Harar
"The hyena man called one over by name, handed me the meat, told me to hold it in my teeth. The hyena was polite about it."
The Walled City
Harar’s old city — Jugol — is listed as a UNESCO site, which usually means something has been smoothed into postcard form. Jugol hasn’t. You enter through one of five gates and the city immediately reorganizes your sense of space. Streets narrow to the width of two people passing sideways. Walls are whitewashed or painted pale blue. Every hundred meters there’s a mosque, or the sound of one, and the smell shifts without warning from coffee roasting to raw goat meat to incense. I arrived from Dire Dawa by minibus and walked through Shoa Gate into what felt like a different gravitational field.
The city has been continuously inhabited for around a thousand years. It was closed to non-Muslims until the mid-19th century. Arthur Rimbaud lived here in the 1880s trading coffee and maybe guns — there’s a house attributed to him near the central market, though the attribution is disputed. The market itself runs along the base of the exterior wall and is one of the largest in eastern Ethiopia, where Oromo and Somali and Harari traders move through in overlapping streams and the khat sellers work from early morning until it’s gone.
Hyena Men After Dark
The feeding happens outside Harar’s Fallana Gate each evening around nightfall. The hyena men — a tradition passed through certain families for generations — call the spotted hyenas in from the surrounding scrubland by name, feed them scraps of meat, and tourists pay to hold a stick with meat on the end while a hyena approaches. This sounds like a tourist performance staged for cameras. It is also genuinely strange and actually works. The hyenas are large and smell strongly and move with that peculiar sloped gait, and when one takes meat from a stick three centimeters from your hand, the fact that this is a performance doesn’t make your pulse behave.
The practice is old — Hararis traditionally left meat out for hyenas to read as spiritual omens. The feeding evolved from that. Whether the current version has been shaped by tourist economics is probably yes, but the hyenas don’t know that, and they show up regardless.
Coffee in a Harari House
The traditional Harari house — gey gar — has a specific interior organization: a raised seating platform called the nadoba, walls hung with baskets and decorated plates, everything color-coded by room function. Several families open their homes to visitors and serve coffee in the traditional ceremony: roasted on a small brazier, ground by hand, brewed three times, served in small cups with popcorn.
I sat in one such house with an older woman who explained each step through her teenage grandson’s translation. The third cup, she told him to tell me, is a blessing. The coffee was dark and slightly bitter and very good. The grandson seemed mildly bored by the whole thing in the way of teenagers everywhere. A small television in the corner played a music channel on mute.
The Market Quarter and the Oromo Gate
The main market spills outside Harar’s walls through the Shoa Gate area and is at its densest in the morning hours. I went twice: once overwhelmed, once able to navigate. Khat — the mildly stimulant leaf chewed across the Horn of Africa — is bundled and sold everywhere, wrapped in banana leaves to stay fresh. The smell is faintly grassy and green. Sellers assured me it was good. I chewed a handful for an hour, felt a mild focused alertness, and bought a bottle of water to cut the bitterness.
Harar grows much of Ethiopia’s khat and the trade moves through the market in volume every morning. It’s one of those substances that’s unremarkable in context and mysterious outside it.
When to go: November through February is the coolest and driest period and the most comfortable for walking Jugol’s lanes. Avoid the main rainy season (April to September), when heat and humidity combine uncomfortably in this lower-altitude eastern city. The hyena feeding happens year-round — arrive at Fallana Gate around 7pm.