Dark Star Safari

6. The Djibouti Line to Harar

Only two trains a week ran on the Ethiopian line to Djibouti, across the low hills east of Addis Ababa and the rubbly plain to the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there I could go by road into the mountains to the old walled city of Harar. Harar was a place I had always wanted to see, for its associations with Sir Richard Burton, the first European to visit. And the boy genius Arthur Rimbaud: after he forsook poetry and civilization Rimbaud had been a trader there off and on for ten years. In spite of his whining in letters home, he had liked Harar for its remoteness and its wildness. Rimbaud took a quiet pleasure in Africa’s motley and unexpected satisfactions, its dusty congeniality. He was seeking relief from metropolitan phonies, literary trend-spotters, hangers-on, time-wasters, and ambitious importuning twits. ‘I’m through with those birds,’ he said in Africa. His mood I shared, his quest I celebrated.

Haile Selassie had an intimate connection with Harar, too, having been born there and served as governor of Harar province before becoming Ras Tafari Makonnen, Lion of Judah, Elect of God, Power of the Trinity and Negusa Negast, King of Kings — in a word, emperor. His career had been patchy. King to Ethiopians, descendant of the Queen of Sheba, mocked as ‘Highly Salacious’ by Evelyn Waugh, he was divine to Rastafarians. Exiled in England during the Italian occupation, he returned to rule as an absolute monarch to whom his subjects bowed low for thirty years. At last he was overthrown by the Derg (the Committee). When I was in Harar the government revealed that the 83-year-old emperor had died in 1975 having been choked to death personally by the Derg’s leader, Mengistu Haile Maryam, who flaunted the emperor’s ring on one of his own strangling fingers.

Famous for its fierce jut-jawed hyenas and its handsome conceited people, Harar I regarded as one of the great destinations in Africa. For its exoticism, its special brand of fanaticism and its remoteness, Captain Burton had compared Harar to Timbuktu, saying that, ‘bigoted and barbarous’ — but also unique in its languages and customs — it was the east African ‘counterpart of ill-famed Timbuctoo.’ At last I was near enough to go there by train.

‘Maybe I should go to the station for a ticket,’ I said, when I arrived in Addis from the Sudan — by plane, because the border was closed.

The Ethiopian manager was a skinny fine-featured man with popping eyes and a shabby suit and the welcoming even courtly manner of his fellow countrymen, who proved to be very polite if a bit melancholy. But then the unsmiling Ethiopians looked brokenhearted even when they weren’t.

But the hotel manager was laughing to reassure me. ‘No worry. The train is not popular.’

My first impression of Addis Ababa was: handsome people in rags, possessed of both haughtiness and destitution, a race of aristocrats who had pawned the family silver. Ethiopia was unique in black Africa for having its own script, and therefore its own written history and a powerful sense of the past. Ethiopians are aware of their ancient cultural links with India and Egypt and the religious fountainhead of the Middle East, often claiming to be among the earliest Christians. When your barbarian ancestors were running around Europe bare-assed with bellies painted with blue woad, elaborately clothed Ethiopians were breeding livestock and using the wheel and defending their civilization against the onslaught of Islam, while piously observing the Ten Commandments.

Relatively new as a city, a brainstorm of Menelik who craved his own capital, Addis Ababa was a sprawling high-altitude settlement with the look of a vast rusty-roofed village, scattered over many hills. It was 100 years old but had a look of timeless decrepitude. Unprepossessing from a distance, up close it was dirty and falling apart, stinking horribly of unwashed people and sick animals; every wall reeking with urine, every alley blocked with garbage. Loud music, car horns, diesel fumes and pestering urchins with hard luck tales and insinuating fingers and dire warnings, such as ‘There are bad people here.’

But even at best African cities seemed to me miserable improvised ant-hills, attracting the poor and the desperate from the bush, and turning them into thieves and devisers of cruel scams. Scamming is the survival mode in a city where tribal niceties do not apply and there are no sanctions except those of the police, a class of people who in Africa generally are little more than licensed thieves.

Ethiopia had just ended its border war with Eritrea. Because of the rumors of that war, and Ethiopia’s neighbors of low repute — Somalia and the Sudan — and the paranoia of travelers, Addis had no foreign tourists. Empty hotels — wonderful for me to behold because I never made forward plans; just showed up, and hoped.

Not many Ethiopians took the train to Dire Dawa, and certainly not onward to Djibouti. Djibouti had a terrible reputation locally. Djibouti is one of the notches on the African coast, at the upper edge of the Horn, an age-old point of entry, and exit too — for centuries it was a slave port, then part of French Somaliland, and finally what it is today, a thorn in the side of Ethiopia, an independent republic. Its oppressive heat was not relieved by the scorching breezes off the Gulf of Aden, nor was there any terrain except the landfill look of reclaimed swamp, and baked architecture that was either Frenchified (biscuity, officious, departmental) or else Arabesque (pillared, scalloped, scowling). French soldiers still garrisoned there had made the place notorious for their enthusiasm for child prostitution.

