Daytime hyena

Yesterday, a hyena broke into a kindergarten in the middle of the city.

The children spotted him in the morning; still and scared beneath a large bush in the playground – and they scattered, screaming.

My brother-in-law, an engineer also known for a good eye with a hunting rifle, was called in to shoot the animal.

“But I left it to the other Italians because I felt ridiculous using a gun in a kindergarten in the middle of the day,” he told us. “It would have been reckless.”

The kids wanted the nocturnal creature to see the light of another morning but the school said it was bad for its reputation and, despite the fact a large crowd had already gathered outside its gates by lunchtime, the animal had to go.

Only a few years ago, Addis Ababa had a bigger problem with hyenas moving into the streets at night. They came down from the forests of the Entoto hills that cling to the edges of a city rapidly growing too big for its natural borders.

Newspapers reported accounts of the homeless and the unlucky being taken to hospital overnight with bitten toes and chewed limbs. Charities would tell horror stories of pulling orphaned babies from under the noses of hyena scavenging through rubbish heaps just out of town.

So the administration started laying baits and soon enough, the city’s stray dogs disappeared too.

In other parts of the country, the wild things are revered.

Each night in the walled Muslim city of Harar, the old gates are opened to the desert to allow hyenas to recover the day’s trash and rid the alleyways of pests.

It’s common to hear of lovers, taking a moonlight stroll through the narrow passages of that ancient town, to cross paths with the shadow of a laughing hyena or two.

During the day, the ‘Hyena Man’ gets down on his knees outside the main gate to feed huge steaks of beef or camel to the animals from his own teeth. The ritual – which has become part of the mythology of that walled city in the East – began centuries before when Sufi Muslims would feed hyenas leftover meat on special Muslim holidays.

Elsewhere in Ethiopia, the hyena was a symbol of witchcraft, perhaps because some tribes and neighbouring countries used the animal’s body parts in their medicine. Folktales tell how hyena would rob graves, steal people’s spirits and their children at night. Others say that blacksmiths were actually wizards and witches with the gift of the evil eye, or bouda and the power to turn into a hyena when it suited them.

Today, between 300 and 1,000 spotted hyena are believed to live in the Ethiopian capital. You can still hear them howl at night from parts of the city like Yeka and large packs have been seen hunting in the hills behind the vast, wooded compound of the British Embassy.

But many locals will say the wild ones are the least of your worries in this city of hustlers. Addis Ababa is over-run with ‘daytime hyenas,’ they’ll tell you – and these are the very worst kind. They’re not afraid to gobble you up in the sunshine, in plain view of your neighbour and their gods.

‘There’s always the hyena of morality at the garden gate and the real wolf at the end of the street’ – DH lawrence