Days begin early in Africa. In my London life I had been used to rising about half past eight of a morning; here everyone was afoot at five-thirty, as soon as it was light. I was wakened punctually by sounds of beating metal and screaming and guessed that my local missionary was about his business. I had been allocated a large, old mission house to myself. At the time I had no idea what luxury I was enjoying; this was the last time I was to see running water, not to mention electricity. I was intrigued to find a paraffin refrigerator next door, the first time I had seen one of these monsters. Capriciously unpredictable, these erstwhile staples of bush life have become rare and expensive as electricity has been introduced into the towns. Out of sheer perversity, they will spontaneously defrost and destroy a month’s meat supply or give out so much heat as to incinerate anyone in the room. They must be protected from draughts, damp, unevenness of the floor and with luck they may consent to exert a mild cooling effect. In Cameroon, with numerous languages and pijins, there are other dangers. English paraffin and petrol get mixed up with French pétrole and essence, American kerosene and gas. It is not unknown for helpful servants to top paraffin refrigerators up with petrol, with devastating results. I peered inside; carefully stacked were bags of large yellow termites. Even in death they seemed to seethe. I was never able to bring myself to eat more than one or two of these African delicacies, of which Dowayos are inordinately fond. The insects swarm at the beginning of the rains and are attracted by any light. The standard means of collecting them is to place a light in the midst of a bucket of water. When they reach the light, the insects drop their wings and fall into the water whence they can be collected and their fatty bodies either roasted or eaten raw.
After a day’s respite it was time to deal with the administration again. At the N’gaoundere mission I had been urged not to forget to register with the local police and to introduce myself to the local sous-préfet, the government representative. Accordingly, I armed myself with all my documents and set off on foot into town. Although it was something less than a mile, it was clearly a major eccentricity for a white man to walk. One man asked me whether my car had broken down. Villagers rushed out and shook hands with me jabbering in garbled Fulani. I had learned the rudiments of this tongue in London so I was able at least to say, ‘I am sorry, I do not speak Fulani.’ Since I had practised this sentence many times, it came out rather fluently and added to the incomprehension.
The police post was manned by about fifteen gendarmes, all armed to the teeth. One was polishing a sub-machine gun. The commandant turned out to be a huge Southerner of about six foot five. He summoned me into his office and inspected my documents minutely. What was my reason for being here? I displayed my research permit, a most impressive document, covered with photographs and stamps. He was clearly very unhappy as I tried to expound the essential nature of the anthropological endeavour. ‘But what’s it for?’ he asked. Choosing between giving an impromptu version of the ‘Introduction to Anthropology’ lecture course and something less full, I replied somewhat lamely, ‘It’s my job.’ Subsequently, I came to realize what a highly satisfactory explanation this was to an official who spent most of his life in pointlessly enforcing rules that seemed an end in themselves. He considered me lengthily under hooded eyes. I noticed for the first time that he was chewing on a needle. He would balance it, blunt end outwards, on his tongue. With a deft flick, he drew it wholly inside his mouth and performed an adroit adjustment so that it reappeared at the other side of the mouth with the point outwards. Back in, and there was a blunt end again. It was horribly like a snake’s tongue. I felt there would be problems here, and I was to be proved right. For the time being, however, he let me go with the air of one allowing a rogue enough rope to hang himself. My name and personal details were recorded in a large volume that recalled the tomes of prohibited persons from the Embassy.
The sous-préfet lived in a dank and peeling house dating from the French colonial period. Moss and mould clung to every crack and crevice in its façade. On a hill above the town he had constructed a gleaming new palace but it stood empty, its air-conditioning unused, its tiled floors untrodden. Several explanations were given for this. Some said that the government had confiscated it as proof of corruption. The Dowayos, when I got to know them, told a different tale. The house had been built on an old Dowayo burial ground, despite their protests. They had not threatened, they claimed, they did not need to; they knew the spirits of their ancestors. They had simply informed the sous-préfet that the day he moved in was the day he would die. Either way, he never did move in but was doomed to look at his new house from the window of the old.