‘Twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls!’ an aid worker told me. ‘Such scenes! The soldiers go to these terrible nightclubs and get drunk. You see them staggering around the streets. Drunkenness and prostitution — drugs, too.’

On such a trip as I was taking, the idea of witnessing such colorful depravity and dissipation seriously tempted me. But I settled on the trip to Harar, for I wanted to be traveling south within a few weeks — to Kenya and beyond.

The Dire Dawa train was leaving early the next morning. If I didn’t take it I would have three days to wait for another. I went to the station and bought my ticket, looked at the inside of the train — not bad, not good: most trains in Africa look as if they are on their way to Auschwitz — and the next day returned and boarded it. Apart from the departure time, there was no timetable. No one knew when we were expected to arrive in Dire Dawa. ‘Tomorrow,’ the best guess, was all right with me.

We started with a scattering of passengers and even later in the morning, after many stations, in the canyons and hills that lay east of Addis, we still had collected very few people. At some stations we lay idle for as much as an hour, and twice after dark in the middle of nowhere (but I could hear the wind rising in bare branches) the train dragged to a halt and did not move for several hours. During the day I had sat and read First Footsteps in East Africa: An Exploration of Harar, by Captain Burton. Night came on quickly. I slept stretched out on a wooden bench, pillowing my head on my bag and gritting my teeth, hating this trip and wishing it were over and glad that I was not going onward to Djibouti. Sometime after dawn, as the heat of the day was taking hold, the sun slanting into the train, we pulled in to Dire Dawa.

‘Seems a little empty.’

The city looked abandoned: silent houses, empty streets.

‘It’s a holiday.’

It was usually quiet in Dire Dawa, but even quieter the day I arrived because of this Ethiopian holiday, the 105th anniversary of the Battle of Adwa.

‘When we defeated Mussolini,’ a man named Tesfaye told me.

Not quite, so I read later. The Adwa victory, a sweet one for Ethiopians, an early anti-colonial one, was accomplished in 1896, when 20, 000 Italian soldiers hurrying into northern Ethiopia from Eritrea, met 90,000 ‘perfervid, battle-hungry Ethiopians,’ commanded by King Menelik II and his second-in-command, Ras Makonnen, who in this triumph over the foreign invaders were bonded in a father-son relationship. They were distantly related in any case, but that bond assured the elevation of Ras Makonnen’s eldest son, Ras Tafari — Haile Selassie I — to the throne.

Adwa was crucial in other ways. It was first of all a wipeout. Trying to group for an attack in the rocky landscape near Adwa, the Italians became lost and disoriented. The Ethiopians, outnumbering them more than four to one, surrounded them, harried them with spears and arrows and killed more than 15,000 and wounded or captured the rest. They also had rifles — 2000 of them were Remingtons that Rimbaud had sold to Menelik in Entotto in 1887. Though he did not live to see it, Arthur Rimbaud, former poet, played a part in this historic African victory. As a battle of natives against invaders, Adwa was on a par with the Sudanese dervishes destroying the British square. So famous was Adwa that it inspired Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement, known then as ‘Ethiopianism,’ as well as the Pan-African consciousness that helped transform British, French and Portuguese colonies into independent republics. The last successful African campaign that had won decisive battles against any European nation had been Hannibal’s.

Italy’s defeat and humiliation were especially bitter, since the Fascists, swayed by the Mitty-like rule of Mussolini, saw themselves as new Roman legionnaires reestablishing a great empire. Hurt pride filled the Italians with a desire to take revenge on the Ethiopians. They succeeded in this conquest in 1935, when they invaded Ethiopia, much better armed, illegally so (with poison gas), killing tens of thousands of warriors, who were battling with the same weapons they had used forty years earlier.

The whole world was united in condemning the Italian adventure. Winston Churchill summed up this contempt in a speech in London, at the end of September 1935, when, as he wrote later in The Gathering Storm, he ‘tried to convey a warning to Mussolini, which I believe he read.’ The warning was one orotund sentence, rolling onward on the devastating sonority of its clauses:

To cast an army of nearly a quarter of a million men, embodying the flower of Italian manhood, upon a barren shore two thousand miles from home, against the good will of the whole world and without command of the sea, and then in this position embark upon what may well be a series of campaigns against a people and in regions which no conqueror in four thousand years ever thought it worthwhile to subdue, is to give hostages to fortune unparalleled in all history.

