Werehyena

The ash in the hearth is still warm when he rolls in it. He takes off his hair first, then goes down into the grey powder and comes up on four legs, and by the time he crosses the threshold there is nothing in the doorway but a hyena, shoulders high, hindquarters low, moving with the unhurried lope that eats ground faster than it looks like it should. Somewhere out in the barley he will find someone worth looking at. He does not bite. He fixes them with his eye, turns, trots home, rolls in the ashes again, and goes to bed a man, waiting for the news.

Accounts gathered among the Manze Amhara of the Shoa highlands in the late 1960s describe the change in exactly those domestic terms. No incantation, no moon, no wolfsbane. The hearth, the ash, and a man who was already something other than what his neighbours were.

The English word is a modern convenience, built on the pattern of werewolf by writers who needed a label. What it covers is a wide belt of belief running from Morocco across the Sahel to the Horn and down into Tanzania, and it is less a single creature than a shape that suspicion keeps taking. The densest version belongs to Ethiopia and Eritrea, where it goes by buda. Buda names two things at once, and the doubling is the whole point: it is the power of the evil eye, and it is the class of people believed to hold it.

Those people are the artisans. In the Amhara highlands they own no land, which in a society where land is the measure of a man is close to owning no standing, and they live by making things: black-burnished water pots too well proportioned for any farmer to match, iron tools, woven cloth. The Amharic word for such a worker, tabib, doubles as a word for one with the evil eye, and it shares a root with an idea of being clever, of knowing too much. On the other side of the line stand the rega, people of clean bone, whose ancestry is known and unblemished. Buda status passes down the mother’s line or the father’s or both, and there is no shedding it. You are born into the trade and into the accusation together. Scholars who have looked at Ethiopian ironworking point out how neatly the two ideas fit: the smith turns rock into a blade in a shower of sparks, which is a kind of creation, and creation had to be got from somewhere.

There is no reliable way to spot one. The signs people list are the signs of poverty and illness. Thinner than usual, because the blood is said to be thin. Discharge from the eyes. A habit of looking sideways at people. Very pale skin. An ashen dryness in the mouth, so that the person cannot spit. A stranger who is a little too friendly is also suspect, on the grounds that he is working too hard at being liked.

What the buda wants is what the neighbour has. Envy is the engine of the whole system, so the people most at risk are the ones with a little more grain than average, a good-looking face, a beautiful child, a run of luck. A compliment paid without the words “let God protect you from the evil eye” is not a compliment, it is a threat. At feasts everyone is served the same, because an unequal portion breeds resentment and resentment poisons the food.

The gaze is only the first half. After the victim dies and is buried, the buda comes for the body. In one telling he twists the root of a plant into a loop and draws the knot slowly closed, and the victim sickens as it tightens; afterwards he squats at the graveside, loosens the knot, and calls to the corpse to get up. In another he carries two rounds of injera to the grave, one lying flat, one folded twice, and unfolding the first opens the earth while folding the second seals it again. Either way he walks home with a servant. The risen slave cannot speak. When visitors come, a tap with one switch turns it into a clay pot standing innocently in the corner, and a tap with the other brings it back. Treated cruelly it weeps without sound, tears running down a face that has no voice to complain with, and after seven years the body gives out and crumbles into ash.

The buda is not entirely to blame for any of this. Inside him sits qalb, an unconscious drive he did not choose and cannot switch off, and the compulsion is what makes him dangerous rather than any decision he takes. Where the qalb came from depends on who is telling it. One account reaches back to Eve, who bore thirty children and, when God asked to see them, hid fifteen away; God cursed the hidden ones, then relented enough to turn some into foxes and jackals so they might live decently, and left the rest human and in the devil’s service. Another version carries the story forward to the crucifixion, where it was the smiths who forged the nails and the carpenters who cut the cross, and Christ cursed their trades from it. A third leaves God out entirely: the source of the power is an immortal man with no arms and no legs, a lump of flesh sitting at the bottom of a cave called Yerimma, who each year teaches the buda children their arts and takes one human life in payment. If a buda cannot find a victim by the due date, the payment comes out of his own family.

Against all of which the defences are practical and constant. Relatives sit by a fresh grave for forty nights, or twelve, until the body has decayed past use, and the buda does not come to a watched grave. Children get their heads shaved to a tuft or a ring, are addressed in the wrong gender to confuse whatever is listening, and take a quick spatter of spit in the face when danger is near. A debtera writes out a kitab, a scroll amulet, to be worn against the skin. Cloaks are pulled up over the mouth and nose in company, because a face that cannot be seen cannot be looked at properly. And if someone has already been struck, a healer heats a knife blade in the fire and lays it against the patient’s cheek, on the reasoning that as the burn heals the same mark will surface on the attacker’s face, and then everyone will know.

