Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

  “The dagger and the flame and the pistol and the labyrinth are nowhere if not inside this head, Ada, a head that does not only reason, or see, but that speaks. Our executioners are coming back. I am ready.”

  Neck was a stump, but so, too, head: stump.

  Green Eyes of Harar

  Wil Weitzel

  My race has never risen, except to plunder:

  to devour like wolves a beast they did not kill

  —Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer

  By the end of the night, I was holding a small boy, my arms crossed tightly over his chest, in a back alley full of garbage. He was Ethiopian, maybe five years old. The boy had an eight-inch stick in his mouth with a strip of meat dangling off the end. Car beams were turned on us, switched to high, so we were flooded with light. And we were surrounded by hyenas.

  Perhaps more than any other animal, the hyena is icon rather than beast. Eikon in the Greek sense of image. It enters the human imagination in the singular, through an optic that perceives only lurid pictures: of death, of the flush of the nocturnal, of carnivorousness pushed to the edge, where the prey may be deceased, where the marrow is prized along with the flesh, and where the cracking of bones and the bolting of viscera thrive in lieu of light and life.

  Hyenas, in African and European visions alike, tend to gravitate toward demon status, toward guardians of the gates of hell, toward witches or the mounts of witches, toward spirits and wraiths, and toward hermaphroditic nightwalkers whose high-pitched whoops and “laughter” have been construed not as the vocalizations of a carnivore but the fateful harbingers of revenge or apocalypse.

  More pronounced even than this tendency to mythologize is the predilection of human beings across cultures to understand the hyena in heavily normative terms as a loping coward and gluttonous scavenger, as a beast that comes too close to the human for comfort or security and is somehow a fallen version of ourselves, displaying avarice, disgraceful squalor, and an incongruous simultaneity of foolishness and cunning.

  As a result of these associations, in part, hyenas have been subject to formidable eradication strikes by humans that few species could have survived. In South Africa, European settlers who became ranchers beginning in the seventeenth century hunted out much of the vibrant fauna of southern Africa as they spread northward from the Cape across the Orange River into what is now southern Botswana and Namibia. The Kalahari Desert alone stopped this advance and marooned small, drought-resistant populations of animals and, for a short time, postponed the decimation of the ancient indigenous culture of the San people.

  Hyenas were largely destroyed in this huge swath of the continent, though they survived farther north in the game-rich swamps and savannas of East Africa largely due to gradual, partial protections afforded more celebrated and less anathematized carnivores like lions, leopards, cheetahs, and African wild dogs. Yet of all places in sub-Saharan Africa, the Horn—Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia—has been a stronghold of the largest of the family of Hyaenidae, the spotted hyena, for millennia. While written records largely coincide with the entrance of Europeans and as such date back only five hundred years, cave paintings portray hyenas along with lions and ungulates subsisting alongside human populations forty thousand years ago. What’s more, it seems likely that hyenas and hominids have coexisted for over three million years, stretching back to before the control of fire, when hyenas held the upper hand and likely preyed on early hominids as part of a much wider diet of prey species.

  Some accounts suggest that hyenas may in fact have originated in the Horn, in what is now Ethiopia, conducting radiating migrations to the south toward the Cape and north and east across Arabia into Asia, where they still persist in low-density populations. In any case, what seems certainly true is that in this region of Africa the relation between humans and hyenas is ancient, and while drifting toward symbiosis in the last millennium, it remains uniquely conflicted and complex. In few places is this transspecies association more intimate or set in starker relief than in the old city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia near the border with Somalia.

  My wife and I went to Harar with the hope of encountering hyenas at night in the streets of the old city, which weave between moldering clay walls into labyrinthine mews and out through six gates to the surrounding countryside. We had read that Arthur Rimbaud had arrived here in the wake of his poetry as a businessman, representing commercial interests across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen, and between 1880 and 1891 he made five caravan crossings off the semidesert escarpment into the arid lowlands of what is now Somalia to the Red Sea, the last on a gurney, his leg stricken with cancer. Wandering through the streets on our first afternoon, we visited what was once the elaborate house of an Indian merchant built on the site of Rimbaud’s abode in Harar.