Yet this deadly absurdity was exacly what the Italians perpetrated. What Churchill did not know — what few people knew — was that the Italians were planning to speed and simplify their campaign by using phosgene gas. Italy had signed the 1928 Geneva Protocol against employing poison gas in warfare. Yet in 1935 Mussolini urged his generals to drop phosgene bombs on the Ethiopians, to win ‘by whatever means’ (qualsiasi mezzo).

The Italians began their attack by bombing Adwa — scene of their humiliation — and drove southward. Twenty-four planes, five of them carrying gas bombs, dropped poisonous phosgene on Ethiopian troops in the Ogaden desert. When atrocity stories of dubious authenticity emerged from the battlefields — how Italian captives had been crucified, decapitated, and castrated by the Africans — more gas bombs were dropped. Even shooting dum-dum bullets, the news of which also outraged the Italians, the Ethiopians didn’t have a chance. Haile Selassie was toppled from his throne and sent into exile. A Fascist viceroy was installed in Addis Ababa. The Italian King Victor Emanuel, now styling himself ‘emperor,’ had two semi-precious stones in his crown, Ethiopia and Albania.

Adwa, the Italian defeat which had provoked that second invasion, was being celebrated in Dire Dawa — which is to say that the people of this small town were given a day off from work. But there wasn’t much work in the best of times, just coffee picking and qât chewing. There were no parades. The town was deserted. Dire Dawa, Amharic for ‘Empty Plain’ — a more appropriate name than its former one of New Harar — lay small and horizontal on the hot pale scrubland beneath the big brown hills. The town built on dust and sand was only as old as the railway, a century. It was the stopping-off place for Harar and — much more important — the point of transshipment for the qât crop from Aweyde, about twenty miles up the steep road to Harar.

The informal economy of this area of Ethiopia was based upon the growing of this mildly narcotic qât (Catha edulis), pronounced ‘chat’ or ‘jat’ in Ethiopia, a bush that in leaf shape, color and size looks like a laurel hedge. The other Ethiopian cash crop, of high-grade coffee, also grown here in the hills around Harar, was in demand but negligible in profit compared to qât. This daze-producing bush was so highly prized in the non-boozing Emirates and the other states in the Persian Gulf that Dire Dawa’s airport was very busy with the comings and goings of small transport planes. For the greatest buzz, qât had to be fresh when it was chewed.

Dire Dawa looked like the sort of French colonial railway town I had seen in rural Vietnam, for its lowness and its squareness and its stucco and its dust, the sort of town on any railway line built 100 years ago by Europeans. Indeed, this one had a European pedigree: the Swiss engineer and adviser to King Menelik, Alfred Ilg, had planned it along with the Djibouti railway. Ilg, who also did business with Rimbaud, accused the exile of secretly having ‘a sunny disposition.’

Alfred Ilg planned and oversaw the building of Dire Dawa in 1902 to serve the railway from Djibouti. Fifteen years later the line was extended to Addis Ababa. Dire Dawa was a Swiss-French notion of what a respectable African town ought to look like: one-story tiled-roof houses of yellow stucco, most of them cracked, with a precise geometry of streets, with a little plaza here and there — one honoring a dung-streaked statue, another a patriotic plaque and a dusty cannon. Dire Dawa’s trees had died in the last drought, but the leafless limbs and twisted trunks remained.

At the heart of Dire Dawa was the market, an important center of commerce, and even on this national holiday a few people were selling fruits and vegetables — bananas, lemons, potatoes, carrots, piles of leafy greens, all of the produce from higher up in the region nearer Harar. Nothing grew in the hot dusty soil of Dire Dawa.

Walking through the market, wondering how I might get a ride to Harar, I came upon a big black woman in a red dress hawking bunches of herbs. To start a conversation I asked her what they were, and she laughed and said, ‘No English! Galla!’

‘No Galla,’ I said.

But as I turned to walk away she said, ‘Habla Español?’

Spanish was not a language I expected to hear from a market woman of the Galla people in northeastern Ethiopia, though every now and then I met an older Ethiopian, Somali or Sudanese who was fluent in Italian — the result of a mission school education or communicant of an ethnocentric pastor, such as Father Cruciani in Aswan.

‘You speak Spanish?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ she said in that language. ‘I learned it from the Cubans.

There were many Cuban soldiers here in the time of the Derg. I liked them, and they liked me. We had good times. That was when we had another government. The Cubans all went away.’

‘I suppose they left some children behind?’

‘I think so! They liked us very much.’

The Cuban episode occurred when Mengistu Haile Mariam took over in 1974, and declared a Marxist state, renamed streets and squares, killed Haile Selassie and his entire family and erected ridiculous obelisks here and there, displaying the crimson star of socialism. Tens of thousands of Ethiopians were imprisoned without trial. This was also the period when Ethiopia was in the news for its terrible famine. The name Ethiopia became synonymous with tyranny and starvation. Food was airlifted by western charities but Ethiopia’s official friends were Cuba and the Soviet Union. Cuban aid included soldiers, doctors and nurses. All you saw then was footage of rickety children and enfeebled adults, the walking wounded — and these are the lucky ones.

