager goods on sale, little more than basic foods, Chinese cooking-pots, plastic buckets, rubber boots and scouring pads. But Harar’s proximity to Djibouti has made it a refuge for illicit merchandize. The shops were full of the latest wide-screen TVs, videos, blue jeans, cartons of Marlboro and bottles of Scotch. Wherever I looked, bales of illegal stock were being off-loaded from trucks.
I tried to imagine what Harar was like when Richard Burton, the Victorian adventurer and linguist, reached the walled city in 1854. The British East India Company had commissioned him to explore the Somali coast and he came in disguise, uncertain whether he would be treated as a guest or as a prisoner. In fact he was the first European to visit the town and not be executed, and he later described his journey in First Footsteps in East Africa.
The back streets of the old city were crowded. Old men sat playing draughts with upturned bottle caps, reclining on charpoys or sipping glasses of mint tea. Lines of women in traditional Harari pantaloons loitered outside the many mosques, hoping for alms. There were children too, tottering along with great bundles on their heads, savage dogs snapping at their heels. And everywhere there were donkeys and goats, tattered chickens and underfed dairy cows. Doorways led from the narrow streets into courtyards shaded by sprawling acacia trees. Barbers ran cut-throat razors over cheeks, then rubbed kerosene into the skin. Mothers washed clothes in tubs. The faithful prayed in silence, and in every doorway sat bearded men, their mouths stuffed with qat, their eyes glazed like those of the Lotus-Eaters. By early afternoon, most of Harar’s men were in a trance.
A shopkeeper had told us where to find the hyenas. Outside the city wall a crude whitewashed building stood in the shade of a tree. In its courtyard a shrine had been built, and on the shrine a beggar was sleeping. The ground outside the house was littered with hundreds of jaw-bones and sets of front teeth.
In the courtyard a young woman was squatting, picking nits out of her daughter’s hair. She chatted to Samson for a few minutes without looking him in the face. He told me that we had come to the right place: the woman’s husband was a hyena-man. The woman brought us glasses of sweet tea and said her husband Yusuf would return shortly.
Ten minutes later, a fiendish-looking man arrived at the house. Yusuf had thin lips, a greasy complexion and no eyebrows. He was leading a scrawny cow by a rope. I introduced myself and asked him what exactly a hyena-man’s duties involved. He motioned for me to sit and watch. Wasting no time, he sharpened a pair of long knives against each other and led the cow to a spot beneath the tree. He tied a rope around the neck of the animal and bound another around her front feet. A gentle push and the cow was forced to kneel like a convict before an executioner. She let out a mild bellow of protest but seemed resigned to her fate. Yusuf held one of the blades high above the jugular and recited the traditional prayer: “Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim, In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful”. With that he carved the knife into the animal’s neck and a fountain of blood gushed out. The cow collapsed as blood continued to pump on to the ground beneath her. Then, just as I thought the grim event was over, her back legs struck out wildly in a last struggle for life.
Yusuf started to dismember the carcass. He drained the remaining blood into buckets, hacked away the head, carved off the limbs, gouged out the lungs and the offal, and emptied the stomachs of their half-digested grass. Then he chopped the carcass up into small, bite-size chunks.
I asked him why he had slaughtered the beast.
“Every night I feed the hyenas,” he said, “just as my father did and his father did before him. My eldest son Abbas will do the same. It is a tradition in our family, a responsibility we pass through the generations.”
“Is the cow sick?”
“No!” he shouted. “We only feed them the very best cows, and we kill them in a halal way, bleeding them to death.”
“What happens if you don’t feed the hyenas?”
Yusuf’s already sullen expression froze.
“If we do not feed them,” he said, “they’ll descend on Harar and carry away all the children.”
“Have they ever bitten you?”
“So many times,” the hyena-man replied, as his bloody fingers stuffed his mouth with qat. “But better I am bitten than our children eaten.”
“How many hyena-men are there in Harar?”
Yusuf burped loudly.
“At one time there were so many — a dozen or more. The town was very safe because the hyenas were happy. But now the young don’t want to carry on the duty. They don’t realize the terrible price they will pay. If no one feeds the hyenas, the animals will become enraged and will run wild!”
“Who pays for the meat?”
“That’s a big worry,” he replied uneasily. “Some people with young children donate money, but it’s not usually enough. You see how we live, like beggars. I spend all my extra money to make sure the hyenas get the very best meat.”
I asked about the gold.
“These creatures are not mortal,” Yusuf replied. “That’s certain. They are ghosts or jinn. It’s true, they protect Solomon’s golden treasure and keep it from Satan.”
“Have you ever tried to find the treasure?”
“Only a lunatic would risk his life to follow the hyenas to their lair,” Yusuf replied. “Any man who has dared to climb down into their burrows has been torn limb from limb.”
