Accepted version for publication in Social Science Information

Final version: Baynes-Rock, M. 2013, ‘Life and death in the multispecies commons’, Social Science

Information, pp. 210-227.

Life and Death in the Multispecies Commons

Marcus Baynes-Rock

2

Abstract

The multispecies commons is the kind of place in which human-animal

entanglements are made most explicit. It is where social, biological and historical

processes are so inextricably entwined with wider ecological processes as to be

inseparable. Here I describe one such place: the area outside a gate in the ancient,

defensive wall around the historic city of Harar, Ethiopia. It was at this place that a

solitary, poisoned hyena set in motion a series of events which culminated in a

conflict between two hyena clans; a conflict in which the local humans were

participants. To gain an understanding of the events I follow the threads of histories,

landscapes, territoriality and social engagement between species to reveal how this

place demands interdisciplinary study. It dramatically exemplifies the ways in which

humans and non-humans are entangled in more-than-social processes through which

they co-shape each others’ worlds. The multispecies commons explicitly deconstructs

limited conceptions of the social and weaves them back together with multiple other

threads that coalesce to create a greater, tangled web of ecological processes.

Key Words

Multispecies commons, human-animal relations, spotted hyenas, socio-ecology, mutual

co-shaping

3

Introduction

The image below (Figure 1) is of a commons in front of a gate in the defensive wall

around the Old Town of Harar in Ethiopia. The gate is named 'Argobberi' after the

people who live in the hills surrounding Harar and come to the town to trade: the

Argobba. On any given day people converge on the commons in front of Argobberi to

buy and sell. The traders – mostly women – drive their donkeys loaded with produce to

the town and lay the goods out on the ground. The donkeys wait patiently, parked up in

a space below the commons, while the women sit on the ground with their produce,

calling to passersby, reprimanding children, talking amongst themselves. They raise

their voices in competition with the loud ‘tuk tuk tuk’ of the three-wheeled taxis taking

on passengers. It is a noisy, busy, social place. In the photograph, the long shadows on

the ground indicate that it is late afternoon. The firewood sellers have arrived; they have

set up in the middle of the road. If a truck comes, the women will push their bundles to

one side to let the truck pass and then push them back again until another comes along.

To the left of the wooden gate, beside the modern road which passes through the wall,

some women are selling chat. The leaves of the chat plant are popular in Harar among

most ethnic groups. When chewed, they provide a stimulant effect, a focusing of

attention and a feeling of well-being. The cut leaves soon lose their potency when

exposed to the sun; hence the chat sellers trade in the shadows cast by the wall. The

people buying chat will take their bagfuls home and chew the leaves well into the

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evening. Meanwhile, as the sky darkens, the traders at Argobberi will light paraffin

lamps and torches so that the place will shimmer with flickering flames and an orange

glow. Most of them will pack up and leave at around 9pm. Some of the chat sellers and

the women who sell bread rolls will remain until about 10pm after which they will pack

up and go to their homes. Darkness and silence will envelop the place. Indigents will

make their beds in the shelter of the gateway, the occasional chat-affected man will lean

against a post in deep contemplation; and dogs will lie down in the road. As the night

unfolds, spotted hyenas will pass through the gate on their way into and out of the Old

Town, their movements concealed by darkness and a maze of narrow laneways.

5

Figure. 1. The commons in front of the gate at Argobberi (Reproduced with

permission from Sean McLachlan 2011)

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A found subject

On the night of June 12, 2010, I was walking up the hill towards Argobberi when I

encountered a sub-adult spotted hyena lying on the road outside the gate. It was early in

the night – 9:30pm – so there were still many people at the place; a crowd of about a

dozen people gathered around the hyena who was writhing, squealing and twitching,

apparently suffering the effects of poison. One man directed his flashlight at the hyena;

some girls were giggling; a Sheikh was standing over the hyena, reciting a verse of the

Quran. Someone had gone to fetch a man named Yusuf from a place further down the

road. Yusuf arrived and turned the hyena over with his foot before calling for a box of

matches. He lit several matches in front of the hyena’s nose, each of which was

extinguished by the breeze. He then tore up some rags which he lit with the match

before deliberately extinguishing the flames and holding the smouldering rags under the

hyena’s nose. Someone arrived with some limes. Yusuf took a lime and bit it in half. He

held the hyena’s mouth in one hand and squeezed the lime so that juice drizzled in. He

was having difficulty so he asked for the assistance of a young man who squeezed the

lime while Yusuf prised open the hyena’s mouth. Meanwhile, another man arrived with

a rickety wheelbarrow and Yusuf and two others lifted the hyena into the wheelbarrow.

The poisoned hyena was squealing and writhing spasmodically as it was wheeled down

the hill. At about halfway down, the wheelbarrow collapsed under the hyena’s weight.