After another famine in 1984–5, and the pressure of opposition parties, the Derg was finally overthrown in 1991, and Mengistu hopped a plane to Zimbabwe and was allowed to reside there on condition that he keep his mouth shut. Ethiopia dropped out of the news, but life went on, the rains brought fresh harvests, war was declared on the secessionists in the province of Eritrea, a war that had ended (triumphantly for Eritrea) with a ceasefire just a few weeks before I arrived at Dire Dawa station one very hot morning in February.

Except for the misleading road squiggles on a very poor map, I had no idea where Harar was or how to get there; no knowledge of Amharic, knew no one in the province — or indeed in the whole of Ethiopia. I was aware of the fact that Harar was more than a mile high in the Chercher Highlands. I was the classic traveler, arriving bewildered and alone in a remote place, trying to be hopeful, but thinking, What now?

I stopped several Ethiopian men and asked, ‘Is there a bus to Harar?’

Grinning with bad news, they said: ‘No bus today.’

Stepping into the shade, for the day was very hot and the wind off the plain scorched my face, I saw an Italian-looking woman in the modern habit of a nun (brown cowl, brown dress, serious shoes). She was carrying a bag and walking with the sort of self-contained and single-minded directness of a punctual person determined to be on time for a meeting.

Yet she smiled and paused when I said hello.

‘Excuse me, do you speak English, sister?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you tell me the way to Harar?’

She sized me up and said, ‘You are alone?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Then you are very lucky. Come with me — I am going to Harar,’ she said. ‘Ah, here is my driver.’

Saved, I thought, perhaps because the day was auspicious, my mother’s ninetieth birthday. Within a few minutes — blessing my dumb luck, blessing this Samaritan — I was seated in the back of a Land-Rover and being driven through the back lanes of Dire Dawa to the bumpy winding road that rose into the hills that were so dusty and windblown that the air and the sky were tawny too.

‘I am Sister Alexandra,’ the nun said. ‘From Malta.’

She turned out to be a great talker, sitting sideways in the front passenger seat, occasionally addressing the driver in Amharic, not looking at me, but now and then calling attention to a curious feature of Ethiopian life, such as the shepherds with their flocks of goats, or the children playing with such contentment that they wrestled and rolled in the middle of the road, while the cars — ours for example — detoured around them.

‘You see, they are not afraid. They are quite free here,’ Sister Alexandra said, and waved to the frolicking kiddies.

She did not seem surprised that I should want to visit Harar, she wondered whether I had been to Malta (I had, on my Pillars of Hercules trip). At first we made small talk, about her family, her girlhood, her law studies, her choosing to be a nun, her missionary instinct; and then I understood that she was circling around one subject, a theme she returned to from time to time, which was, ‘I have been loved.’

She was much younger than me, just about forty, full of life and that Maltese vivacity that is so compulsive it is adjacent to hysteria — I had had a glimpse of it in the way she had walked, with a passionate purposefulness, in Dire Dawa. Not a dry dull nun at all but a full-blooded one with a tale to tell.

‘I had a fiancé, I was studying to be a lawyer,’ she said. ‘I have always been very free — my father encouraged me to believe in freedom. I was happy, I was going to go into a law partnership with my brother. I had a ring, I even had a date for the marriage.’

Children were lying flat in the middle of this mountain road on a hairpin turn, tickling each other and laughing, absolutely heedless of the fact that cars were speeding past them.

‘No, it is their playground!’ Sister Alexandra said. I had not said anything but she had anticipated an obvious question. Then she said, ‘I began to have thoughts of being a nun. I prayed for guidance and when I was twenty I made the decision.’

‘What did your family think?’

‘They were shocked. Shocked!’ In her solemn dramatic way she seemed to enjoy the memory.

‘And your fiancé?’

‘My fiancé wanted to send me to a doctor in Italy to see if I was insane.’ Now she smiled. ‘Or had a mental problem.’

‘I suppose he was worried.’

‘He was sick with worry and very disappointed. The wedding was cancelled, everything called off! My family — well, you can imagine. They didn’t understand. Only my father saw what was in my heart. My fiancé was desperate. I loved him but I knew I had a vocation. Before I took my final vows in Addis he flew here to Ethiopia and pleaded with me.’

‘He didn’t change your mind?’

‘He didn’t change my mind, no,’ Sister Alexandra said. ‘But he gave me a ring.’

I looked at her fingers: no ring. That was understandable, for a nun had to turn her back on the world of materialism and secularity and become a bride of Christ.