Muttering to himself, Yusuf wandered away. Each night, before he feeds a bullock or a cow to the hyenas, he goes off to wash, to collect his thoughts, to pray and to chew a great deal of qat. He asks God to make sure he’s not bitten badly, to keep the hyenas happy, and to protect the city’s children until dawn.
By nine o’clock the moon was high above Harar, casting ivory light over the whitewashed walls of the house. Yusuf had chewed qat since early afternoon, and his eyes were dilated to capacity. The mild amphetamine gave him the strength he needed to face the hyenas.
Before the feeding began, he hurled the buckets of cow’s blood as far as he could over the baked earth outside his house. The hyenas’ sharp sense of smell would quickly alert them to the killing. Then, sitting on an upturned pail, he started to call the animals by name.
At that moment the first hyena appeared. Cowering and snarling, its head hung low, it darted over to where the blood had been thrown and began to lick the ground feverishly; its mottled fur reflecting in the beam of light from my torch, its eyes glistening like shards of crystal. Yusuf spoke to it in a language I did not understand. Then
he tossed over a hunk of offal. When I looked again I saw others, many now, their shadowy forms moving through the darkness like phantoms. Whistling, calling names and chanting mysterious words, the hyena-man lured the animals towards him.
As Yusuf skewered a chunk of roughly cut beef on a stick and held it in his teeth, I stepped back from the buckets of meat. Lurching, snapping, the hair on their spines bristling, the hyenas crept forward. More were joining the pack. Before I knew it there were too many to count accurately, at least sixty, perhaps more. One by one they seized the meat from the stick. Then gradually they forgot their fear and seethed around their master, filling the air with the sound of crazed laughter. From time to time greed would get the better of them, and they would turn on each other. For an hour or more Yusuf continued to feed them, until the entire carcass had been devoured.
Before driving back down to Dire Dawa, Samson and I stopped for some food at a small café. All the tables were occupied by men who were smoking, laughing and chewing piles of fresh qat. We asked three or four of them about Yusuf and the hyenas. To my surprise they all said the same thing. They agreed that without fresh meat, the wild dogs would descend on Harar and butcher the town’s infants. They were convinced that the hyenas guard a treasure more fabulous than any other known to man. Sometimes, they said, a hyena is shot and in its ear is found a gold earring. Lastly, they explained that at night, after he has fed them, Yusuf transforms himself into a hyena and runs off with the pack. Until dawn the next day he reigns as the hyena king.
On hearing this we rushed out of the café and down through the narrow streets to the gate in the old city’s wall. Jumping across a ditch we made our way to Yusuf’s house. The smell of offal and blood still lingered beneath the tree where the hyenas had fed. Samson declared that he’d prove that the tales of superstition were a load of nonsense, and so we scoured Yusuf’s home, the courtyard and the surrounding area. But the hyena-man wasn’t there.
Travel in Africa is generally something to be endured rather than enjoyed. The bus-ride back to Addis Ababa was the kind of experience that makes you question the purpose of even the most well-intentioned journey and long for the luxury of home. Shunning the train, I had insisted that we race back to the capital on the local bus. After numerous false starts, the vehicle rolled out of Dire Dawa at walking pace. It was the middle of the night. Very soon it became clear that the bus had severe mechanical problems. The gearbox was badly in need of repair and the bus had no brake pads.
We discussed the hyenas. Samson was convinced that there was no gold mine or hoard of treasure waiting to be found at Harar. To my irritation he declared that the expedition so far had been a waste of time.
“Gold drives men mad with greed,” he said. “You can see it in their eyes. If there was a treasure,” he went on, Yusuf would be the first man to kill the hyenas and take it all.”
The man sitting in the row behind us was dressed in a patched boiler-suit with a canary-yellow scarf wound around his throat. He was clearly deranged. For fourteen hours he pretended he was a radio announcer, chattering manically into his thumb. Someone whispered that he’d been a soldier during Mengistu’s regime and that he had been tortured. As the hours passed my sympathy wore thin. The other passengers grew sick of his noise as well. They held an impromptu vote, and then threw him off the moving bus.
We broke down more times than I can remember. At each breakdown the occupants trooped off with all their belongings and sat at the side of the road. At the regular checkpoints the vehicle was searched and searched again. Each time, the passengers would struggle to conceal their contraband — cartons of imported cigarettes, pink Lycra shell-suits, fake Ray Bans and tubs of French margarine.
By local standards the journey was not unusual, but in a dusty village called Hirna something happened which confounded me.
The bus was undergoing repairs at a blacksmith’s stall. Samson had gone off to find some food. I wandered about the village aimlessly and a group of children followed in my wake, taunting me with the usual chorus of “Faranji, faranji!” I hardly looked up, but then I noticed that away from the gaggle of children a boy of about ten was standing all alone. He was barefoot, covered in dirt and dressed in rags like the others. But the strange thing about him was his complexion — he was white. In African countries you often see albinos, but I was sure this boy wasn’t one of them and his appearance brought to mind a newspaper story that I’d once read.