Having listened to my tale, a dour servant showed me in. I was struck by the fact that he knelt down before daring to address his superior.
I had been tipped off in advance that a present of some cigars would be ‘acceptable’, so these were duly produced and graciously accepted, disappearing swiftly inside the flowing robes. I was still standing up, the servant was still on his knees, the sous-préfet sat. My documents were once more examined with minute attention. I began to fear that they might wear out before I left the country. ‘Out of the question,’ he declared impassively. ‘I cannot have you in Poli.’ This was something of a setback; I had regarded this as a courtesy visit. ‘But my research permit, from Yaounde,’ I emphasized carefully, ‘gives me permission to be here.’ He lit one of my cigars. ‘Yaounde is not here. You have not my permission.’ Clearly this was not a situation where the passage of currency between us would be politic since the venerable retainer was still on his knees, taking in every word. ‘How might I obtain your permission?’ I persisted. ‘A letter from the prefect, absolving me of responsibility, would be sufficient. He is to be found in Garoua.’ He turned away and busied himself with papers. Our interview was at an end.
Back at the mission, Pastor Brown seemed to regard this as a vindication of his pessimism. He was touchingly cheered by my misfortune. He doubted whether I would ever get to see the prefect even if he happened to be where they claimed he was and not away in the capital; it was virtually certain he would not return for months. His own life had been fraught with many such frustrations. There was no hope; this was Africa. He walked off chuckling.
Calculating that I had just enough petrol to reach Garoua, about a hundred miles away, I resolved to set off at dawn the following day.
When I left the house next day, I was rather taken aback to find a sea of expectant faces confidently intending to accompany me. It has always been something of a mystery how such information circulates. Westerners often fail to realize with what minute attention they are observed. Being seen checking the fuel level is enough to trigger a barrage of requests for transport. To refuse is held to be inadmissible. Those who reproach Europeans with paternalism fail totally to perceive the relations that traditionally exist between rich and poor in much of Africa. A man who works for you is not just an employee: you are his patron. It is an open-ended relationship. If his wife is ill, that is as much your problem as his and you will be expected to do all in your power to heal her. If you decide to throw anything away, he must be given first refusal on it. To give it to someone else would be most improper. It is almost impossible to draw a line between what is your concern and what is his private life. The unwary European will get caught up in the vast range of loose kinship obligations, unless he is very lucky indeed. When an employee calls you ‘father’, this is a danger sign. There is surely a story about an unpaid dowry or dead cattle to follow and it will be perceived as a genuine betrayal not to assume part of the burden. The line between ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ is subject to continual renegotiation and Dowayos are as expert as anyone else in trying to get as much as they can out of a link with a rich man. The failure to realize that the relationship is being seen in very different terms from either side has led to much friction. Westerners are always complaining of their workers’ (they are not called ‘boys’ or ‘servants’ nowadays) ‘cheek’ or ‘nerve’ in their bland expectation that employers will look after them and always bail them out when in trouble. Initially, I was much put out on occasions such as that which now presented itself. It seemed as if I could never do anything spontaneously or go anywhere without dragging a huge burden of obligation behind me. When in the city, it was even more galling to find that people one had given lifts to would be most annoyed if loans to finance their stay were not also readily forthcoming. I had brought them to this strange place; to forsake them here would be unthinkable.
However, on the first occasion I understood none of this and embarked as many as seemed possible. Here again, European and African notions are strongly divergent. By local standards, a car with only six people in it is empty. Any claim that there is no more room in it is greeted as a patent falsehood. It is a further annoyance, having finally limited numbers by striking those rather firm attitudes that Africans expect from Westerners who really mean what they are saying, only to find that all manner of baggage is suddenly dragged forth from concealment to be tied to the roof with the inevitable strips of rubber cut from inner tubes.