‘My fiancé went away. For nine years he lamented,’ Sister Alexandra said.

Now we were entering the heart of the highlands — very dry, rubbly, chilly, windblown, the brown block-like houses, the robed people walking on skinny legs or else squatting in front of mats selling withered vegetables. I cracked open the window and sniffed the cool air.

‘He found a woman and married her and had two children. I did not even get in touch with him. I thought about him — of course, I thought about him a great deal. But I knew he had his life and I had my life.’ She reflected on this. ‘From time to time I heard about him. Well, Malta — you have been there …’

‘Just an island. I know islands a bit.’

‘Malta is a small place. No secrets, much talk,’ she said.

We were high enough in the highlands to feel the chill. The people here wore billowing clothes and were wrapped up well, with scarves and cloaks and headgear, pressing into the wind.

‘Last May, I had a phone call — a woman’s voice,’ Sister Alexandra went on, and melodramatic in her mimicry of a distant voice, said, “ ‘I know who you are. I think you should know that he has died. Thank you for respecting us.” That was all.’

The windblown dust whirled around us, slashing and buffeting the Land-Rover. I did not know what to say about the dead man except to inquire as to whether he had had a long illness.

‘It was lung cancer — he never smoked or drank. He was only forty-seven,’ Sister Alexandra said.

There was no commiseration I could offer. I might have said: I too have experienced the death of loved ones, but what consolation was that to someone suffering the peculiar pain of loss? I just made noises but as I did so I realized that she was protesting.

‘No, no — he is not dead,’ she said. ‘He is still alive for me. I live with the memory of him. I even speak to him, and he guides me. Can you imagine how important it is to have been loved?’

‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘There’s a nice poem about that by an English poet.’ I partly recited and partly paraphrased the Larkin lines from ‘Faith Healing’:

In everyone there sleeps

A sense of life lived according to love.

To some it means the difference they could make

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.

‘Recently, I heard that the woman is going to marry again,’ she said. ‘No one understood him or loved him as I did. That is why he is still alive to me.’

‘It’s true, the dead don’t seem to die, and the people we love seem to go on living within us,’ I said. ‘Or maybe that’s just how we deal with grieving.’

‘You are a writer?’ she said. ‘Maybe this is a story you can write.’

But I said what I always say to people who offer such stories as grist for my mill: you must write it yourself, because there is more to it than you’ve told me, and since you know everything it is your story not mine.

She didn’t object, she said she might, and she added, ‘I am a bit of a poetess. I have written some poems.’ She smiled the enigmatic smile of He is not dead, and said, ‘But I am a nun. If I published what I wrote it might seem strange, coming from a nun.’

‘I’d love to read your poems,’ I said, imagining something steamy and ecstatic, more John Donne than Thomas Merton, both of whom (for being poets and clergymen) I mentioned to her.

If the stereotype of the missionary is of a strong, dull, smiling person with endless patience and no libido, possessed by a conversion mania, Sister Alexandra was the opposite: tenacious, certainly, but also temperamental, opinionated, open-minded and passionate. And after I got to know her better I discovered that she was a gourmet cook. She was much loved at the convent and school but it struck me that she would have made a wonderful wife and mother. She didn’t use the word sin. Perhaps that was why she was such a success in Harar, the only faranji woman in the province.

‘These people are all horribly rich,’ she said as we passed Aweyde. ‘Pay no attention to their houses. They save their money, they don’t spend it on clothes or houses.’

The grubby qât-producing town on both sides of the road had a teeming market with one product on sale, the bunches of green leaves. The hills were thick with it, hedges and bushes of it; everyone grew it, sold it, chewed it. The particular conditions there in Aweyde were perfect. The local price per bunch was $1.20. It was three times this in Addis Ababa; much more in Yemen and Oman and the Emirates, where it was shipped from Dire Dawa in small planes. The qât flights were more reliable than the passenger flights, because the stuff lost its potency so quickly and had to be sped to the qât chewers.

‘The quality comes down within a day,’ a trader told me.

Harar was not much farther. Small houses were more numerous, the road widened, there was a stadium, a church, a mosque, and more mosques, and ahead a walled city, the gates gaping open.

Burton wrote of Harar being a forbidden city, attempted by many travelers in vain. ‘The bigoted ruler and barbarous people threatened death to the Infidel who ventured within their walls; some negro Merlin having, it is said, read Decline and Fall in the first footsteps of the Frank.’ He went on to say that the English were the most reviled because ‘at Harar slavery still holds its headquarters, and the old Dragon well knows what to expect from the hand of St George.’

There was also a superstition among the people of Harar ‘that the prosperity of their city depends upon the exclusion of all travelers not of the Moslem faith.’