In the 1970s a man and a woman turned up at the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, claiming to be American citizens. They explained in Amharic – they spoke no English — that they were brother and sister and that they had been abandoned by their parents twenty years earlier. The woman was called Tegest Gadessa, and her brother was named Mariam. In the intervening years both had been badly treated and Tegest had been raped on several occasions.
The details of the tale are sketchy, but it seems that their parents were driving alone through the Ethiopian highlands when their vehicle broke down. Some people said they were missionaries, others that their father had a contract to search for oil. The mother and her two children stayed with the vehicle, while the father took to the road in search of help. He was never seen again, probably killed for his wallet and his shoes a few miles on. When the car was attacked by shiftas, bandits, the mother died. The boy and girl were taken to a remote village, sold into slavery and given Ethiopian names.
The loss of awareness of one’s identity, a condition called fugue, is very rare and I might not have given the white boy at Hirna further thought had I not remembered the Gadessas’ story. I called the boy over and gave him some bread. He didn’t speak English or Amharic, only Oromo. The other children said he was sleeping in the open and that he’d arrived in the village six months before. Samson confirmed that his speech was slurred and his knowledge of Oromo only mediocre.
Where were his parents? With the other boys taunting him, he replied with growing apprehension. He didn’t know where his family were, he said. He had been left to fend for himself. I asked him to lift up his tattered shirt. His chest and back, although very grimy, were undeniably white.
The more questions we asked, the more frightened the boy became. I slipped him a wad of birr notes and gave him some more food. Then, bursting into tears, he ran away.
Three toots of the horn warned us the bus was about to leave. There was no time to search for the boy, but I decided to report the incident to the British Embassy when we reached Addis Ababa.
For two more days that accursed brakeless bus inched its way towards the capital. At night we stopped at roadside dens where music blared, warm beer flowed freely and prostitutes caroused with clients. Diesel was heavy on the air, and oily mud thick on our shoes. Outside the dens truck drivers slept beneath their vehicles, wrapped in no more than a shamma, a white cotton shawl.
On the second night we stopped at a particularly vile bar and decided to sit outside instead. A meal of injera, Ethiopian bread, and doro wot, spicy chicken stew, was brought out and set before us. As we ate, Samson talked of his home town of Kebra Mengist, of his family and his beloved girlfriend. Did he plan to marry her? He looked somber at the question.
“If God wills it, we will marry,” he said gloomily, “but weddings are expensive. When I mined gold I was rich, but the Devil was inside me. Now that I have returned to God I am penniless.”
After the meal he opened the great Bible at random and started to read. As far as Samson was concerned, a man who didn’t read the Bible had no hope of succeeding at all. He never said so, but I knew he regarded me as an especially wretched case. While he ploughed through the Book of Revelation, I started the life story of an Englishman called Frank Hayter. The book was entitled The Gold of Ethiopia, and it had been published in 1936. With such a title it had seemed an obvious book to buy.
Every few minutes Samson would pause, glance up at the starlit sky, and thank God for walking beside him. Then he’d return to the text, his lips trembling as he mouthed each
word. Across the table I had a revelation of my own.
The frontispiece showed a moustachioed Hayter in a pith helmet, a safari shirt and khaki shorts, with a long cigarette-holder between his lips. He was standing against a backdrop of a giant leopard skin. I started to read, and by the end of the first chapter I was hooked.
Frank Hayter was born in 1902, into a farming family on the Welsh borders. From his earliest youth he dreamt of becoming a great white hunter and of traveling to the Dark Continent. The first step towards his goal came when he got a job at the London Zoo as a taxidermist. He took pride in his work and was thrilled when he was selected for a special African expedition. He was to travel to the Abyssinian highlands to collect a hundred baboons for the zoo.
In 1924 Hayter took the boat-train to Marseilles, and then a steamer on to Djibouti. There he caught the train to Dire Dawa, where he made his base. In those days the now quiet railway town was full of shady characters. Greek and Armenian merchants ran every type of scam, and Danakil warriors would meander in from the desert, shields held tight across their chests, testicles dangling round their necks. Hayter even came across the resplendent entourage of the socialite and traveler Rosita Forbes, camped out on the outskirts of Harar.
After buying guns and supplies, and hiring guides and camels, Hayter and his small caravan set out across the desert towards Afar. By day the party was ravaged by heat. At nightfall the jackals arrived. Eventually they reached marshland. “For three hideous days, and three even more hideous nights,” Hayter wrote, “we were in those reeking, fever-stricken swamps, moving not mile by mile, but foot by foot.”