By now much delayed, I finally set off, the car heaving and groaning, for Garoua. Various other features dependent on numerous passengers soon became apparent. Dowayos are not enthusiastic travellers and react badly to motion. Within ten minutes, three or four of them were vomiting with great gusto all over the car, none of them bothering to use the window for this purpose. It was a decidedly seedy driver who finally reached the city limits for more inspection of documents. Whereas a lone white man attracts very little police attention, he is a matter of some concern when hauling around Africans. The police were very interested indeed in my movements and motives.
The appearance of the word ‘doctor’ on my passport seemed to do more than anything else to dispel doubts, but my passengers were not so lucky. While I was seeking to explain the absence of a registration card for the car by leading the sergeant through the dossier I had prudently brought from N’gaoundere, my passengers were dolefully lined up and required to produce receipts for tax for the last three years, identity cards and membership cards of the sole political party. Inevitably, they fell somewhat short of perfection and this caused further delays. It became clear that little would be achieved before the midday siesta.
Garoua is a strange town situated on the River Benoue, a watercourse of sporadic appearance that varies from raging Mississippi in the rainy season to damp sand in the dry. Its dedication to its wayward river explains the smell of ripe fish that hangs over it like a pall of smoke. Dried fish is one of its main industries, the others being beer and administration. The beer is a particular source of fascination to Dowayos. They are keen customers of the breweries that produce the ‘33’ beer, a mark of a previous French administration. Its peculiar quality is that it enables one to pass directly from sobriety to hangover without an intervening stage of drunkenness. The factory has a glass wall through which it was possible to see bottles of beer gliding, without the intervention of human agency, from one stage of the process to another. This deeply impressed the Dowayos and they spent hours watching the miracle. To describe it, they used the word gerse which means ‘miracle’, ‘wonder’, ‘magic’. It was in this context that I first heard the term that was later so to occupy me as an anthropologist. It was also a fertile source of metaphor for their most metaphysical concepts. The Dowayos believed in reincarnation. It was like the beer at Garoua, they explained; people were like bottles that had to be filled with spirit. When they died and were buried, it was like sending the empty bottle back to the factory.
Fearing the worst, I now expected my encounter with the prefect, if it occurred at all, to take some days. A sort of calm fatalism had settled upon me. Things would take as long as they took; there was no point in worrying about it. It is one of the marks of the fieldworker that he has a supplementary gear into which he can shift at such moments and let the slings and arrows do their worst.
Not yet having made those contacts that stand the city-visiting anthropologist in such good stead, I checked into a hotel. Garoua boasted two of these, a modern Novotel at a mere £30 a night for the tourist trade and a seedy French colonial establishment for a fraction of that amount. The latter was clearly more my style. It had apparently been built for the rest and recreation of sun-crazed French officers from the forlorn stations of empire, and consisted of separate huts with grass roofs and furnished in military fashion; but it had water and electricity. It also possessed a large terrace on which the élite would sit and drink as the sun went down behind the trees. It was especially romantic since it was impossible to forget the presence of the rest of Africa: the roars of the lion in the zoo next door recalled it.
It was in this establishment that I first made the acquaintance of the woman who came to be known as the ‘Coo-ee lady’. Whatever the season, Garoua is at least ten degrees hotter than Poli and, thanks to the river, has a profusion of mosquitoes. After being cloistered with vomiting Dowayos, I was therefore keen to have a shower. I was hardly under the tap when there came a persistent dry scratching noise at the door that ignored all attempts at interrogation. Swathing a towel round myself, I opened the door. Outside was an extremely large Fulani woman in her mid-fifties. She began simpering coyly, making little circular motions in the dust with her expansive feet. ‘Yes?’ I queried. She made drinking motions: ‘Water, water.’ My suspicions were aroused; dim memories of the rules of hospitality of the desert stirred. While I was considering the problem, she sailed blandly past me and seized a glass, filling it from the tap. To my horror she began to unwrap her vast form. The porter chose this moment to bring me some soap and, misinterpreting the situation, began to back out muttering apologies. I was trapped in a farce.