Burton set off in 1854 and after an eventful trip from Zayla (present-day Zeila on the Somali coast, near the border of Djibouti) he saw the city on the hill, not a lovely place at all, but a walled hill town, a ‘pile of stones,’ and entered the eastern gate of Harar, palavered with various officials and was at last admitted to an audience with the Emir (who called himself Sultan), who extended his hand ‘bony and yellow as a kite’s claw’ and invited Burton to kiss it. Burton refused, ‘being naturally averse to performing that operation on any but a woman’s hand.’

Burton stayed in Harar for ten days (but unwillingly — for six of those days he was trying to leave). My stay was slightly less but only because I was headed for Cape Town by road, rail, ferry, whatever, and figured upon months more of travel. People all over Ethiopia regarded Harar still as a bastion of fanaticism and rural poverty, where proud war-like Muslims, handsome Hararis who would not dream of marrying anyone but a Harari, lived uneasily with Copts. In addition, there were the groups of hungry Somalis who attached themselves to the town; and camel herders, beggars from the hills, and a fairly good-sized leper colony at the back of the town, not to mention the hyenas, wild and ravenous, for which Harar was famous. All this had compelled my attention and people in Addis trying to worry me with images of Harari savagery merely roused my curiosity. I would happily have stayed in Harar longer.

The beggars were numerous because the Muslim Hajj period was ending, and the Muslim faith enjoins its believers to give generously to the poor on such occasions. Mosques are magnets for beggars, and such a festival as this had throngs of people looking for alms. I had never seen so many derelict people with their skinny hands out, demanding charity.

The xenophobia that Burton described was still a feature of life in Harar. Hararis limited their marriage partners to other Hararis, and did not mix socially with anyone else. They disliked the very presence of foreigners, observing the old belief that foreigners make Harar unsafe and unlucky. It was not unusual for a person — usually old and toothless and wild looking — to rush from a doorway and howl at me. Invariably when I made eye contact with a Harari I saw distrust and menace, and usually the person seemed to mutter something against me.

‘Oh, the things they say to faranjis,’ an Ethiopian woman told me, rolling her eyes at the memory of the remarks, ‘and especially to faranji women.’

‘For example?’

‘I could not repeat such things.’

A Belgian aid worker told me, ‘Some people spit on me at the market, for no other reason than that I am a faranji.’

This is an interesting word. Burton said, ‘I heard frequently muttered by the red-headed spearmen the ominous term “Faranj” ’ and went on to say that the Bedouin ‘apply this term to all but themselves.’ In his time even Indian traders were called faranji if they happened to be wearing trousers (shalwar).

The word is derived from Frank — the Franks were a Germanic tribe who peregrinated western Europe in the third and fourth centuries. But the name, of which French is a cognate, probably gained currency from the Crusades of the twelfth century when Europeans plundered Islamic holy sites and massacred Muslims in the name of God. In the Levant and ultimately as far as South East Asia, a Frank was any Westerner. ‘Immense crowds collected to witness the strange Frank and his doings,’ wrote Edward Lear about himself in his Albanian journal in 1848. A form of faranji, the word afrangi is regarded as obsolete in Egypt though it is still occasionally used, especially in combination (a kabinet afrangi is a western toilet). I heard it now and then in the Sudan, and the word traveled east — to India and as far as South East Asia, where pale-skinned foreigners in Thailand are known as farangs, and in Malaysia as feringhi.

Almost the entire time I spent in Harar I was followed by children chanting, ‘Faranji! Faranji! Faranji!’ Sometimes older people bellowed it at me, and now and then driving slowly down the road a crazed-looking Harari would rush from his doorstep to the window of the car and stand, spitting and screaming the word into my face.

Meanwhile, I was a guest at the Ras Hotel, where Sister Alexandra directed me. Fifteen dollars a night included breakfast, and there was always Ethiopian cuisine (‘national food’) on the menu. The Coptic season of Lent was in full swing. Copts were as fastidious in observing their Christian holidays as Muslims were Ramadan and Eid — in fact they seemed to vie with each other in the strictness of their pieties, ‘I am holier than thou’ the subtext of their senseless mortifications and stern fasting rituals.

‘A dreary, Coptic-flavored brew of the more absurd ideas of old Christian and Jewish priests, all this spiced with local abominations,’ is Vladimir Nabokov’s bluff characterization of the Abyssinian Church, in one of his extensive appendices to his four-volume Eugene Onegin. Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather was born in Abyssinia, probably in Tigre. Breezily sketching the progress of Christianity in the region, Nabokov goes on,

The Gospel was introduced there about AD 327 by Frumentius (c. 290–c. 350), a native of Phoenicia, who was consecrated bishop of Aksum by Athanasius of Alexandria… Jesuit missionaries affronted the nameless dangers of a fabulous land for the holy joys of distributing images of their fair idols and of secretly rebaptizing native children under the pious disguise of medical care. In modern times, Russians have been pleasantly surprised at finding a kind of natural Greek-Orthodox tang to certain old eremitic practices still persisting in Ethiopia; and Protestant missionaries have been suspected by the natives of paganism because of their indifference to pictures of female saints and winged boys.

