by Paul Theroux
Many of the photographs in the house had been taken by Rimbaud himself in the 1880s and were the more evocative for being crude blurred snapshots, like mug shots of a castaway – Rimbaud squinting in the sunshine, Rimbaud in his white suit, Rimbaud looking ill, scenes of huts and mobs in the 1880s that looked the same as the huts and mobs out the window this morning. Rimbaud had sent the snapshots home to his sister and mother. In these pictures he is not the anarchic youth anymore deliberately ‘encrapulating’ himself (as he put it) but a self-mocking Frenchman in his mid-thirties, referring to ‘the filthy water I use for my washing’ and ‘This is only to remind you of my face.’
Banners with quotations from ‘The Drunken Boat’ (‘Le Bateau ivre’) which he wrote at the age of sixteen, and ‘A Season in Hell’ (‘Une Saison en en enfer’) decorated the walls. Although both these poems were written by the time he was nineteen, when he abandoned poetry for good, they were appropriate to the pitching and tossing of his life in Aden and Harar.
‘I drifted on a river I could not control,’ he had written as a sixteen-year-old, in ‘The Drunken Boat,’ and in a later stanza the line, ‘I’ve seen what men have only dreamed they saw.’ In ‘A Season in Hell,’ in the section ‘Bad Blood,’ he wrote, ‘The best thing is to quit this continent where madness prowls … I will enter the true kingdom of the sons of Ham.’
These precocious insights were also prescient, for many Ethiopians are described as Hamitic, and in Africa Rimbaud’s life imitated his art. The hallucinatory imagery of Rimbaud’s greatest poems became the startling features of the landscapes of his life in Yemen and Abyssinia. As a youth in Charleville he produced poems of genius, seeking exoticism in his imagination; in Africa, wishing for the exotic, he took up with an Abyssinian woman, led camel caravans for weeks across the Danakil desert, traded with the King of Shoah, and in his most heroic venture he was the first European to explore and write about the unknown Ogaden region.
Another house much meaner than this trader’s villa was the real Rimbaud house, Nyali said. He told me that his father and grandfather had called it Rimbaud’s house. Hawks drifted over it, as hawks drifted all over Harar; the town’s skies were filled with raptors as its nighttime streets were full of predatory hyenas. Probably they were not hawks, but black kites, for the true hawks and harriers were in the bush.
This ‘real’ house was on one of the main squares near the west gate of the town, a small two-story stone and stucco building with a porch and two blue-painted windows above it, and a sign in Amharic lettered in that ancient script ‘Wossen Saget Bar.’ I went inside and was stared at by drunken Hararis – or perhaps not Hararis since these Muslims would not be drinking alcohol – but drunks all the same. The place had low ceilings and the darkness and dampness of a thick-walled shop-house.
Going in I was pestered by beggars, and leaving I was screamed at in the square by grinning boys. Hurrying away from them I was attacked by a black kite – that is, a kite swooped down and snatched at my cap, grazing my scalp with its talons. The grinning boys screamed again at me and called attention to my alarm, for the hawk had been on my head just moments before and I was even more the butt of their joke. ‘Faranji!’ the boys cried in Amharic. (In Oromo, Nyali said, the word was ‘Faranjo.’) Though the teenaged boys tended to jeer and the men sometimes howled at me, I received many searching looks from women huddled in doorways.
‘One day at school I was eating a piece of meat,’ Nyali said. ‘A hawk came down and took it, and did this’ – took part of his thumb, the scar furrow still obvious twenty-five years later.
From a high place in town, a cobblestone lane, Nyali pointed east, saying, ‘That is Somalia – those hills’ – brown hills on the horizon – ‘that road is the way to Hargeissa. Somalis bring salt here.’
The salt caravans that Burton mentioned, that were as old as this town, 1000 years of caravans from the coast. ‘They trade the salt for qât and bring it back to Somalia.’
But there were other trade goods – Indians had come selling cloth, and guns had always been in demand, and these days, drugs, and elephant tusks. Harar was still one of the centers of the illegal ivory trade in Ethiopia.
