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| ‘There was something very strange going on, bordering on sadomasochism’ … the street perfomer and his hyena. Photograph: Pieter Hugo |
Pieter Hugo's best photograph: the hyena men of Nigeria
‘They would beat drums to draw a crowd. Then they’d take the muzzles off the hyenas and put their heads between their jaws’
Thu 19 Jul 2018
I
first learned about Nigeria’s “hyena men” in 2005, thanks to a picture that had gone viral. The caption said they were debt collectors in Lagos. I knew I had to find them. The country has a population of 186 million people, though, so the odds were pretty low. But then in 2017 a journalist friend told me they come from his home town, Kano, in the north. Two weeks later, I was on my way.