The men resorted to carrying both wheelbarrow and hyena down the road to the space

7

outside Yusuf’s house. Following the group was the Sheikh, still reciting Quranic

verses.

On arrival at the place in front of Yusuf’s house, the squealing of the poisoned hyena

attracted the attention of some other hyenas who were lying around in the dark. They

stood up and began to growl and whoop in the fashion of agitated hyenas. Yusuf’s

family came out of their house and his wife was asked to fetch some milk. Meanwhile

the whooping and growling of the hyenas had attracted others of the clan so that there

were at least twenty agitated hyenas present and more arriving by the minute. The milk

arrived and Yusuf held the poisoned hyena’s mouth open while the white liquid was

poured in. There was no immediate effect and the hyenas had by that stage worked

themselves up into a frenzied state. Yusuf decided to take the hyena from the tub of the

wheelbarrow and place it on the ground. By that time, most of the people present had

retreated to the stone step in front of the shrine at the side of the open space. The hyenas

were creating a considerable din which was echoed by the nearby hills. Yusuf and his

son were the last to retreat and, as they stood up on the step, the hyenas approached.

One large female was at the front of the group. She was in what could only be described

as a state of rage. However, she was hesitant in coming forwards. A smaller, sub-adult

hyena stepped past the large female and approached the poisoned hyena. The sub-adult

bit the skin of the poisoned hyena’s back and dragged it backwards to where the other

8

hyenas were waiting. At that point, the large female picked up the hyena in her mouth

and marched off into the darkness with him. She was followed by thirty-one other

hyenas, growling and whooping, their manes and tails bristling. The people began to

disperse. The sheikh was one of the last to leave; he finished his recitations and walked

down the road, disappearing into the darkness.

On the second night after the above incident, there was some unusual activity at the

place outside Yusuf’s house. One hyena was uttering a series low groans while the

other hyenas present were agitated. They were scratching at the ground and gathering

around at various places, sniffing together. As more hyenas joined in they became more

and more vocal. Then a group of four hyenas broke off from the activities and went

running up towards the gate at Argobberi. As soon as these hyenas reached the top of

the hill, they turned and went running back down; two hyenas ran down in the lead

while another two marched back down the hill with their manes bristling and tails erect.

Before the last two had reached Yusuf’s house, the first two came running back with

another two hyenas following. The now larger group of six hyenas ran up the hill

towards Argobberi, ignoring the people on the road as they ran past.

At the top of the hill, under the street light outside the gate at Argobberi, there stood

another six hyenas. Their manes and tails were bristling as they scratched at the road,

9

creating a cloud of dust within which they were but silhouettes under the streetlight. All

of the people who had been walking through the gate had vacated the road and were

standing under the verandas of the nearby shops, watching the hyenas. The six hyenas

who had run up the road from the Yusuf’s house, arrived in front of the gate. They

stood not more than ten metres from the other agitated hyenas and there began a

cacophony of growling and whooping. The two groups of hyenas appeared as though

they were going to attack one another but neither approached close enough for there to

be physical contact. Instead, each group remained cohesive and took turns lunging at

their opposites. All of the humans present were transfixed by this coming together of

hyenas and they stood and stared. Then, before any physical contact had been made

between the two groups, the ones who had run up the hill broke away from the stand off

and hustled back towards the place beside Yusuf’s house - growling as they went. The

others remained beneath the streetlight for some time, watching their opposites

retreating back down the hill. Then one by one they turned and marched back in the

other direction along the road that encircles the Old Town of Harar. The people present

collected their things and went on their respective ways. It was 10:15pm and human

activities at the gate at Argobberi were winding down for the night.

To the uninitiated, the events described above must be somewhat perplexing. The Old

Town of Harar is a densely populated urban centre – there are 21,000 people

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concentrated in an area of 0.6 square kilometres. And beyond the Old Town, another

78,000 people occupy the suburbs of Harar’s New Town. The appearance of a spotted

hyena on a crowded road is unusual for an African town of those proportions.

Moreover, a sheikh standing over such a hyena, reciting verses of the Quran is unheard

of. So too, do Yusuf’s actions demand explanation. The question of why he waved

smoking matches and rags under the nose of the hyena, and squeezed lime juice and

poured milk into its mouth arises in tandem with the question of why there was a large

number of hyenas lying around outside his house. And as with the actions of the

humans, the actions of the hyenas demand explanation. Why did the hyenas become so

agitated on the arrival of their young, poisoned conspecific? What was the significance

of the aggression between two groups of hyenas two nights later on the road where the

poisoned hyena was found? Here, I want to address these questions because they speak

of something beyond the sum of two species. I want to follow the threads of

(pre)history, landscape, species and society, and argue that these are all elements of a

shared ecology of humans and hyenas. The threads come together at the gate at

Argobberi and express most dramatically the theme of this special issue: the Life in

Common. I will begin with the most obvious question: Why were hyenas and humans

together at that place and time?