This month, Copts ate no milk or meat or fish, only ‘fasting food’ — mashed vegetables — mounded on injera, a layer of gray spongy bread made from fermented grain and spread over a whole large platter. ‘Like a crêpe or a pancake,’ people said, but no, it is cool, moist and rubbery, less like a crêpe than an old damp bathmat. Spicy sauces called wot were placed on the injera at intervals, with pulped beans, lentils, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes or, in non-fasting months, fish or meat. In Harar the injera was made from millet, and sweet, not fermented, but it still looked and had the mouthfeel of an overripe bathmat.

I was so contented in Harar — cheap hotel, good weather, strange sights, unworkable telephones — I sketched out the erotic story I had conceived on the Nile about the young man, the older woman, and her enigmatic doctor. And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time.

One morning I bumped into Mr Nyali Tafara at the main gate to the city. ‘I am born and bred in Harar.’ He was unemployed. Most men in Harar were unemployed, he said. He had been to Addis many times, but had never set eyes on Djibouti, an easier trip, six hours up the line. He was a Christian and fasting his heart out. He said local history was his favorite subject.

Harar was the setting of a strange little tale, like something out of Borges’s Fictions that might have been called ‘The Exile.’

Since aloneness is the human condition, a stark example of the perfect stranger was the white man in black Africa, alone in his post, odd man out. The whitest of these would be the celebrated poet living in obscurity in a walled town, among black illiterates and philistines whose respect he had to earn as a man. He was a solitary entrepreneur in a society of organized slavers. His head teemed with surreal imagery and cynical retorts, though he seldom spoke his own language except under his breath.

To the Africans, this original was just another sickly faranji in a shabby suit, wandering the reeking market, watching the lepers crouched for alms by the mosque, the alleys piled with goat shit, the fly-blown camel haunches hanging in the butchery.

Even the fox-faced village woman in the gauzy headdress that he took as his mistress did not know his history, not that he knew hers either: they were opposites, black and white, yet they rubbed along. Perhaps his traveling with her (occasionally to Aden) seemed proof that he loved her. She was photographed by an Italian adventurer and she described the life she had led with the faranji, his silences, his questions, his maps, his stash of coins, the letters he wrote, his passion for photography, his books, how he hated interruption and any talk of his past. She had no idea where he was from. He said he loved the desert. She did not know that his whole strange existence he had predicted years earlier in wild premonitory dream-like poems.

The nineteen-year-old poet who wrote, ‘it is necessary to be completely modern’ was now almost thirty, prematurely gray, and noting with stabbing pen strokes in a company ledger the weight of elephant tusks and coffee sacks to be taken by camel train to the coast. His unexpected enthusiasms set him apart as much as his color — his ability in Arabic, his knowledge of the Koran, his skill as a photographer; he crossed the dangerous Danakil region, explored the empty Ogaden desert, reported on its spidery routes and its few oases. After one terrible trip he wrote, ‘I am used to everything. I fear nothing.’

The price of rifles was something else he studied. The Arabs in Harar were never so curious. Faranjis came and went but this one stayed off and on for ten years, living in modest houses. He hated the food. No one knew what was in his heart, nor heard his muttered ironies, nor understood his gift for concealment. He denied his wealth, claiming he was cheated, while chinking tall stacks of thick silver Maria Theresa dollars and rustling bank notes from the king.

Later, Menelik’s emissaries sought him out, pleading for guns and ammo, which he brought in caravans from the coast. He knew Makonnen, the father of Haile Selassie. The king bargained with him personally and helped make him rich.

His worst day went like this: on a visit to Aden he was confronted by his employer, a Frenchman he despised. The man was gloating with astonishing news. A traveling French journalist had told him that he recognized the name of his employee. He had been a boy genius in France and was famous as a decadent poet.

This revelation was like a horrible joke, the diligent and dull and rather sulky trader being the toast of literary Paris. Absinthe, drunkenness, buggery, free verse! The employer needled him for the travesty of it. The sour coffee merchant in the African outpost a poet! At last the boss had something on him.

The exile denied it. I is someone else, he had also once written, loving its enigma. But exile was a condition in which wordplay was frivolity. Finally he admitted who he had once been and said it was ‘absurd’ and ‘I’m through with all that.’

