Among the Bone Eaters: Encounters with Hyenas in Harar by Baynes-Rock Marcus

Author:Baynes-Rock, Marcus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: 2015-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

I wanted to go to Kombolcha to find out more about the attacks, but I procrastinated for a month before doing so. I’d learned to dread encounters with bureaucrats, and a visit to Kombolcha would be like going to a different country. The town was in Oromia state, so my magic letter would be useless. I figured I’d need a whole bunch of permissions, from zone level downward, and it took me weeks to summon the resolve to seek them. Once I’d determined to do it, though, it proved surprisingly easy. I called Ahmed Aliye, the East Hararge Zone administrator to whom Nureddin had originally referred me when I did my surveys north of Harar. Ahmed arranged for me to meet the following day with Wordi Hashim, a local administrator for Kombolcha. Wordi gave me his phone number and said, “Call me tomorrow when you arrive in Kombolcha.”

The next morning I was riding along a bumpy road between green hills of khat on my way to Kombolcha. I was in my usual rental car, a Suzuki owned by the manager of a fabric shop named Abdulmalik who included his services as driver in the deal. In Ethiopia, it’s extremely unwise for a farenji to drive a vehicle; if there’s any kind of accident, farenjis are held responsible by default.3 Presumably, this is because of our ignorance of local driving customs and our perceived capacity to pay for any damage. In fact, it was likely that I’d be held responsible for any accidents simply because I had hired the car and was sitting in the passenger seat. Riding in the back of the Suzuki was my translator and friend Arif. A Somali by extraction, Arif was a polyglot par excellence, counting English, Harari, and Oromo among the six languages he spoke fluently. He also looked uncannily like a young Haile Selassie, only his beard was a little narrower.

Kombolcha is a type specimen for Ethiopian B-towns. There are no historic landmarks; there is no town center; there is in fact no evidence of any town planning, just buildings lining either side of a dirt road and other buildings hiding behind them. Some are made of concrete blocks with tin roofs, most are wattle-and-daub with tin roofs, and everything is built on the cheap. This is due more to necessity than miserliness. We went to the wereda administration, a concrete building built and furnished in the fashion of an old school, and met with the administrator, who took us to see the wereda leader.4 He greeted us, wound up the meeting he was in, and took us to his office, furnished with a modest steel-frame desk and little else. We sat and heard his account of the attacks and the underlying reasons behind them. “There are boundaries which we must not cross. People and hyenas must live in peace together, but the farmer who killed the hyenas crossed the boundary. So the hyenas, they were taking revenge for their friends that were poisoned.” I asked what the solution was, and whether they had closed the school.

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