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The multispecies commons untangled

Our two genera, Homo and crocuta, have such a long history of coexistence that we

could be considered ecologically related. Throughout the Pliocene and Pleistocene

ancestral hyenas occurred with ancestral humans across both Africa and Eurasia

(Rohland et al., 2005; Schreve, 2006). The two groups competed over scavengeable

carcasses and occasionally humans fell victim to hyena predation (Boaz et al 2000; Lee-

Thorpe, et al., 2000:572). However, it was humans who gained ascendancy. Hyenas

disappeared from Eurasia at the end of the Pleistocene and were exterminated or

excluded from much of Africa in historical times. Yet they have persisted in Ethiopia

and in relatively high numbers. One possible reason for this is that Ethiopia was never

settled by Europeans. In South Africa the arrival of settlers and the introduction of

sheep engendered conflict between spotted hyenas and pastoralists. The inevitable

consequence was the extermination of hyenas in the southern part of the continent

(Beinart, 1988:180). Ethiopia, on the other hand, was colonised from within. Under

Menelik II, the Abyssinians annexed much of the land that constitutes modern Ethiopia.

However, unlike colonisation in other parts of Africa, the Abyssinians did not bring

radically new ways of managing the landscape, nor did they bring ideologies of

extermination. The established farmers maintained their traditional practices and

relations between humans and hyenas continued as before. Indeed, early historical

accounts of Ethiopia paint a picture of hyenas as abundant as sheep (Gade, 2006:612).

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Yet, the conditions for hyenas in Ethiopia have not remained unchanged. Whereas

previously hyenas competed with lions over wild prey, massive deforestation in the

country reduced the availability of prey species and the lions have largely disappeared.

This has in fact benefitted the hyenas in the region. The absence of lions has reduced

one possible cause of mortality. Furthermore the forests have been largely replaced with

agricultural production. In the Hararge region, the most abundant crop is chat (Gebissa,

2004; 2008) to which the hyenas do no harm. In fact, the presence of hyenas is believed

by farmers to deter chat thieves as well as Salt’s dik diks who would otherwise take the

leaves.

Meanwhile, spotted hyenas are also sufficiently flexible in their feeding habits to be

able to adapt to a landscape in which wild species have all but disappeared. Nowadays,

hyenas in Ethiopia rely largely on anthropogenic foods (Abay et al. 2010; Gade, 2006;

Yirga et al., 2012). They scavenge from dumps where they obtain skin and bones, they

consume livestock dead of disease, they occasionally prey on unguarded animals or

break into huts and take sheltered livestock. In Harar, the food preferences of the people

benefit the hyenas greatly; as with much of Ethiopia, people in Harar consume a lot of

meat. There are two slaughter-yards in Harar – one provides meat for Christians, the

other for Muslims – and both produce and discard great quantities of skin, bones and

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entrails. So too do households produce a lot of leftover bones and bits of fat and these

are thrown into the streets in the knowledge that they will be consumed by hyenas

during the night. Any uneaten part of an animal in Harar ends up either at the garbage

dump, in the streets or in open garbage containers all of which are accessible to hyenas.

Possibly more important for hyenas in Harar is the kind of meat that the locals do not

eat: donkeys. These pack animals are ubiquitous in the landscape; they are an

invaluable means of transporting goods and materials. The number of donkeys in

Ethiopia is estimated to be four to five million (Gebreab et al., 2005:46). In

combination with the estimated number of hyenas (1,000 to 2,000, according to Mills

and Hofer, 1998:74), this makes for a ratio of 2,000 – 5,000 donkeys for every single

hyena.1 And every one of those donkeys is inedible to the human population; both

Muslims and Christians observe a prohibition against eating hoofed animals. The

Oromo have a saying: whether in life or death it is inevitable: a donkey will be eaten by

a hyena.’ the saying alludes to the fact that regardless of whether a donkey falls prey to

hyenas, dies of disease or dies of old age, it will inevitably end up as food for hyenas.

In Harar, the local hyenas are also directly provisioned by people. The man named

Yusuf who arrived at Argobberi and attended to the poisoned hyena is one of two men

1 It is possible that the figure from Mills and Hofer is a gross underestimate. Yirga et al. (2012:3) estimated

at least 535 spotted hyenas in only one district in Northern Ethiopia.