Beyond the highlands the shape changes but keeps its outline. Somali tradition remembers Qori Ismaris, the one who rubs himself with a stick, who became a hyena-man at nightfall by rubbing himself with a magic staff and returned to human form the same way before dawn. In Kanuri, the language of the old Bornu Empire around Lake Chad, a mid-nineteenth-century collection of tales and proverbs records bultungin, which means “I change myself into a hyena”, and ngadza for a person who does it; the more colourful claim attached to it in Europe, that whole villages in the region were populated entirely by such people, comes from Victorian speculative writing rather than from anyone in Bornu. Across the western Sudanic belt the night-shape is a cannibal that lures lovers out of doors, and by day it is a healer, a woodcutter or again a smith, known by a hairy body, red gleaming eyes and a nasal voice. Members of the Korè association among the Bambara of Mali put on the hyena instead, masking and acting out its greed and filth so that everyone watching remembers not to resemble it. Further east the animal itself is the villain: al-Damiri, writing in 1371, has hyenas drinking blood from sleepers’ necks, and a Persian medical text from 1376 treats the kaftar, half man and half hyena and a killer of children, as a patient with a curable condition.

What the werehyena can do follows from what it is. It carries a killing gaze it need not aim, it wears the most common large predator in the country as a disguise, it holds a claim on the dead, and it is invisible because it is your neighbour. Its limits follow from the same place. The power is inherited rather than earned, which means it cannot be taught or bought or renounced. It needs a body still whole enough to walk, so rot defeats it and so does a family willing to lose sleep. It can be named, and once named it can be dragged to a sickbed at gunpoint, made to spit on its victim and step over him. And a scar will find it. The accusation did the damage, not the hyena. Salamon’s interviews with Ethiopian Jews record what it was like to be the hyena people, to have your funerals watched and your children called grave robbers, and the tally of what that belief cost is measured in expulsions, broken marriages and killings rather than in disturbed graves.

The strangest thing about all of it is how little the real animal is hated. In Harar, behind the old walls, the gey waraba come into the streets after dark and are known individually by name, fed scraps at the gate, given porridge at the shrine of Aw Nugus at Ashura, and credited with keeping jinn out of the city by whooping them back into the hills. The hyena is a neighbour there, and a useful one. It is only when someone suspects there is a man inside it that the trouble starts.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a werehyena?

A werehyena is a person believed to take the form of a hyena, usually at night, found across a broad belt of African tradition from Morocco to the Horn of Africa and south into Tanzania. The English name was coined by analogy with werewolf. The best documented version is the Ethiopian and Eritrean buda, a person believed to hold the evil eye and to change shape by rolling in hearth ash.

Who was accused of being a buda in Ethiopia?

Accusations fell on hereditary artisan castes, especially blacksmiths, potters, tanners and weavers, who were landless and lived apart from the land-owning Amhara. The Beta Israel, Ethiopia’s Jewish community, were widely called the hyena people by their Christian neighbours, partly because metalworking was a common Jewish trade. The status was inherited and could not be shed, which made the belief a permanent social stigma rather than a passing suspicion.

How does a werehyena attack?

The buda kills by envy and by looking. It fixes a victim with the evil eye, often while in hyena form so that its human identity stays hidden, then waits for the sickness to take hold. After burial it returns to the grave, opens it by untying a knotted root or by unfolding a round of injera, and raises the corpse to serve it as a mute slave for seven years.

How do people protect themselves from a werehyena?

Families watch a new grave for forty nights, or twelve in some accounts, until the body has decayed too far to be useful. Children are given protective haircuts, addressed in the opposite gender, and spat on lightly when danger seems near. Adults wear kitab amulets written by a debtera, cover the mouth and nose with a cloak in company, and answer every compliment with an appeal for God’s protection against the evil eye.

What is a bultungin?

Bultungin is the Kanuri word for a werehyena in the region of the old Bornu Empire around Lake Chad, recorded in a collection of Kanuri tales and proverbs published in 1854. It translates as “I change myself into a hyena”, and an individual with the ability is called ngadza. The often repeated claim that entire villages there consisted of werehyenas comes from nineteenth-century European speculation rather than from Kanuri sources.

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