Harar Hyenas Don’t Chew Khat

The East Ethiopian city of Harar has been a civilizations and trade crossroads since centuries, where Africans, Arabs, and Indians still coexist peacefully. On 2006, UNESCO decided that its cultural heritage should be included in the World Heritage List. Nowadays, Harar’s old town remains a feast for the visitor senses and a constellation of cultural and architectural highlights.

Argob Bari gate – Harar old town

The city’s charms attracted numerous illustrious mortals throughout history, who left traces of their stay, still visible in different kinds. Emperor Haile Selassie, a.k.a. Ras Tafari, a.k.a. Ras Mekonen, spent his honeymoon in a fair Indian architect designed building that currently houses a local museum. French poet Arthur Rimbaud lived for over ten years in the city, reportedly trading African goods to the Western World, and recovering from the affective break up with the likewise poet Paul Verlain. (the current Rimbaud House Museum is not the original house where the poet lived). Sir Richard F. Burton, multifaceted writer, explorer, diplomat, spy, etc. was held captive for ten days during his “exploration” trip by the Emir Ahmad III ibn Abu Bakr, and left a magnificent narrative entitled First Footsteps in East Africa or An Exploration of Harar.

Old town street

But a visit today to Harar would not only render the splendid particulars reported above. The tourist apprehends three main concepts: the walled town and its cobblestoned streets, the hyena feeding ceremony, and the omnipresent khat. The first one is the predominant visual concept, materialized by the lively narrow pedestrian streets filled with cement plastered compound walls painted in light colours, bustling ethnic markets, one hundred and ten mosques and shrines, and the traditional guild grouped businesses in one or several adjacent streets, being the most characteristic Makina Kri-Kri street, where dozens of tailors stitch outdoors, leasing the onomatopoeic sound of their sewing machines to name the street. Second, the hyena feeding started some thirty years ago at a suburban house, where a cattle proprietor decided to feed hyenas to preserve his cows and save them from night attacks. Successively, the animal night meal turned into a wide show-ceremony, where the smiley carnivores attend every night to receive their scheduled ration, thrown on the ground or handed on a stick by the proprietor or even the public. Finally, khat in Harar represents a historical social custom, and presently an overwhelming local production and consumption. Khat is a controversial leaved plant stimulant that causes euphoria, and in different levels, dependency. While in some countries is legally a controlled substance, in Ethiopia, Yemen, Somalia and Djibouti is legal. Therefore, attractive for tourists who come all the way to Harar, and do not only want to visit the rumored world biggest khat outdoors market in the nearby town of Aweday, but personally chew it, forcing the unfortunate tour guides stay long hours awake throughout the night until they believe they can feel the euphoria. At that point, all of them emphatically express the wish to return and feed the hyenas from their own bare hands!

At hyena feeding show

I Want to Be Mubarak Bin Basel

Following the camel-steps of Sir Wilfred Thesiger I ended up in Al-Ain’s fort Al Jahili, once a real defensive structure that housed the Sheikh Zayed Bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, credited for the unification of today’s United Arab Emirates. The fort did not resemble fully the one photographed by Thesiger in the 1940’s but certainly provoked my admiration. Its renovated German cold engineered walls combined with local artisan architectural techniques cooled my stay and made me forget the outdoors’ forty-five degree desert summer while roaming the exhibitions about the Sheikh and Thesiger. The latter one’s photos and narratives, nicknamed Mubarak Bin London by his two local comrades during their epic trek throughout the Empty Quarter in Arabia, made me fantasize of velvety desert dunes, idyllic oasis, and Sheherazade’s stories to the Sultan Shahriar in the ‘Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night’. Therefore, as like as Mubarak Bin London I wanted to be the blessed one from Basel! The next day I embarked on a desert safari and bashed the dunes on board of a modern fully equipped SUV driven by a skilled Indian pilot who made us feel dizzy in a suburban Dubai City desert. The SUV had air conditioning and plastic bags for every passenger in case of sudden carsickness requirements. After a short stop on the highest dune for a group picture we continued on desert trails first and a motorized highway afterwards until a fenced area, where multiple compounds serving as show attractions for three hundred people per compound, appeared. Before entering the artificial desert camp, I got a ten meter camel ride and a picture to testify such endeavor. Once inside, I was offered Arabic delights for dinner and a belly dance show, but in between a Psy’s Gangnam Style song rocked at least two hundred fifty of my two hundred and ninety-nine camp mates. Two hours later all scheduled camp shows finished and my tourist mates disappeared into the fifty SUVs to return back to their Dubai accommodations. Finally I was alone in the desert night! The compound cleaning and lights turn off took another two hours and only then I could experience the darkness, but certainly not the silence. Dubai’s international airport was not farther away than fifty miles, and my desert bed was below its approach traffic. That night I could experience how vast was Emirates fleet. Back to my hotel room and despite the divergences of my adventure and Thesiger’s, I managed to live the desert, its solitude, and the magic in it, and my wish to become Mubarak Bin Basel is still intact.

Al Jahili fort