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in Harar who feed hyenas on a nightly basis for the entertainment of tourists. This

practice began in the 1950s or 1960s (Kruuk, 1968:51). According to some informants,

a man who worked at the old tannery on the east side of the town began throwing flesh

scrapings to the hyenas who congregated outside. Before long he was doing so on a

regular basis and tour guides began taking tourists to see the feeding. Wider, global

processes have fostered increasing numbers of tourists in Harar and the majority of

these are taken to see the hyenas being fed. At present there are two government

sanctioned places where hyenas are fed for tourism purposes and several others where

enterprising individuals are trying to establish feeding relationships with hyenas. This

provisioning does not contribute significantly to the available resources of the Harar

hyenas; if the scraps were not handed to the hyenas they would end up in the streets or

at the garbage dump and hyenas would eat them regardless. However, it does embolden

the hyenas in the presence of people and prepares them for their food searches in the

Old Town where the narrow laneways foster close proximity to humans. Yusuf feeds

hyenas in an open space in front of a shrine, beside his house. From about 7pm, tourists

arrive at the shrine. Yusuf takes a bucket of scraps, sits on a rock in front of the hyenas,

and drapes scraps of skin and meat over a stick from which the hyenas take the food

(Figure 2). This explains why there were several hyenas present at the place when

Yusuf arrived with the poisoned hyena in the wheelbarrow. The hyenas who he feeds

spend the early part of the evening outside his house and linger there for a couple of

15

hours after the tourists have gone, waiting for the Old Town to become quiet so they

can pass through openings in the wall and search for more food. The feeding place is

one of the core areas for that hyena clan and I will discuss the importance of its

relationship to Argobberi below but first I want to address the matter of why there is a

gate at Argobberi (although, it is more pertinent to explore the reasons for why there is

a wall and the reason for the existence of the gate will follow from that).

Figure 2. Yusuf Mumey feeding a hyena in the open ground in front of his house.

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In the sixteenth century, Harar became the capital of the Adal Sultanate. The

charismatic Muslim leader Ahmed ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi married a Harari and moved

his base of operations to the town (Abbink, 1998:114; Davis, 1963:571). From there, he

waged war against the Christian Abyssinians in the west until he was killed during the

battle of Wayna Daga. As a consequence of the war, the Adalites and the Abyssinians

were so politically and militarily weakened that a power vacuum was created in the

south. This was soon filled by new players on the field: the Oromo (Levine, 1974:76).

With no centralised government and with a system of age sets which required that each

community wage war against a neighbour every eight years, the Oromo played to a

different set of rules than the Muslims and Christians (Legesse, 1973:8; Waldron,

1984:23). The boundaries of their territories expanded organically and rapidly; they

simply absorbed other peoples as they 'broke like a tidal wave over Ethiopia'

(Trimingham, 1965:187). Within decades, the Oromo had taken over much of the

former Christian and Muslim territories and increased their numbers with the peoples

they assimilated (Keller, 1995:624). Ahmed ibn Ibrahim’s successor in Harar, Amir Nur

foresaw the danger that the Oromo expansion posed to an undefended Harar and began

construction of a defensive wall (Pankhurst, 1982:52; Waldron, 1984:24). When the

Oromo came, they failed to take the town behind the wall; however, they occupied all

of the land around Harar. They brought with them their own belief system and pastoral

ways so that all that remained of the once vast Harari dominion was less than a square

17

kilometre of stone dwellings behind a four metre high wall. Harar became an island

(Braukämper, 1977:34).

The gate at Argobberi is built into the wall at the place where traders enter into Harar.

Historically, caravans entered through Argobberi after trekking across the Somali plains

from the Red Sea ports of Zayla and Berbera. These places connected Harar with the

Middle East, India and beyond (Hecht, 1987:1) Indeed it was through Argobberi that

the English explorer Richard Burton passed when he visited Harar in 1855 (Burton,

1856:293). He was the first European to visit Harar. The trade from the east has since

declined and now it is mostly local farmers from the adjacent Erer valley who pass

through the gate. Meanwhile, Hararis pass through the gate in the opposite direction as

they go out to their farms in the surrounding countryside. And almost every Harari

passes through Argobberi after death as it is through that gate that the road leads to the

cemetery. Yet, the history of the gate at Argobberi is not restricted to the affairs of

humans; the hyenas of Harar have a history at Argobberi as well.

There are three hyena clans in the vicinity of Harar and two of those clans’ territories

include the Old Town (Figure 3). One of these is the Aboker clan.2 Their dens are

2 I named the clans after shrines in the direction of which, the respective clans’ territories lie. The locals

recognise that there are different clans around the town but do not distinguish them by name. Instead they

distinguish them by the gates which they most often use.

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located just north of the suburbs of the New town, overlooking farmland. They are

regularly provisioned at one of the two official hyena feeding operations and they also

obtain a lot of scraps from a butcher shop at the sportsground northwest of the old town.