You go to the ends of the earth to begin a new life, and think you have succeeded, and then the past breaks in, as it does to the fugitive in disguise spotted by an old enemy. He had been happy in his anonymity, just a white man in the bush. He was naked now.

Thus, Rimbaud in Harar.

I said to Mr Nyali Tafara, ‘I want to see Rimbaud’s house.’

‘The real house or the other one?’

‘Both.’

In fact, none of the many houses Rimbaud occupied in Harar now exist. The house advertised as Rimbaud’s was built after his death, an old three-story Indian trader’s villa, mostly of wood, Islamic gingerbread in style, with colored glass windowpanes and shutters and wide verandas. As Rimbaud’s latest, and best, biographer, Graham Robb, has demonstrated, Rimbaud’s irony and self-mockery and deliberate deceptions created the myth of Rimbaud as a ruin, a bankrupt, a desperate failure, a discontented exile.

In fact, he was a resourceful traveler, an imaginative trader, a courageous explorer — his report on his discoveries in the Ogaden was published by the Société de Géographie in Paris — an accomplished linguist (he spoke Arabic and Amharic) and something of a botanist and ethnographer. He enjoyed living in Harar. He was a clever businessman, and though he had given up poetry he planned to write a book about Abyssinia. Posterity, unsmiling as always, took his mordant wit, his sarcasm and self-mockery literally. Robb’s description of him is apt, ‘a contented misanthrope.’

In one of my favorite self-portraits, grimly jeering at his life Rimbaud wrote home:

I still get very bored. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who gets as bored as I do. It’s a wretched life anyway, don’t you think — no family, no intellectual activity, lost among negroes who try to exploit you and make it impossible to settle business quickly? Forced to speak their gibberish, to eat their filthy food and suffer a thousand aggravations caused by their idleness, treachery and stupidity!

And there’s something even sadder than that — it’s the fear of gradually turning into an idiot oneself, stranded as one is, far from intelligent company.

Though he denied it, he was the happy captain of the drunken boat. Like many of us, he made a meal of his suffering — complained even as he was rather enjoying it, thrived on adversity and grumbled dishonestly about savagery and bad food, discomfort and poverty. Contemporary accounts prove that he lived well in Harar, made money, and felt at home in the town.

It was impossible for me to imagine Rimbaud in this villa, though various French cultural agencies had raised money to beautify the supposed Rimbaud residence. Around the turn of the century the building housed a French school, and the young Haile Selassie had conjugated irregular verbs in its classroom.

Now the building was devoted to the memory of Arthur Rimbaud, patron saint of all of us travelers who have echoed his unanswerable question, first uttered by him in Harar, What am I doing here?

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 and 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.’

Later, I discovered that Hyena Porridge Day was the seventh day of Muharram, during the Muslim festival of Al-Ashura. Predictions for the future are made on the basis of how much porridge the hyenas eat.

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.

Outside this area of circling hyenas dozens more had gathered and were fighting each other and growling and chattering, and moving with their strange lame-looking leg motion. Hyenas that had gotten something to eat were chewing, and their chewing was loudly audible, for hyenas eat everything including the bones, masticating them with the snap and crunch of a wood-chipper.

‘If you give me money I’ll turn on my headlights,’ the taxi driver said.

I gladly handed him some money and was rewarded by the sight of a wild-eyed hyena, frightened and hungry, gnashing its teeth and then in the bright beams of the car’s headlights using its toothy jaws to tear the protruding piece of meat from Yusof’s mouth.

The next day, with children and some adults howling ‘Faranji’ at me, I left Harar. I didn’t take the word personally. They were mocking me as they would any foreigner. I was certainly better off than the Harari woman cowering in a doorway who was being beaten by a man with a heavy stick just inside Harar’s main gate. She was screeching loudly as the robed and turbaned older man, with a grizzled beard, whacked her across her body using the thick part of the stick. A woman squatting near her made a face and leaned away, so as not to be hit by mistake. No one else took any notice. When he was through, the man was a little puffed from this exertion — wailing on someone with a stick is heavy work. The woman howled and bowed down, holding her head, and the man walked away swinging his stick, in the manner of a husband who has just done his duty.

Men are beasts all over the world: that could have happened anywhere. But the lepers, hyenas, ivory tusks and garbage, complaining donkeys, open drains in the cobbled alleys, the tang of spices, the butcher covered with blood raising his cleaver to split a furry hump and reveal the smooth cheese of camel fat — and smiling crookedly to offer the fat as a gift — the moans of people’s prayers, the dark-eyed invitation to a shadowy hut, the howls of ‘Foreigner!’ All these explained why Rimbaud had been so happy here. He had liked Africa for being the anti-Europe, the anti-West, which it is, sometimes defiantly, sometimes lazily. I liked it for those reasons, too, for there was nothing of home here. Being in Africa was like being on a dark star.