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Two Ethiopias, Two Hyenas
Drive four hundred kilometers across Ethiopia and the hyena changes meaning entirely. In the Christian highlands around Gondar and Addis Ababa, a hyena crossing your path after dark might be a neighbor in disguise, a blacksmith who slipped out of human skin to feed on the freshly buried. In the walled city of Harar, a man kneels in the dust at the edge of town and lets a wild hyena take meat straight from his mouth, and the crowd around him treats it as a nightly blessing, not a threat.
Both beliefs are Ethiopian. Both are hundreds of years old. They just come from different corners of the same country, shaped by different religious histories, and they arrived at opposite conclusions about the same animal.
The Buda of the Highlands
In the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian regions, buda (sometimes rendered bouda) names a person, usually from a specific craft lineage, who transforms into a hyena at night. The accusation attaches overwhelmingly to blacksmiths and potters — trades that were hereditary, tied to specific families, and treated with a mix of dependence and suspicion by the surrounding farming communities. People needed the blacksmith's tools. They were also, according to the belief, afraid of what he became once the sun went down.
Several details recur across highland accounts of the buda:
- The transformation is said to happen after dark and undo itself by morning, leaving no mark on the person's daytime body.
- Buda are accused of digging into fresh graves to feed on the recently dead, a detail that ties directly into Ethiopian Orthodox burial customs and the importance placed on an undisturbed grave.
- The evil eye is treated as a companion power, separate from the shapeshifting itself — a buda is said to be able to sicken a child, a cow, or a crop with a glance alone, no transformation required.
- Protection is described in practical terms: charms made of iron, since iron is the blacksmith's own material and therefore believed to be what he fears most, along with specific prayers and simply avoiding known buda families after dark.
- The power is inherited, not chosen, which meant the fear attached to entire family lines rather than individuals who behaved suspiciously.
Where the Legend Became a Weapon
This is the part of the story that matters more than the shapeshifting itself, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than folded into atmosphere.
Ethiopian Orthodox communities have historically directed the buda accusation at the Beta Israel, Ethiopian Jews whose men traditionally worked as blacksmiths and metalworkers. Anthropologist Hagar Salamon documented this connection in her 1999 study “The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia,” tracing how an occupational fear calcified into an ethnic one. Because blacksmithing was both a Beta Israel trade and a supernatural suspicion in the surrounding culture, the two got fused. Land ownership was in places closed to the Beta Israel, which pushed families further into craft work — the very occupation the buda accusation was built on. The belief and the discrimination fed each other in a loop that had nothing to do with whether anyone actually turned into a hyena at night.
Salamon's research situates this inside a wider global pattern: a marginalized or endogamous professional group — smiths, again and again, across very different cultures — becomes associated with supernatural danger by the people around them. The hyena is specific to the Horn of Africa. The mechanism is not.
Harar: The City That Chose the Opposite Story
Roughly five hundred kilometers southeast, inside Harar's old city walls, the relationship runs the other direction entirely. For at least five hundred years, according to written records, residents have fed wild spotted hyenas by hand at the city gates. The current practice traces to a farmer who began feeding the animals to keep them off his livestock, and his son and successors — most recently a man known locally as the Hyena Man — carry on the ritual nightly for residents and visitors alike.
Harar's folklore around the practice takes a few different forms:
- One version holds that a pious man dreamed of feeding porridge to starving hyenas during a nineteenth-century famine, ending a wave of attacks on people and livestock.
- Another describes local Muslim saints striking a bargain directly with the hyena packs: food in exchange for the animals leaving the city's people and herds alone.
- Many residents describe hyenas as guardians against jinn, the malevolent spirits of Islamic tradition, rather than as threats in their own right.
The contrast with the highland buda isn't a coincidence of geography. Harar's identity is built on centuries of Islamic scholarship and trade, distinct from the Orthodox Christian institutions that shaped the buda belief further north and west. Two religious frameworks looked at the same predator and produced two different relationships to fear — one that turned the animal into a mask for human threat, one that turned it into a protector to be fed by hand.
What the Two Traditions Add Up To
Read side by side, the buda and the Harar hyena tradition aren't a contradiction to resolve. They're a record of how differently a single animal can be used to think about danger, trust, and the outsider. The highland version made the threat human — a neighbor with a trade, a family with a lineage, a person who could be blamed. Harar's version kept the threat animal and made peace with it directly, gate by gate, meal by meal, for five centuries running.
Both are still told. Both still shape how people in their respective regions think about the hyenas outside their doors after dark.
Learn More
- Hagar Salamon, The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia
- Ethiopian and East African Folklore Books
- Hyena and African Wildlife Photography Books
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