The Aboker hyenas normally enter into the Old Town through Assumberi, the gate on

the north side of the wall, or through two ‘hyena holes’ which facilitate entry for hyenas

and people prepared to stoop on entry. The other is the Sofi clan. The Sofi dens are

located in dense vegetation, about one kilometre east of Harar. These hyenas are the

ones provisioned by Yusuf and they also obtain a lot of food from the garbage dump

which lies within their territory. The Sofi hyenas normally enter into the Old Town

through the gate at Suqutatberi, two hyena holes and several drains. Both clans

converge on the Main Market in the Old Town after about 10pm. They travel via the

maze of narrow laneways towards the centre of the town where several butcher shops

leave bones and scraps out for enterprising hyenas. And this is where some interesting

things happen.

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Figure 3. Map of Harar including the hyenas’ territories which converge on the

Old Town.

In other studies, hyenas have been found to maintain exclusive territories which they

mark and aggressively defend (Boydston, Morelli and Holekamp, 2001; Kruuk,

1972:256; van-Lawick-Goodall and van Lawick-Goodall, 1970:149). There are several

ways in which hyenas mark and recognise the boundaries of these territories: pasting,

defecating, scratching, and enacting (Kruuk, 1972:259). When pasting, a hyena

protrudes its anal pouch and secretes a scented paste on a long grass stalk which it

straddles. This paste carries a signature which identifies the hyena and by extension the

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clan to which it belongs. These scent marks are often deposited at clan boundaries

(Burgener et al., 2009). Another way in which hyenas delineate their boundaries is by

creating latrines. They deposit clusters of conspicuous white droppings at places along

the outer perimeters of their territories (although see Mills and Gorman, 1987). They

also mark boundaries with scent from their interdigital glands when they scratch at the

ground. Presumably the scent carries a distinctive signature as with the paste. Lastly,

hyenas recognise boundaries by simply observing their clan-mates engaging in inter-

clan disputes along boundaries or they witness clan-mates pulling up short when prey

they are pursuing crosses a territorial boundary (van Lawick-Goodall and van Lawick-

Goodall, 1970).

All of the above methods are limited or unavailable to hyenas in Harar’s Old Town.

After Harar was encircled by a wall, the town could only grow internally. While the

internal area of the Old Town remained the same, houses and laneways multiplied and

the result is a maze of narrow laneways lined with high walls which surround clusters

of dwellings built up against one another. The consequence of this kind of urban

development for hyenas is the inability to establish and maintain territorial boundaries.

Almost all grass that has the temerity to grow in Harar’s laneways is soon trampled by

people or consumed by goats. Whatever grass survives is sparse and scattered so that it

is impossible for hyenas to paste along a consistent boundary. Moreover, any faeces

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deposited in the laneways during the night is promptly swept up in the morning by

women’s co-operatives so that hyenas are unable to create latrines. Hyenas could

potentially scratch scent into the dirt between the cobble stones and possibly the foot

traffic during the day would not completely trample and disperse it. However, this can

only be done along a laneway and it is impossible for a laneway to be a boundary; it is a

corridor. Two groups of hyenas cannot engage in a territorial dispute over a laneway; in

order to do so, they would have to be within centimetres of each other in the confined

space. Hence, I have seen some unusual interactions between hyenas of different clans

where instead of aggression, there was nothing but wariness shown on the part of

hyenas. This often occurred at the Main Market. On one occasion I followed a Sofi

hyena from the gate at Suqutatberi to the Main Market where it encountered and greeted

two hyenas who I then followed over the hill and into the Aboker hyenas’ territory. I

had witnessed a peaceful greeting between hyenas from different clans. On another

occasion I encountered a Sofi hyena eating a bone well inside what I thought was

Aboker territory, when two Aboker hyenas approached. They were outwardly

unconcerned with each other and went their separate ways. As a consequence, I find it

impossible to accurately depict the clan boundaries in Jugol because the hyenas

themselves are not even sure of where these lie. Instead there is a broad shared area

within the Old town which hyenas from both clans use (Figure 4). However, that shared

area ends abruptly just outside the gate at Argobberi.

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Figure 4. The area inside Harar’s Old Town which is shared by Sofi and Aboker

hyenas.

The encounter that I described above - between the two groups of hyenas - was in fact

inter-clan aggression involving the Sofi and Aboker hyenas, and it was almost certainly

sparked by the incident two nights earlier involving the poisoned sub-adult hyena. It is

almost certainly coincidence that the poisoned hyena wound up at the place outside the

gate at Argobberi, however, the consequences were profound. Hyenas are difficult to

recognise unless by physical characteristics alone. Yusuf, the hyena feeder, relies on

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behavioural characteristics to recognise the hyenas he is feeding. The poisoned hyena

on the road was contorted and twitching so that Yusuf had no way of ascertaining

whether it was one of the hyenas from the Sofi clan who he regularly feeds. He simply

assumed it was a Sofi hyena and brought the sub-adult to the place beside his house

where several Sofi hyenas were lying down. It appeared to me that the Sofi hyenas

immediately recognised the sub-adult as a stranger and became enraged that a hyena

from another clan was in their core feeding area. They became so aggressive that the

people present retreated to the step of the shine. The large female at the forefront of the

aggressive hyenas was Koti, the dominant matriarch of the Sofi clan. She was bold and

aggressive but still wary of humans and reticent to come forward and take the poisoned

hyena from in front of the people. Instead, it was a young hyena named Willi who came

forward and dragged the hyena back a short way. Willi was in fact habituated to the

close proximity of humans through my actions in conducting research at the place

(Baynes-Rock, 2012). He had no qualms about approaching so closely and was able to

drag the young hyena back for Koti to take him off into the farmland where he was

presumably killed. For two nights after that incident, the Sofi hyenas displayed a lot of

territorial behaviour at the feeding place: social sniffing, scratching and vocalising.