Fortunately, my few lessons in Fulani at the School of Oriental and African Studies stood me in good stead, and crying ‘I do not wish it’, I disclaimed any desire of physical contact with this woman, who reminded me strangely of Oliver Hardy. As if by some prearranged sign, the giggling porter seized one arm, and I the other and we got her outside. Thereafter she came back every hour, unable to accept that her charms were unappreciated and roamed outside calling ‘Coo-ee’, like a cat miaowing to come in. In the end, I tired of this. It was clear that she was operating in connivance with the management, so I declared that I was a missionary, come from the bush to see my bishop, and strongly disapproved of such goings-on. They were shocked and embarrassed; thereafter she ignored me.
The story became a favourite of the Dowayos as we sat around the fires in the evening when one of the chief occupations is spinning yarns. I had my assistant rehearse me in telling the ‘fat Fulani woman story’, as it came to be known, and when I got to the part where she called ‘Coo-ee’ they would scream with laughter, hug their knees and roll about on the ground. It did much to establish good relations between us.
My visit to the prefect’s office the next day turned out to be an anticlimax. I was shown straight in. The prefect was a tall, very dark Fulani who listened to my problem, dictated a letter over the telephone and chatted to me most amiably about government policy with regard to establishing schools in pagan areas. The letter was brought to him, he signed it, stamped it and wished me good luck and ‘bon courage’. Thus armed, I returned to Poli.
The first priority was to find an assistant and settle down to learning the language. The anthropologist’s assistant is a figure who seems suspiciously absent from ethnographic accounts. The conventional myth seeks to depict the battle-scarred anthropologist as a lone figure wandering into a village, settling in and ‘picking up the language’ in a couple of months; at the most, we may find references to translators being dispensed with after a few weeks. Never mind that this is contrary to all known linguistic experience. In Europe, a man may have studied French at school for six years and with the help of language-learning devices, visits to France and exposure to the literature and yet find himself hardly able to stammer out a few words of French in an emergency. Once in the field, he transforms himself into a linguistic wonder-worker. He becomes fluent in a language much more difficult for a Westerner than French, without qualified teachers, without bilingual texts, and often without grammars and dictionaries. At least, this is the impression he manages to convey. Of course much may be done in pijin or even in English, but as often as not this isn’t mentioned either.
It was clear to me that I needed a native Dowayo who also spoke some French. This meant that he would have been to school which also, given the nature of things in Dowayoland, would imply that he was a Christian. For me that would be a considerable disadvantage since the traditional religion was one of the areas that interested me most. But there was nothing for it; I decided to go along to the local secondary school and see if they had someone suitably qualified. In fact, I never got there.
I was pre-empted by one of the preachers being trained at the Poli mission who knew what I was looking for; it so happened that he had twelve brothers. With rare entrepreneurial flair he swiftly mobilized them, marched them in from the village twenty miles out in the bush and presented them to me. This one, he explained was a good cook and very cheerful. Alas, he did not speak French. This one could read and write, was a terrible cook, but very strong. This one was a good Christian and told stories well. Each, it seemed, had great virtues and was an outstanding bargain. In the end, I agreed to hire one on trial, nobly settling for one who could not cook but spoke the best French, and could read and write. I realized at the time that the preacher himself was the man I should have taken on but his present employment prevented that. He was subsequently thrown out of the mission because of his promiscuous tendencies.
The time had come, if indeed it was not overdue, to move into a village. Dowayos divide into two sorts, mountain and plains. Everyone I had spoken to had urged me to live among plains Dowayos. They were less barbarous, supplies would be easier, more of them spoke French; I would be able to go to church more easily. Mountain Dowayos were savage and difficult, they would tell me nothing, they worshipped the Devil. Given such information, an anthropologist can only make one choice; I opted for mountain Dowayos. Some nine miles outside Poli was the village of Kongle. Although on the plains between two sets of hills, it was a mountain Dowayo village. Here, I was told, lived a very old man who was a stern traditionalist and had much arcane knowledge from the ancestors. The road was just passable. I decided to install myself here.