The markets had a medieval look, filled with tribal people from the countryside – the Oromo, the Harari who were also called the Adere, the Galla, each identifiable from the color of their robes, or their coiffure, or the styles of their jewelry. Mostly women, lovely women – Burton had remarked on their beauty; Rimbaud’s common law wife had been from the Argoba tribe nearby – they thronged the market square, with donkeys and goats and children. The stalls covered with tents and awnings were piled with spices and beans, the coffee husks that were steeped to make the strong brew I had tasted in the Sudan, and piles of salt, stacks of tomatoes and peppers, pumpkins and melons, beautiful leather-covered baskets unique to Harar, and tables of assorted beads. The most common spice was fenugreek (abish in Amharic, hulbut in Harari) which was an ingredient in Harari dishes. There were bunches of qât, and also big enamel basins of tobacco flakes.
‘Tumbaco, we call it,’ Nyali said. ‘Or timbo.’
Bundles of firewood sold for the Ethiopian equivalent of a dollar, which seemed expensive, given the fact that the bundles were not large and a bundle probably would not last more than a few days. Camel meat was also high priced, at over a dollar a pound, but to sweeten the deal the butchers hacked a few fist-sized pieces from the hump and threw that into the bundle. The camel’s hump is pure fat, as smooth and white as cheese.
‘Muslims eat camel, we eat goat,’ Nyali said.
Near a mosque called Sheik Abbas, Nyali took me to a passageway so narrow that two people could not pass each other in it without squeezing together. Because of this it was known as Reconciliation Alley (Magera Wageri).
‘God sends people here who are quarrelling – and they meet and when they try to pass, they reconcile.’
It was a nice story, but the narrow alleys and passageways beside the ancient stone and stucco houses ran with waste-water, another medieval aspect of the city – open drains, where garbage, mud and shit mingled and you had to tread carefully. Burton mentions this too: ‘The streets are narrow lanes … strewed with gigantic rubbish heaps, upon which repose packs of mangy or one-eyed dogs.’ Europeans are shocked, but Europe was once exactly like this.
Nyali said, ‘When it rains, this will go.’
‘When will it rain here?’
‘Maybe in May.’
Today was the fourth of March.
The following morning at six I was woken by the noise of sandals slapping and scuffing the road, the sound of tramping feet, and I looked out the window and saw thousands of people hurrying down the road. They were the faithful coming from the stadium, where they had assembled for prayers to mark the end of the Hajj period. This festival perhaps explained why the Hararis had been so irritable, for I knew from experience that observances that required extensive fasting and prayers seemed to make the believers peevish.
‘Today we eat!’ was a greeting in Harar to signify the feast day. The townspeople were in a good mood, the men in clean robes, the women in beautiful gowns and shawls, dressed up in their finery, wearing bangles and earrings. Some were from the distant countryside and had come to Harar, riding for two or three hours to be here among the celebrants, promenading and gaping, shy girls in groups and loud boasting boys. Everyone was eating or else carrying food – boys hurrying with tin trays of sticky buns, or grapes, or melons or tureens of meat stew.
Food everywhere. I was reminded of the feast in Flaubert’s Salammbô, a novel I had read on the Nile, Antelopes with their horns, peacocks with their feathers, whole sheep cooked in sweet wine, haunches of she-camels and buffaloes, hedgehogs in garum, fried grasshoppers and preserved dormice … great lumps of fat floated in saffron.’
Knowing the Koran was on their side, and taking advantage of the good feeling on the feast day, the beggars were also in their element, beseeching and nagging and demanding. They were old a
nd young, blind, crippled, limbless women and children, war-wounded, fingerless lepers, screeching for alms like a procession of tax collectors making their way through the narrow passageways of the town exacting a duty from everyone they met. I started to count them but when I got to a hundred I gave up.
There were many lepers gathered outside the east gate of the walled town. It was the Erar Gate – the various names that Burton scrupulously noted for the five gates are still in use. Just beyond the gate was a leper settlement called Gende Feron – Feron Village – after the French doctor who organized it and tended to the sick in the 1940s – though it had obviously been established as a district for outcasts for much longer, and possibly since ancient times, since it lay outside the walls.
