Hyena Blues in Harar

by Adrian Pritchard (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

Making a local connection Ethiopia

Granny chattered her teeth and muttered something in Amharic. Barbed and aimed in my direction. I smiled awkwardly and wondered what the hell the etiquette was in a situation such as this. Grandson had just spent 10 minutes securely wrapping me in what appeared to be the family’s only blanket, having wrenched it unceremoniously from her wrinkled midriff. In the corner, on an old black and white TV, Roy Walker was shouting 80s Catchphrases, dubbed into Amharic. Mother and presumably Father also sat in the corner, glancing at me expectantly. I could imagine the conversation later, when the rain had stopped hammering the tin roof enough to be heard… “Tewdros, why are you picking up tourists?” “I am cold!” “It was raining, he wanted to see the hyenas” “In our living room??” “I am cold…” Harar is famous for its hyenas, apparently you pay a few hundred birr and someone feeds them meat from his mouth. It’s a nice enough little city. There isn’t much beyond an Islamic influenced ‘Old Town’ and a unique take on pizza. It’s a friendly enough place to spend a week or so. It’s also bloody chilly in the wet season! I’d arrived in town a few days earlier, dramatically, having bombed across the desert from Dire Dawa in a Ute, breaking the speed of light on the way. One hand on the wheel, one in his pocket, the driver handed me a card with a cartoon set of female legs and a phone number. “You like girls?” I didn’t bother attempting to explain why I’d cut short my trip to Lalibela. At best it would’ve confused him, at worst, got me dumped on the plains, scarily close to the adrenalin packed delights of Somalia and active Al Shabaab. Talk about ‘making local connections’ … But yes, back to Harar and why I was sat in someone’s shack eating popcorn, watching old gameshows and being glared at by a shivering senior citizen. The hyena meeting place lays under a tree, on the edge of town, where the land gives way to flat wilderness. Somewhere, far away in the distance is either Djibouti or the breakaway Somaliand Republic. You meet the man at dusk, under said tree. It’s that vague. I somehow managed to turn up in a bajaj a full two hours before sunset, just as a monsoonal downpour was building. The driver indicated the edge of the track where the village petered to an end. About a mile ahead of me, poking out of some knee-deep mud were several scrubby trees. The sort of scrubby trees that hyenas, humans or something even scarier could easily lurk and pick me off with impunity. I liked this driver. I have no idea what ‘hyena’ is in Amharic and he likewise hasn’t a clue what it is in English. Faced with a small ginger tourist stood outside his rickshaw alternately barking, chuckling and then trying to push a camera in his face displaying an image of downtown Addis Ababa, he’d been remarkably patient. Eventually I realised my mistake and cycled through about 200 pictures before alighting on the screenshot whipped off Google. Quickly surrounded by seemingly every local resident, I spent half an hour or so sharing their food (Ethiopians are incredibly generous when it comes to sharing their meals) and wrenching my hand from a particularly persistent toddler. Someone, somewhere (probably Geldof) appears to have hammered it into the pre-school Ethi mindset that you have to stuff your sticky, grubby palm into that of all ‘Ferrangi’, it’s always felt a bit rude to immediately whip out the hand sanitiser. “No hyenas! Not today!” Tewdros (disclaimer: that probably wasn’t his name!) indicated the leaden sky and a heavy drop smacked down onto my shoulder. “You come!” Tewdros bounced off in one direction and I made to follow, almost finding my arm dislocated as a toddler who had claimed me as his very own ‘pet ferrangi’ decided I was coming home to meet HIS parents and presumably grandmother. dragging me in the opposite direction. “You have made many friends here in Ethiopia? Where?” “Yes, in the north, Lalibela. One in particular. It’s a story for another time though”