I can only conclude that the inter-clan aggression that occurred two nights after the

incident with the poisoned hyena was initiated by the Aboker hyenas. It was they who

24

were waiting outside the gate at Argobberi when the group of six Sofi hyenas ran up the

road to confront them. I am not sure whether the Aboker hyenas collectively knew that

one of their clan-mates was missing. In fact it is still an assumption on my part that the

poisoned hyena was an Aboker hyena. However, they were able hear the sounds from

the feeding place when the raging Sofi hyenas took the poisoned sub-adult off into the

farmland. The Sofi feeding place is only one kilometre from the Aboker dens. I suggest

that the Aboker hyenas recognised that some kind of interaction had taken place

between Sofi hyenas and one of their own. However, regardless of the ways in which

these hyenas knew about the events of the night of the poisoned hyena, they were

sufficiently aggrieved to have gone to the place outside the gate at Argobberi and

challenged the Sofi hyenas to engage in a territorial dispute. Several of the Sofi hyenas

responded and went running up the road to where the Aboker hyenas were waiting.

There was a lot of aggression displayed by both groups but no physical contact. In that

way, it was more like a ritualised display in which the two clans were enacting and

reasserting the boundary rather than a conflict over a disputable, moveable line of

demarcation. Eventually the Sofi hyenas were the first to disperse. Significantly, the

Aboker hyenas did not pursue the Sofi hyenas. They simply stood for a while before

turning and marching off into the heart of their own territory. The strictly defined

boundary outside the gate at Argobberi remained; a marked contrast to the vague shared

areas on the other side of the gate, inside the Old Town.

25

For me, the inter-clan aggression outside the gate at Argobberi was akin to a realisation

of an expectation. I was told on numerous occasions by numerous people in Harar that

the hyenas did not fight inside of the Old town; they only came together to fight outside

the gate at Argobberi. Indeed, so often was I told this that I ceased writing it down; it

was simply a matter of fact. In this respect, the place has a shared history. Both people

and hyenas come to recognise and remember this place as a locale for territorial

disputes through participation and the passing down of knowledge. The people who

vacated the streets when the two clans of hyenas came together under the street light

were as complicit in the dispute as the hyenas who were growling and kicking up dust.

For any hyena and human initiates present, it was a dramatic first experience and

something they would remember for the future. And they passed the history of the place

onto others; the people through stories and the hyenas through inciting young hyenas to

follow them up the hill to the place outside the gate where they faced off their

opponents. The gate at Argobberi is more than an edifice. It is a mutually constructed,

historicised, politicised, meaningful place in the minds of both hyenas and humans who

participate in the dramas which are enacted there.

For very many people in Harar, it is uncontroversial that the territorial boundary at

Argobberi is for hyenas partly socially constructed. These people consider that spotted

26

hyenas are very much like themselves in their social organisation. According to these

people, hyenas hold meetings, make supplications for food, and communicate detailed

messages to conspecifics and to humans who can understand hyena language.

Furthermore, hyenas have an understanding of and capacity for revenge. They act

against conspecifics who kill livestock animals because they know humans will demand

retribution for the killing. They also attack people who harm or insult hyenas. ‘Hyena

has a brain like a human.’ This is the comment by a Harari father to a son in an account

of hyenas taking action against the boy after he dropped rocks on them. This also goes

some way to explaining the persistence of hyenas in Harar. Where the people are

socially engaged with hyenas, they do not conceive of them as objects in the landscape

which can be acted upon with impunity. Any attempt at eradication of hyenas for

Hararis is unthinkable because hyenas cannot be acted upon without harmful

consequences.