About 1000 people lived in the leper village, mostly the old and the afflicted. In Africa, the superstitions applied to lepers – sufferers of Hansen’s disease – have kept such people out of the mainstream of society. The disease is not very infectious, easily treatable and quite curable, and yet in Ethiopia, for example, there was more talk of leprosy than of AIDS – and Ethiopia had perhaps the second or third highest HIV numbers in Africa, at 8 percent (South Africa had 10 percent) with a quarter of a million AIDS-related deaths in the year 2000. Yet while there were many prostitutes within the walls of Harar no one ventured into the leper village by the East Gate.
The clusters of mud huts or shacks in the leper village were made of scrap wood, with goats tethered nearby and women cooking over smoky fires. But one part of the place was new – recent, anyway, even if it did look rundown. A German aid agency had built a series of duplexes, two-story condos with balconies and stairs – the only stairs of that sort I had seen in the whole of Harar. Most of these dwellings looked empty, some looked ill-used or vandalized. I asked about them – their newness, their neglect.
‘The people here hate them,’ a man told me. ‘At first they would not live in them.’
‘But they’re new, and they’re stronger than mud huts,’ I said, baiting him, for I could see they were unsuitable.
‘They are too tall. There is no space. They cannot bring their donkeys and goats inside.’
‘Why would they want to do that?’
‘To protect them from the hyenas.’
The conceit among donors is that the poor or the sick or the hungry will take anything they are given. But even the poor can be particular, and the sick have priorities, and the famine victim has a traditional diet. The Germans had built houses that did not resemble any others in Harar, that did not allow for the safety of the animals, and had the wrong proportions. So they were rejected by the lepers, who chose to live more securely, with greater privacy and – as they must have seen it – more dignity in their old mud huts by the road. The German buildings – expensive and new but badly maintained and ill-used – were the only real slum in Harar.
Walking back through the city I looked at the house Haile Selassie lived in when he had been governor. It was an old Indian trader’s villa, once elegant, now very beat-up, and occupied by a traditional healer, Sheik Haji Bushma. He was sitting cross-legged on a carpet, in a haze of incense fumes, chewing qât. His mouth was stuffed with a green wad of it and his lips and tongue were slick with a greenish scum.
‘I cure asthma, cancer, leprosy – with the help of God and some medicine,’ he said.
I talked to him a little and he gave me some qât leaves – the first I had chewed. The leaves had a sharp tang which when I got a cud of them going also dulled my taste buds. Burton said that it had the ‘singular properties of enlivening the imagination, clearing the ideas, cheering the heart, diminishing sleep, and taking the place of food.’
It also killed conversation. After Sheik Haji Bushma told me his line of work he just sat and chewed like a ruminant, smiling at me occasionally and poking more qât leaves into his mouth from the bunch he held in his hand.
One of his serving boys gave me another bunch and I went on chewing and swallowing. I had to chew for about ten or fifteen minutes before I got a buzz. This I felt was an accomplishment – try anything twice, was my motto – but before I could get comfortable, the doorway darkened and I realized that Sheik Bushma was in the process of receiving a patient. I gave him some baksheesh and left.
The next day I paid a visit to the convent school to see Sister Alexandra, with some other nuns and a Red Cross worker, Christine Escurriola. Sister Alexandra had made spaghetti sauce with fresh tomatoes from her garden, and grilled fish and salad.
‘This is to give you a variation from the injera at the Ras Hotel,’ Sister Alexandra said.
Christine’s job was to drive to the various prisons in the province visiting prisoners to make sure they were not being tortured or mistreated. Many were political prisoners.
‘For some, there is no reason to be in prison at all – maybe they have an enemy in the police,’ Christine said. ‘For others it’s a bad joke. Some get six years because they gave a glass of water to the wrong soldier.’
As for culture shock, she said she had not gotten it here, though she got it badly when she went home to Switzerland and people talked about electric dishwashers and children’s shoes.
‘And here people have nothing,’ Sister Alexandra said.
