The NIGHT watch

In his blog, Hyenas in Harar, anthropologist Marcus Baynes-Rock recalls a memory from his time spent in a farming hamlet in West Shewa, Ethiopia. For the most part, his blog investigates the relationship between people and urbanised spotted hyenas in Ethiopia’s city of Harar, but in this entry, Marcus is sitting inside a mud hut, eating a plate of stir-fried meat, crumbly cheese and a hunk of kocho (a traditional flatbread).

“It would have been like a family camping trip, if not for the sound of a donkey urinating on the floor directly behind me,” writes Marcus. There were other livestock there, too – goats, donkeys, horses, cows – sleeping just across the other side of the small room. The reason that the animals were inside the house at night, was what lurked outside: hyenas. “In West Shewa, hyenas are considered a sort of sinister society – a population of creatures of both physical and supernatural power who hold sway over the land whenever it