Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road. Christine Osborne
a daughter has reached a marriageable age,’ said Mr Abdulwasi as we peeped into the courtyards of buildings likely hundreds of years old.
Mr Abdulwasi said his family had lived in Harar for six generations. One of five children of a wealthy coffee merchant, his paternal grandfather had been a bookbinder who specialised in ornate copies of the Qur’an. A devout Muslim, he used to perform the hajj pilgrimage to the holy shrines in Mecca every three years, travelling across the dry plateaus of Christian Ethiopia to Djibouti, where he caught a dhow to Saudi Arabia.
‘His boat was lying off Jeddah on the terrible night a pilgrim ship from Karachi caught fire. Pakistani hajjis cooking on little stoves were blamed. Leaping overboard to escape, most drowned or were eaten by sharks. Grandfather told us before they jumped, they cried Allahu Akbar—God is great’—said Mr Abdulwasi gravely.
Sir Richard Francis Burton, the celebrated British explorer was the first European to visit Harar in 1855, but its most celebrated resident was Arthur Rimbaud, the rebellious child of nineteenth century French poetry. Rimbaud who has been described as both ‘a brat and a genius’, was certainly one of those individuals in the manner of Henri de Monfreid, Lady Hester Stanhope, or even Dame Freya Stark, who only discover their true focus in life through travel and adventure.
‘Monsieur Rambo,’ said Mr. Abdulwasi, pronouncing his name very carefully, ‘spent eight years in Harar, becoming a personal friend of the governor, Ras Makonnen, the father of our future Emperor.’8 He stopped outside a house, different to others being a double-storey timber affair, with an enclosed upstairs verandah.
‘This was Monsieur Rambo’s house,’ he said, moving back for us to admire the building. ‘Once owned by the Egyptian conqueror of Harar— hence its name, House of the Pasha—it was subsequently rented by the French traders, Bardey et Cie in Aden, for their new agent in Africa.’
By the age of nineteen, Rimbaud had ceased to write poetry, but he continued to correspond with his mother in Charleville, a town near the Belgium border. Writing in November 1889, he said: ‘... The company has founded an agency in Harar, a region that you’ll find in south-east of Abyssinia. We’ll export coffee, hides, gum and so on ...’9
As well as becoming an expert on bunna, the Amharic name for coffee, Rimbaud made several excursions into the unexplored hinterland. But while the ‘grand house’ where he lived with a beautiful Abyssinian woman provided a welcome base, living conditions in Harar were primitive. His letters mentioned a lack of water, lepers, beggars and the constant odour of human excrement. Following an expedition to the Red Sea in 1887, he described the town as a ‘cesspit’. With no sanitary arrangements, the good citizens of Harar used to throw their rubbish—the dead included—over the walls to attendant hyenas.
And hyena-feeding was the final bizarre attraction of our own quick visit.
‘Ask not what started the custom,’ said Mr Abdulwasi staring up at the sky. ‘Some say it began during a famine, when people put out durra porridge to stop hyenas attacking their livestock. But no one really knows. Lost in the mists of time,’ he murmured.
The ‘hyena man’ was waiting for us outside the Erer Gate where Sir Richard Burton had entered Harar, disguised as an Arab merchant. A farmer by day, at night he transmogrified into the ‘hyena man’, staging a show for anyone willing to pay for this rustic entertainment.
When we were assembled, the ‘hyena man’ knelt down, and waving a chunk of meat, he uttered a chilling canine-like call. At first there was no response, but then I discerned four or five animals skulking in the shadows.
‘Batu!’—come and eat, he called.
Growling the scavengers jostled each other like footballers in a scrum. Then one dashed out and snatching the meat, it loped off with that peculiar canter of the Hyaenidae family. When John Gritten of the Morning Star boldly stepped up to repeat this feat, the other men insisted that I follow suit. Barely forty-eight hours had passed since I was preparing Mrs Graham’s breakfast: now I was about to feed Africa’s second largest predator. Picking up a lump of offal, I stretched out my arm as far as it would go.
‘Batu! Batu! ’ cried the ‘hyena-man’ again. But the pack stayed back. What’s the matter? I thought. Don’t they like the colour of my nail polish?
‘Batu,’ he called once more and sniffing the air, a big spotted animal, took a few steps towards me. Head lowered, it edged closer. It was now so near I could smell a putrid, feral odour and its jet-black eyes reminded me of a shark encounter off New Caledonia. Curling back its lips over a fearful set of teeth, it grabbed the meat and made off, leaving me shaking. None of the men said ‘well done’, but it seemed I had passed a test.
‘Are you crazy?’ scolded Dorothy on the bus back to Dire Dawa. ‘Hyenas can slink into a hut at night and bite the face off a sleeping person.’
The aircraft taking us back to Addis Ababa next morning arrived three hours late, and missing the official press conference highlighting the achievements of the revolution, we were whisked by police escort to the centre of the parade, watched by 100,000 people.
The three strongmen of the eighty member Dergue Revolutionary Council were seated on a platform. In the centre was Chairman Brigadier General Teferi Bente; on his left, the second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Atnafu Abate; and on his right, the soon-to-be President of Ethiopia, Major General Mengistu Haile Mariam. Seated beside these atheists and looking very uncomfortable, was white-haired Bishop Abuna Tewofilos, Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church who would be executed by the Dergue, in May 1976. Next to him, looking terrified, were three young women waiting to release white doves of peace.
I was standing beside this tense little group as wave after wave of people passed: Wollega blowing long reed pipes; Gambela shaking medieval shields; Arussi tossing lion’s mane headdresses; Gurage from the Awash area; dark-skinned Berta and Nilo-Saharan Anuak from the southwest river divisions; Agaw, Irob and scores of other prancing tribesmen who had been trucked in to help celebrate twelve months of dramatic revolutionary change.
However, the parade was not a happy one. Despite the soldiers guarding the route, also marching were unemployed graduate students bravely waving signs reading: ‘WE NEED WORK’ and ‘WE NEED BREAD’. Other people called out for civilian rule and the release of prisoners, among them the twelve Ethiopian princesses10 detained by the Dergue. When the float from the reviled Ministry of Information drew level with the generals, some 50,000 sat down in protest against the regime we were invited to publicise.
FRONT MEN OF THE DERGUE MENGISTU (L) AND BENTE, 13 SEPTEMBER 1975
Under the late emperor, all fertile land in Ethiopia was owned by a feudal landlord, living in affluence and indifferent to the hardship of the peasant-farmers who were obliged to surrender half their harvest to him. But while the revolution may have been well intentioned, it had turned society upside down, and Mengistu’s own ruthless policies were accelerating desertification and starvation.
The situation we found was on the cusp. Studying the grim features of Teferi Bente11, I decided he wore the look of a doomed man, an expression to become familiar on my later travels in Iraq. As Soviet MiG-23 fighter aircraft swept low overhead, I felt apprehensive and with my colleagues nowhere in sight, I shouldered my camera bag and found my own way back to the Ghion Hotel.
When the crowds had dispersed, I slipped out to explore Addis Ababa, a city of small disconnected neighbourhoods, dotted across the foothills of the Entoto Mountains, 2,400 metres (7,874 feet) above sea level. Most buildings were corrugated iron shacks standing side by side with round, thatched-roof Ethiopian tukuls (huts). There were few cars and no traffic lights; in one place, I crossed the road among a herd of goats.
Then suddenly I saw gum trees. Ethiopia’s previous capitals had been abandoned when the supply of wood used for cooking and heating, became exhausted. Addis Ababa had faced a similar fate until the introduction of the rapid-growing Eucalyptus