This perceived similarity of hyenas and humans in Harar goes a long way towards

explaining the actions of Yusuf the hyena feeder: he was treating the hyena like a

human. In most parts of Ethiopia, if a person experiences an epileptic seizure, it is

standard practice to try and alleviate the seizure by striking a match, extinguishing it

and waving the smoke under the sufferer’s nose. Thus, Yusuf’s first actions on

encountering the poisoned hyena can be explained: he assumed that the spasms the

27

hyena was experiencing were symptomatic of an epileptic seizure. Consequently, he

took the customary remedial action for humans. Then, after it was suggested that the

hyena had been poisoned, Yusuf altered the treatment, but remained within the

conventions of treatment for humans. If a girl in Harar is being compelled to marry

against her will, she might drink a quantity of bleach; whether as a cry for help, a

protest, a suicide attempt or combination of these. The conventional first aid in these

cases is to administer lime juice. The acidity of the limes is supposed to nullify the

alkalinising effect of the bleach. Hence, Yusuf squeezed lime juice into the hyenas’

mouth as, in his eyes, what works or should work for people should also work for

hyenas. As for the milk – that was my idea. I recalled the advice given in Australia for

poisoning – administer quantities of milk – and made the suggestion after Yusuf’s

efforts were failing to have any effect.

While we both recognised that the young hyena had been poisoned, Yusuf interpreted

the response of the Sofi clan members in a different fashion to myself. On arriving at

the gate at Argobberi on the night of the poisoning incident, Yusuf’s first question to

me was if the poisoned hyena lying on the road was Willi, the Sofi hyena mentioned

above. The sub-adult did resemble Willi but I knew from the spot patterns that it was

not him. Thus, having not recognised him as any of the Sofi hyenas whom I knew, I

assumed him to be an Aboker hyena. Yusuf, however, did not identify hyenas by their

28

spot patterns; he recognised them from behavioural contexts: some hyenas had

favourite places to lie down, some were very bold in front of people, some were

excessively aggressive towards other hyenas. The poisoned hyena lying on the road was

not in control of its actions; it was writhing and squealing and outside of its usual

behavioural repertoire. As a consequence Yusuf simply assumed that it was one of his

Sofi hyenas and took it to the feeding place beside his house. Moreover, Yusuf’s

interpretation of the actions of the other Sofi hyenas was different from my own. He

perceived that the hyenas were aggressive because they were concerned for the young

hyena in human hands. As far as Yusuf was concerned, the Sofi hyenas took the young

poisoned hyena away, not to kill but to care for. This is why he had no compunctions

about handing over a poisoned hyena to an angry mob who I anticipated would kill and

eat it.

Lastly, it remains for me to explain the actions of the Sheikh who stood over the hyena,

reciting the Quran, and who did so until the Sofi hyenas finally took the unfortunate

sub-adult away. In Harar, hyenas are ‘spiritually powerful’ animals. In the first place,

hyenas are messengers. They are given instructions by the town’s Saints (deceased

religious figures) who meet every Thursday on the mountain overlooking the town. The

hyenas pass these messages on to certain people who can understand hyena language,

and these people pass them on to Sheikhs and elders. The messages contain advice

29

about developments in the town, instructions for religious adherence, predictions of

future occurrences or occasionally updates on the numbers of jinn in the town. Within

Islam, jinn (sing. jinni) are unseen spirits who have the capacity to cause mischief or to

possess people (see for example Fadlalla, 2005). Some people in Harar are very

concerned about the presence of jinn and as a consequence are very appreciative of the

presence of hyenas. The reason is that hyenas can see jinn. Moreover, they catch and eat

the unseen entities. Indeed it was intimated to me that the reason for the local term used

to address hyenas ‘Derma sheikh’ or ‘Young man of religion’ is that hyenas have the

capacity to control the numbers of jinn, as do the human sheikhs who are called upon to

treat jinn possession. This is yet another reason for the persistence of hyenas in Harar:

they protect the people from beings, far more elusive and dangerous.

Having traced the threads of prehistory, history, biology, religion, economics, landscape

and society, the events I described at the beginning of this paper should make more

sense. Hyenas persisted in Harar due to the circumstances of Ethiopia’s colonisation

from within. Furthermore, their ability to consume carrion, which evolved over millions

of years in competition with humans, enabled them to persist where the deforested

landscape precluded lions. The meat-rich diet of the local people combined with their

heavy reliance upon, and prohibition against, consumption of donkeys ensured that

there was ample carrion for the hyenas to eat. Despite hyenas occasionally preying on

30

livestock and people, a combination of religious beliefs and social engagement with

hyenas entailed that the people were never inclined towards eradicating their spotted

neighbours; they appreciated the way in which hyenas controlled numbers of unseen

spirits and they ascribed to hyenas a capacity for revenge.

Meanwhile, global processes were bringing more and more tourists to Harar each year

and these people were attending the hyena feeding places, which were in turn

sanctioned by the government. At these places the close proximity of people and hyenas

was emboldening the hyenas and inuring them to close proximity with people in the

confines of the old town. The internally complex nature of the Old Town was in turn a

result of socio-historical processes which saw Harar surrounded by hostile neighbours

so that it could only grow centripetally. This urban landscape constrained the territorial

behaviours of the hyenas so that they were unable to establish, recognise or defend

boundaries within the Old Town. Instead, they maintained a tradition of coming

together outside the gate at Argobberi to enact their rivalries. This was recognised by

the people who vacated the open space in front of the gate when the hyenas went there

to fight; again a reflection of the social engagement of hyenas and people in Harar.