  To my disappointment, there was no mention of hyenas on the placards recounting Rimbaud’s travails in Ethiopia. It is a dispiriting story that is widely known. He had traveled to Yemen then onto Harar in the wake of his falling-out with Verlaine. Verlaine had shot him in a drunken frenzy after their relations had soured then briefly resurged then sunk into disrepair, and once Rimbaud had healed and finished Une Saison en Enfer, he’d begun his travels. Over the course of two stints in Harar, he spearheaded several commercial ventures, exported coffee, and attempted to transport guns to Menelik in Shoa.

  Overall, his fortunes were mixed and by the time he fell ill, his accounts were strapped and it seems he was in agony of the spirit and not only of the body. The house held reproductions of a letter from his sister and confidante, Isabelle, along with accompanying correspondence from Rimbaud’s own hand. Together, they depicted painful last days in a hospital back in Marseille and recounted Rimbaud’s fear of never walking again, his intermittent delusions that he could return to Africa, the worry that, were he to attempt the voyage back to Harar, Isabelle might abandon him, and then finally the onset of death, and, throughout, the elusive presence of sleep, which, Rimbaud plaintively alleged, arrived at long intervals only to last an hour.

  My wife, Michelle, is a photographer and the one thing we took from this old house to relieve the gloom was the memory of Rimbaud’s images. He had sent to his family for a camera shortly after arrival in Harar, and there is now hung for the public an array of late nineteenth-century reproductions of which Rimbaud’s are the oldest. According to the placards, he was the first to photograph the old city and its denizens, and, beyond Rimbaud’s posed self-portraits in the desiccated Abyssinian landscape, there is one shot in particular, of his storerooms near the center of town, that is hauntingly beautiful. A Harari man sits beside an aged pilaster in dilapidated chambers partially open to the sky. He has spread pots and water gourds on layered mats and has been preparing something in a weathered artisanal bowl. The storerooms around him are largely empty, his long wooden pestle lies in the dust beside his hidden feet, and his hands are poised in his lap. The man is staring off into the corners of the room, gaze vacant. If there is commerce afoot, it is invisible, distant. It looks as though, to the contrary, in the shadows of these sprawling quarters, nothing has moved for a thousand years.

  By the time we’d made it to Harar the previous evening, we were exhausted. We had backpacked in the Bale Mountains to the south across the Sanetti Plateau above four thousand meters elevation, where our tent froze solid at night and our lips at altitude were split open and swollen from the sun. I had blood blisters on my hands from hanging on to gas canisters in a minibus overflowing with villagers en route to Harar, and when we’d arrived just after dusk, the power was out in the old city so we had spent another evening huddled together with headlamps and canned cannellini beans.

  Now, stepping back out into the street from the merchant’s house that contained the photographs of Rimbaud, we began the wait for sunset. The old pictures of the city within had looked much like the contemporary images Michelle had recorded that morning. Despite the absence of hyenas, the
re had been plentiful refuse on show. The squalor and dignity of the walled town in which open sewers ran through cobbled streets among tailors seated beside neat stacks of textiles had been apparent then as it was now.

  When night did fall, we headed out of town to the hyena feeding about which we both had misgivings. It seemed, on the one hand, a chance to encounter at close range spotted hyenas—one of Africa’s most fearsome and fascinating carnivores—and to witness a spectacle that, from our research, made little sense but which promised to provide insights into the way the town perceived these animals. At the same time, there was something off about it, about the idea that money was changing hands while humans were luring hyenas with the promise of raw meat to show each other how the animals could be cowed or tamed.