I consulted Matthieu, my new assistant. He was horrified to hear that I intended to live in the bush. Did this mean I should not have a fine house and other servants? Alas, it did. But surely I did not intend to live in Kongle – the people were savages. I should leave it to him; he would speak to his father, a plains Dowayo, who would arrange for us to live near the Catholic mission. I explained again the nature of my work. The only similar endeavour in Dowayoland had been the establishment of the linguists who had begun the analysis of the Dowayo language. They had spent some two years building a fine cement house and had been supplied by aeroplane. Matthieu was distressed to learn that my operation was much more a shoestring affair. It became clear that his status was dependent on my own, and he managed to make any lapse from dignity on my part seem like a bitter betrayal.
The moment for initial contact had come. Taking Matthieu’s advice I brought some beer and tobacco and we set off for Kongle. The road was not too bad, though there were two rivers I did not much like the look of; indeed they proved rather a nuisance. My car would make a habit of developing faults half-way across. This was more serious than it might otherwise have been since they were liable to flash-flood. The mountains were pure granite, and should it rain there the water came straight off and caused almost a tidal wave in the river valleys. To either side of the road were fields with people working in them. They stopped and stared as we crawled past. Some fled. Later I found that they had assumed we were from the sous-préfet; outsiders usually meant trouble to Dowayos. At the foot of the mountains the road simply came to an end, and behind a palisade of millet stalks and cacti lay the village.
Dowayo huts are circular mud constructions with conical roofs. Being built of the mud and grass of the countryside, they assume a picturesque quality that is a relief after the ugliness of the cities. On the roofs grow long, trailing melons like the rambling roses of an English cottage. Following Matthieu’s lead, I entered the circle that stands before every Dowayo village. This is the place where all public meetings and courts of law are conducted, where rituals are held and the various shrines important in religious life are to be found. Behind it lies a second circle where the communally owned cattle are kept. We passed through these and into the courtyard of the chief. It is not strictly accurate to use this term: the Dowayos have no real chiefs in the sense of leaders with power and authority. The French tried to create such men so that they would have figureheads to rule through and someone to collect taxes. The Dowayo term for such men, waari, is based upon an older classification. Chiefs are simply rich men, that is, men with cattle. Such men can organize the various religious festivals that are an essential part of ritual life. Poor men can associate themselves with rich celebrants and so complete rituals that they would not otherwise be able to afford. Chiefs are therefore very important people. Some have modelled themselves on the dominant local tribe, the Fulani, and sought to improve their status by refusing to speak Dowayo to their own people. They pretend that they can only understand it with difficulty, although it is their first language. Hence their astonishment when I refused to talk Fulani, like all the other white men, and insisted on learning Dowayo. Several of the chiefs have adopted all the panoply of pomp with which Fulani nobles surround themselves. They wear swords and have someone carrying a red sunshade over their heads. Some even have praise singers who precede them beating drums and wailing out a stereotyped list of their singular accomplishments and virtues, always in Fulani.
The Chief of Kongle was a rather different kettle of fish. He despised such acculturated Dowayos and made a point of only speaking Dowayo to them.
We came to a halt before a bare-breasted woman who knelt down before me and crossed her hands in front of her genitals concealed by a minute bunch of leaves. ‘She is greeting you,’ whispered Matthieu, ‘shake hands with her.’ I did so and she began to rock backwards and forwards on her heels crooning ‘Thank you’ repeatedly in Fulani and clapping her hands together. Faces appeared furtively over walls and round the side of huts. To my huge embarrassment a child appeared with a single folding chair and stood in the middle of the courtyard. I was required to sit. There was nothing else for it; I sat in splendid isolation, feeling rather like one of those stiff and very British figures in the photographs from colonial days. Status differences are clearly marked in much of Africa; Africans go in for heavy overstatement. People grovel and scrape, kneel and bow in a way that Westerners find hard to swallow; yet to refuse to accept such gestures is extremely impolite. Initially, whenever I would sit on a rock at the same level as everyone else it would cause acute embarrassment. People would desperately attempt to arrange matters so that they were lower than me or insist that I sit on a mat. Sitting on a mat, though lower than on a rock, carries higher status. Thus a compromise was reached.