The place outside the gate at Argobberi is a salient example of the multi-species

commons: a zone of entanglement (Ingold, 2007:103) in which historical, political,

31

economic, social and religious threads combine in what Ingold (2007:100) calls a

meshwork; where species come together in ways which defy singular explanations and

challenge disciplinary boundaries. It is little wonder that biologists focus on hyenas in

national parks and reserves (Holekamp and Dloniak, 2010:191-193); the complexity of

the multispecies commons is difficult to reduce and quantify. This kind of entanglement

exposes the shortcomings of the disciplinary divisions which seek to study subjects in

isolation. The biological sciences are ill equipped to deal with a place such as

Argobberi because they operate under the assumption that there is a ‘real’ Hyena out

there in the savannah whose ecology can be measured in terms of resources and

observable, repeated behaviours. When singular animals adopt singular trajectories in

such complex landscapes as Harar, their actions become problematic for those who seek

to subsume their behaviours within species paradigms (Lestel et al., 2006:171).

Meanwhile, the social sciences fall down because they maintain a distinction between

humans as actors in places of shared social meanings and animals as commodities or

resources which are thought about but not engaged with (Noske, 1993:185). The social

sciences still perpetuate Mead’s distinction between the reflective, social humans and

the instinctual animals (Alger and Alger, 2003; Myers, 2003).

At Argobberi, the biological is the social is the historical is the ecological. A complex

interweaving of processes combine to create a place in which resident hyenas’ normal

32

means of maintaining territories are confounded. Thus the hyenas establish and

maintain a socially constructed, politicised boundary which they come to understand

through participation in inter-clan disputes such as the one described above. Yet, the

maintenance of the territorial boundary is a joint effort by both hyenas and humans. The

people at Argobberi had to vacate the place for the Sofi and Aboker hyenas to be able to

enact their rivalries there. And they told stories of the territorial boundary. Those people

shared with the hyenas the recognition that Argobberi was the place where clan rivalries

were enacted and they participated in those rivalries by vacating the space and giving it

over to the hyenas. The territorial boundary at Argobberi was a place of mutual co-

shaping (Fuentes, 2010) maintained by both humans and hyenas.

In many respects, the commons at Argobberi is unexceptional. The hybrid community

is the norm rather than the exception (Lestel, 2006:150); the world is full of human and

non-human actors coming together, ‘cooperating and struggling’ with wider social,

political, historical, economic and social processes (Sanders and Arluke, 1993:386).

Indeed Yusuf’s hyena feeding place, just down the road from Argobberi, is another

example; it is there that people and hyenas combine to shape each others’ actions in a

feeding context. Yet, Argobberi is striking because it so explicitly confounds the

distinctions between the social human and the ecological animal. This is the utility and

wonder of the multispecies commons: it dramatically explodes social, political and

33

historical relations, wrenches them away from the exclusively human realm and

subsumes them under the overarching concept of ecological relations which include

humans, non-humans and everything else besides (Ingold, 1996; 2000). This is not the

‘death of the social (in epistemological terms)’ (Taylor, 2012:44); rather, this is its

expansion to encompass a wider world of actors. The multispecies commons challenges

us to reconceptualise the ways in which human and non-human lives are lived; it speaks

of meanings which transcend language (Alger and Alger, 2003:76) and loudly demands

that we reconfigure the paradigms which guide our understandings of what are social

processes.

Lastly I want to return to that young hyena who lay down on the road in front of

Argobberi. At some point during that night, the unfortunate hyena made a choice which

had far reaching ramifications. He chose a direction in which to look for food, and

found some. Whether a poisoned rat or a baited piece of meat, the hyena ate the poison

and then chose to go in the direction of Argobberi. By the time he arrived at the road, he

must have been severely ill because that is as far as he could go. From that point, that

solitary hyena became the central character in a play of events involving a crowd of

onlookers, a sheikh, a hyena feeder and his family, an anthropologist, two hyena clans

and now whoever reads this paper. It is the one consolation that I draw from having

seen that hyena suffering; his body coiling as he writhed spasmodically and then

34

flattening out as he tried to catch his breath before, inevitably, the next spasm came. I

like to think that his wretched death was not meaningless. Rather than lying down in a

ditch in the darkness, and waiting for the vultures to find his carcass in the morning, he

went to one of the most crowded places in Harar at that time of night. When he lay

down on the road outside the gate at Argobberi, his actions brought together a tangle of

threads which pulled and still pull at the foundations of so many different kinds of

boundaries.

35

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was funded in part by Macquarie University Higher Degree

Research Funding and a Macquarie University Travel Grant.

36

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