  But were they cowed or tamed? We wanted to know. The “hyena men” of Harar call out to spotted hyenas denning in the encircling hills then feed them under car lights each night, charging visitors for the privilege of looking on. This is a practice that allegedly began in the 1960s and, like so much else in Harar and neighboring Somalia, dates back to mythic origins. In the nineteenth century, shortly before the time of Rimbaud, one of many droughts in this hyperarid region led to a surge in hyena attacks on domestic livestock. Competing accounts suggest that either local saints convened on a nearby mountain or one pastoralist divined the practice on his own, but in any case, spotted hyena clans were fed porridge, made from wheat and barley, in order to discourage them from preying on herbivores.

  Now the practice of feeding hyenas porridge is largely defunct, but it is commemorated once a year on the Day of Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram in the Islamic calendar, at a shrine perched on a landfill outside the crumbling city walls. Fortune-telling is traditionally associated with this event, and auguries of crop growth and human thriving are contingent upon the amount of porridge the hyena clan leader devours.

  For a long time as we stood in the dark, nothing moved in the shadows. We’d ended up in a back alley staring into the night beside two SUVs full of Ethiopians whose flickering high beams—off, on, off, on—suggested they were eager to see a predator. Upon arrival, we’d been informed that we each owed a hundred birr or approximately five dollars.

  “Pay now,” said a local Harari man who approached me in the dark.

  “We’d like to stay,” I told him. “But I’m going to pay you after.”

  “No,” he said. “You should pay now. They have all paid.” He pointed at the SUVs loaded with people.

  “I believe you.”

  “Fine,” he told me, “but you must pay.”

  “I must pay,” I agreed, and we stared at each other until he drifted away.

  Later on, after half an hour, first one then the other SUV drove off. It was getting cold. There were no hyenas. Somewhere out behind the refuse piles a man was calling to them in what is apparently a dialect that hybridizes Oromo, Harari, and hyena linguistic traces. It sounded to me like a humanized version of the famed “whoop” of the spotted hyena. We had heard this whoop from our tent several nights before, after hiking down from the mountains into the Harenna Forest. On that night, spotted hyenas had been traveling game trails through massive, flowering Abyssinian Hagenia trees that draped beside us. After eight days in gelid winds and scorching sun, it was strange to be sleeping in forest, surrounded by tall, moss-bearded Afromontane trees and, until sundown, the murmur of bees. Now, listening to the hyena man, it was strange again, this time to be near human beings and to be hearing vocal hybrids that were neither man nor hyena, or both.

  Finally, Michelle nudged my shoulder. Both SUVs were gone but a Datsun full of African tourists had arrived to illuminate the alley, and at last a small spotted hyena, a subadult, slunk into view. He was young and timid, skittish, and paced back and forth on the far side of the small courtyard fed by the alley. One of the loitering Harari men stepped forth with a bucket and threw a scrap of meat out toward the garbage. The hyena devoured it and a game commenced in which the bucket man reeled in the hyena with scraps, slowly shortening the trajectory of his tosses. One of the SUVs returned. Several of the Ethiopian men exited the vehicle to stand by the hood while the women stayed inside. For some time, training our headlamps on its strong shoulders and slack hind legs, we watched the hyena dart toward us, retrieve the meat, then retreat to the far wall.

  When there was no change to this routine, the two carloads of Africans seemed to grow restless. A heated discussion arose as the SUV shifted heavily into reverse and threatened to depart again. Meanwhile, several Western tourists had arrived with their guides and spoke in hushed voices close to the vehicles. Then a second hyena ambled into view, larger than the first, seemingly an adult male. Immediately, the hyena man materialized from his calling site and spread a small tarp. There was new energy. Staring brazenly at the crowd, he began to bring the new individual closer, first with short throws and soon via abrupt hand feeding in which the strip of meat was swung outward toward the animal’s mouth. Another vehicle arrived, again full of Ethiopians. Suddenly there was a crowd. We were inching closer, all of us, even the vehicles themselves, as though this new hyena, with a body length of four feet and weighing 120 pounds, held us by a different kind of lure, powerful, vying even with the gut song of hunger.