By now the silence was becoming very strained and I felt it incumbent upon me to say something. I have already said that one of the joys of fieldwork is that it allows one to make use of all sorts of expressions that otherwise are never used. Take me to your leader,’ I cried. This was duly translated and it was explained that the Chief was coming from his field.
Zuuldibo later became a good friend. He was in his early forties, invariably grinning all over his face, and somewhat running to fat. He was resplendent in Fulani robes, a sword and sunglasses. I now realize that whatever he had been up to when I arrived had not been in his field. No one cultivated the land in such attire; moreover, Zuuldibo had never touched a hoe in his life. He found the whole business of agriculture so unspeakably boring that he looked pained if anyone even mentioned work in the fields to him.
I launched into my prepared speech, saying how I had come many miles from the land of the white men because I had heard of the good ways of the Dowayos and especially of the good nature and kindness of the people of Kongle. This seemed to go down rather well. I wanted to live among them for a while and learn their ways and language. I made great play of the fact that I was not a missionary, which no one believed initially because I was living at the mission and driving a car that they recognized as belonging to the mission. I was not connected with the government, which no one believed because I had been seen hanging around the sous-préfecture. I was not a Frenchman, which no one even understood; to Dowayos all white men are the same. However, they listened politely, nodding their heads and muttering ‘It is good’, or ‘true, true’. It was swiftly agreed that I would return in one week and the Chief would have a hut for myself and accommodation for my assistant. We drank a beer together and I gave them some tobacco. Everyone looked ecstatic. As I left, an old woman fell on the ground and embraced my knees. ‘What did she say?’ I asked. Matthieu giggled, ‘She said God had sent you to hear our voice.’ It was a better start than I had dared to hope for.
In the following week I made another trip to the city to lay in supplies and buy tobacco. The black Nigerian tobacco that Dowayos so like sells in Dowayoland for four times the price in Garoua. I bought a large bag of it to pay informants with. My financial situation remained acute. I had arranged for my salary to be sent from England to my Cameroonian account. Since it came from England, it was sent to the old capital of British Cameroons, Victoria, thence to Yaounde, thence to N’gaoundere, thence to Garoua. In fact it never made it; the bank at Victoria simply deducted ten per cent ‘expenses’ and returned it to England, leaving me biting my nails and building up an ever larger debt at the Protestant mission. It was impossible to contact the bank at Victoria; they simply ignored letters, and the phones did not work.
It was during this final trip that I caught malaria for the first time. It manifested itself initially as a mild, light-headed sensation as I left the city. By the time I reached Poli, I had double vision and could barely see the road. A high fever was accompanied by shivering bouts and red-hot knives in the belly.
One of the sadder aspects of the disease is that it causes loss of control of the sphincters; when you stand up, you urinate on your feet. Even worse, there is an almost infinite list of remedies, some of which merely offer protection against the disease, others cure it once contracted. Unluckily, the pills I swallowed so hopefully were not curatives and so my condition worsened and the fevers rapidly reduced me to a whimpering wreck. Pastor Brown passed by to draw encouragement from my physical dissolution and lent me some curatives, warning me that ‘Out here you can never be sure anything’s gonna work.’ Work, however, they did and I was rather shakily back on my feet in time to move into the village as planned – not, however, until I had spent several fever-racked nights tormented by the bats that came down into the house through holes in the ceiling. Much has been written on the excellence of bats’ navigation equipment. It is all false. Tropical bats spend their entire time flying into obstacles with a horrible thudding noise. They specialize in slamming into walls and falling, fluttering onto your face. As my own ‘piece of equipment essential for the field’, I would strongly recommend a tennis racket; it is devastatingly effective in clearing a room of bats. Pastor Brown had taken the time to tell me that bats carried rabies. They occupied a large place in my fevered fantasies.
It was not until I packed up to leave that I found the house had been broken into and half my food stolen.