Hyena

Hyena is the great counter-figure to Hare in Kaguru storytelling: clever enough to scheme yet fatally greedy and short-sighted, it is forever gulled by its own appetite. Beidelman shows that the two animals are deliberately paired, their outwardly similar cunning given opposite moral weight, so that Hyena embodies the destructive, antisocial self-interest that the trickster's wit is made to expose. Beyond the tales, the hyena carries a heavy symbolic load in Kaguru thought, associated with the darkness, filth and inversion of the witch; witches are imagined to consort with and even ride hyenas, and the animal's night-prowling and carrion-eating make it an emblem of the forces that gnaw at ordered social life.

Domains

• greed and appetite
• witchcraft and the night

Powers

• devours greedily and without restraint

Relations

• rival: HareThe gluttonous, short-sighted Hyena is the standing foil to the cunning Hare.T. O. Beidelman, 'Ambiguous Animals,' Africa 45(2) (1975); 'Hyena and Rabbit,' Africa 31(1) (1961). (secondary)

Sources

• Hyena is the greedy, gluttonous and short-sighted dupe of Kaguru folktales and, in Kaguru cosmology, the beast most closely linked to witchcraft, night, filth and death; it is the second of the two dominant theriomorphic metaphors.: T. O. Beidelman, 'Ambiguous Animals: Two Theriomorphic Metaphors in Kaguru Folklore,' Africa 45(2) (1975): 183-200. (secondary); T. O. Beidelman, The Kaguru: A Matrilineal People of East Africa (1971). (secondary)