Christine had served as a Red Cross staffer in Colombia, India, Yugoslavia and Kuwait, and ‘I would like to go to Iraq for my next assignment.’ Christine was cheerful about the difficulties. Sometimes in Harar there was no electricity or water. Often in the countryside where they visited prisons the hotels were dismal and there was no water and only one bed and the three Red Cross women slept together in it.
‘I am trying to picture it,’ I said. But I saw the picture vividly.
‘If one person is clean and the others are dirty, it’s a problem,’ Christine said. ‘But when we’re all dirty, it’s fine. If no one has washed we all smell the same.’
Even though I knew that these women were agents of virtue, Red Cross workers concerned with human rights in remote Ethiopian prisons, Christine’s revelation filled my susceptible brain with the delightful image of three untidy girls, the Three Graces, tousled and playful, with sticky fingers and smudged faces, snuggling in an Ethiopian bed, the powerfully erotic tableau of disheveled nymphs at nightfall.
‘It is very bad to be out at night,’ she said. There were thieves and bandits at night in Harar.
And,’ Sister Alexandra said, filling my plate with another helping of spaghetti, ‘of course the hyenas.’
Everyone mentioned the hyenas in Harar. Burton anatomized them in First Footsteps. ‘This animal … prowls about the camps all night, dogs travellers and devours anything he can find, at times pulling down children and camels, and when violently pressed by hunger, men.’ People still talked about them for the sense of color and danger they gave to the town. In an era of vanishing wildlife, the African hyena flourishes as a successful hunter and member of a pack. They were unusual in Harar in possessing no fear of humans – indeed, after dark they tended to skulk behind people walking in the walled town.
Around the time I was in Harar I heard that a small boy dawdling behind his father in the town one night was pounced upon and killed by hyenas. The boy died the next day. That was considered a somewhat rare event, since hyena attacks do not always end in death. But outside of town – about fifteen miles east in Babile on the road to Jijiga – the Somali direction – attacks were a weekly occurrence. Hararis claimed not to be frightened of hyenas, and many qât-chewers sat out at night on mats, stuffing their mouths, diverted by the sight of hyenas coming and going and in their foraging similarly chewing.
One day talking to Abdul Hakim Mohammed, who was a prince (his daughters were gisti, princesses, and he was a direct descendant of the Emir of Harar), he mentioned the hyenas and the hyena men. ‘We had saints – walia, holy men. They made porridge and put it out for the hyenas on a certain day. The hyenas knew the day and they showed up then. Each hyena had a name – there were many.’
I said, ‘So Harar is famous for its hyenas.’
He said, ‘More famous for religion. We were like missionaries, teaching the Koran.’ He thought a moment. ‘What is written and thought is that we are xenophobians.’
The Harar tradition, he suggested, was to propitiate the hyenas. This was the self-appointed task of Harar’s hyena man, Yusof, who gathered scraps of meat and bones from butcher shops during the day, and at dusk brought a sack of these scraps and a stool to a spot just outside the town and fed the creatures.
‘We have a belief that if we feed the hyenas they will not trouble the town,’ a Harari told me.
I found Yusof one night by the dark city wall, under a dead tree, watching the dusty fields beyond. He was very serious and untalkative, holding a hunk of camel meat in his lap, a burlap bag stained with leaked blood beside him.
In the distance the hyenas were gathering, trotting with their characteristic bobbing gait, and chattering excitedly, fighting as they approached, nipping each other on the neck or backside. I had counted eleven of them when I saw another pack approach through an adjoining field, eight or ten of them.
‘They each have names,’ the Harari taxi driver told me.
A big hyena was sidling up to Yusof.
‘What’s that one’s name?’
The question was relayed to Yusof who muttered a reply and held the camel meat in the hyena’s face, refusing to drop it, forcing the animal to take it from his hand. This the hyena did, opening his mouth wide and snarling and tearing the meat from Yusof’s fingers.
‘He is called “The Runner.” ’
The hyenas were moving in circles, still battling for dominance. Yusof tossed the meat and bones a few feet away, and the animals fought for it. Now and then he held the meat in a forked stick and fed them that way. He put a raw steak in his mouth and he was leaning towards the hyenas.
