The current Barbican exhibition, Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins, features many of the usual suspects, from Diane Arbus onwards. One of my favourites was South African photographer Pieter Hugo, represented by a couple of his extraordinary portraits of the Nigerian hyena men, aka Gadawan Kura.
Pieter Hugo first learned of Nigeria’s Gadawan Kura, or hyena handlers, in 2003 when he received an image taken on a cell phone camera depicting several of these men with their beasts in the streets of Lagos. A newspaper in Hugo’s native South Africa published a similar image and identified the men as debt collectors, drug dealers, and thieves who enlisted hyenas as muscle in support of their criminal activities. With the help of friends in Nigeria, Hugo found the group in a shantytown outside of the capital, Abuja. They were not necessarily criminals, but rather what Hugo describes in an artist’s statement as “itinerant minstrels... a group of men, a little girl, three hyenas, four monkeys and a few rock pythons,” who subsist by staging performances and selling traditional medicine. Hugo traveled with the group for weeks at a time over the course of two years, taking a series of portraits of the men posing with their animals....
Determining a hyena’s gender can be a challenge. Females of the species are not only larger and more aggressive than males, but they also have an elongated clitoris that closely resembles a penis in size, shape and erectile ability. Lacking an external vagina, females urinate, mate, and give birth through this pseudo-penis, an anatomical anomaly that has fueled the popular misconception that hyenas are hermaphrodites.
Captivation does little to mitigate the hyena’s bizarre appearance. Historically, the animals have seldom been domesticated and seem only precariously so in Hugo’s photographs. The hyenas are bound with woven muzzles attached to chains that seem better suited to anchoring medium-sized boats than to leashing an animal. Some of the men are depicted with sticks or clubs, presumably as a counter-measure if the animal were to slip, for a moment, back into the wild. At the same time, the possibility of barely suppressed animal violence erupting is what makes the hyena a compelling spectacle—or an effective partner in crime.
More here, from Adetokunbo Abiola:
The first time I met up with the hyena men, as they have become known, the group was staying in a ramshackle three-bedroom apartment in Dei Dei Junction, a suburb of the Nigerian capital, Abuja. The animals were housed in specially constructed boxes. Every member of the party had sores and scars on their faces, legs and hands – legacies of times when the animals suddenly turned hostile and pounced on their handlers with their teeth and claws. ‘We use a heavy stick to hit the hyenas on the head when they misbehave,’ Abdullahi said. ‘We knock them down on the ground. All of us hold the sticks in case the animals become aggressive.’ However, Abdullahi’s daughter, six-year-old ‘Mummy’, played with the animals with no sign of fear. She even rode a hyena as if it were a miniature, slope-shouldered pony. ‘She cannot be harmed,’ said Abdullahi. ‘It’s the same thing with the snakes and monkeys. She has taken a potion of traditional herbs and has been bathed with it. So her safety from the animals is guaranteed for the rest of her life.’
Hmm.
The 2007 book, The Hyena and Other Men, now seems to be something of a collector's item. A (cheaper) retrospective was published in 2012.
[Photos: Pieter Hugo]
The Gadawan Kura previously.
Also from Hugo - young Ghanaians scraping a living from the huge Agbogbloshie dump on the outskirts of Accra.
one must admit that the hyena is one weird damnimal.
in my zone eastern coyotes have no closed season.
if something at all like a hyena showed up most (but not all)of the kill no creatures set would demand immediate extirpation with extreme prejudice.
Posted by: gavin | April 02, 2018 at 02:43 AM