  This lure of hyenas is not to be underestimated; nor, in Harar, is their connection to public health, sanitation, and the supernatural. Various folkloric attributions have it that their infamous necrophagy—their eating of the dead and desecration of human graves—must be attributed to the machinations of the spirit world. Outside the Jugol, or old town, cement and sheet-metal enclosures often protect graves, particularly those of the Islamic deceased who do not lie within coffins or sealed containers and can be shallowly interred in friable soil. Even the living are subject to attacks, notoriously in the capital, Addis Ababa, prior to its modern expansions. To this day, those sleeping on the streets of Harar or in the outskirts of Addis and throughout eastern Ethiopia across the Somali border must be wary of the nocturnal presence of hyenas.

  Yet the sudden, opportunistic theft and dismemberment of children, the aged, and the infirm, usually at night when spotted hyenas are emboldened by their formidable olfaction, hearing, and eyesight, are rooted in a history of a much more concerted predation and a deep representational irony. The djibb or wolf, as the animal is known in Amharic, or woraba, in the Somali language, is not the same species as the retiring scavenger of the Kalahari—the brown hyena—or its more widespread relative, the striped hyena, who likewise thrives by means of carcasses. The spotted hyena, understood originally by Europeans as a bear-wolf or monstrous hybrid, and confused with its scavenging cousins in some instances as late as the 1970s, is in fact sympatric with the lion in most of its African range. And, like lions, with which we have seen hyenas at night share water holes unmolested and beside which they stand at the top of the trophic order or food chain, they are no scavengers. To the contrary, the spotted species we were witnessing in Harar that is blamed for livestock depredation and rightly accused of entering the huts of villagers and dragging off the weak to devour them in minutes, bones and all, is in fact a formidable carnivore that can pull down adult blue wildebeests and even African buffalo and giraffe, challenge lionesses after dark, and sustain long-distance chases of antelope as large as eland at speeds reaching sixty kilometers an hour.

  As such, the image of the spotted species of the Horn as a lapsed beast slouching toward dawn and pilfering ordure and refuse contains a bitter truth that is in all ways constructed by humans. Spotted hyenas, in order to survive the human-authored decimation of wild fauna in the region, have turned to preying on domestic bovids and encountered sharp reprisals and revenge killings largely perpetrated in the form of poisonings. Over time, out of wariness and the incentive of limiting their energy outlay, hyena clans have been conditioned around towns and cities to become sanitation mechanisms, subsisting on detritus that humans cannot
or do not care to clear. They have achieved a resultant modicum of human toleration and proved useful in particular during frequent epidemics in which they have devoured the victims of cholera, smallpox, and typhoid, dead or abandoned, and potentially limited the spread of disease. More essentially, they have survived as a species, despite the human shift from nomadism to agricultural pastoralism about six thousand years ago, and now wander the streets at night as “scavengers” in a radically transformed landscape.

  As we stepped closer within this night world, more hyenas arrived. Figures filtered through the dust, both human and hyena, slipping in and out of the light and briefly shaping themselves before sliding into the shadows. I was itching to go face to face with one of these animals, but I looked at Michelle, who was crouched beside me, shooting the scene.

  “Will you be all right if I go in there?” I asked her.

  “No. What if you are bitten here? Where would you go? And is this really something we want to support?”

  I hesitated. But something about these moments gives you away. People know you, I’ve decided. You can’t change that. The Harari men were watching me fixedly. My long, dirty hair to my shoulders. Our exhaustion. The fact that we were unescorted, without the legitimizing company of guides. I can’t say. They appeared to ignore the others and kept brushing up against me. Once in a while, one of them would bump me and tell me to pay.

  I left the crowd and walked over to the hyena man. We crouched down together. Cameras went off in our faces. By this point, several Ethiopian onlookers had already assumed this position before me, feeding the hyenas themselves or allowing the hyena man to dangle meat above their heads so the animals climbed their backs to grab it.