by Nigel Barley
Faced with the impossibility of eating off the land, I decided to keep my own chickens. This, also, was not a success. Some I bought, some were given to me. Dowayo chickens, on the whole, are scrawny, wretched things; eating them is rather like eating an Airfix model of a Tiger Moth. They responded to treatment, however. I fed them on rice and oatmeal, which Dowayos who never feed them at all found a huge extravagance. One day, they began to lay. I had fantasies of being able to eat an egg every day. As I sat in my hut, gloating over my first day’s haul, my assistant appeared in the doorway, an expression of bland self-satisfaction on his face. ‘Patron,’ he exclaimed, ‘I just noticed the chickens were laying eggs so I killed them before they lost all their strength!’
After this, I tended to restrict myself to a breakfast of oatmeal and tinned milk which I bought in the mission shop. Tea is a major crop in Cameroon but it was normally impossible to buy it in Poli. There was, however, Nigerian tea, presumably smuggled over the border.
My assistant would normally eat with me since he claimed it was impossible to eat the food of these savage mountain Dowayos. After some months I noticed he had become hugely fat and discovered that he was in fact dining with both the Chief and myself.
After breakfast would come my ‘clinic’. There is a great deal of disease in Dowayoland and I was something less than ecstatic about having it accumulate around my hut. However, even with my limited knowledge and medical resources, it would have been inhuman to turn the sick away as my assistant did initially. In accordance with African notions of status, he regarded me as someone who had to be carefully screened from contact with the common herd. It was all right for me to speak to chiefs or magicians but I should not waste my time with foolish commoners or women. He was frankly horrified when I talked to children. He posted himself strategically in front of my compound and would leap out on anyone who sought to approach me directly, interposing himself like a secretary in the ante-chamber of some great man. Whenever I sought to give anyone a cigarette, he would insist that it pass from my hand to his before it could be given to a Dowayo. In the end we had words about it and he desisted in his attentions but always managed to convey that excessive contact with ordinary people diminished his own exalted rank.
Infected wounds and sores would always be brought to me and I would put on anti-biotic and a dressing, knowing full well the futility of this since Dowayos always keep wounds open and remove a dressing as soon as they are out of sight. There were one or two cases of malaria, on which I now considered myself to be an expert, and I would hand out quinine, my assistant making sure I got the numerals right when I explained dosage.
The news soon got around that I was willing to hand out ‘roots’, as the Dowayos called remedies, for malaria and had good medicines. I was somewhat taken aback when an old woman turned up very angry and complained that I had given her malaria. A huge argument developed that I was quite unable to follow at this stage, and she was driven away with much mockery. It was only after months of work with healers and sorcerers that I understood what the trouble had been. Dowayos divide disease into a number of classes. There are ‘epidemics’, infectious diseases that white men have remedies against, things like malaria or leprosy. There is witchcraft of the head or from plants. There are the symptoms that are caused by the spirits of the dead. Lastly, there are pollution diseases that come from contact with forbidden things and people. The cure for the last is regulated contact with the forbidden thing or person that has caused the disease. Having heard that I had a cure for malaria, the old woman had imagined it was a pollution disease and the cure in my hut was also the cause of the disease. To keep such a powerful and dangerous thing in the middle of a village would, indeed, be grounds for complaint.
The rest of the morning would be spent on language learning. My assistant greatly enjoyed the role of teacher and took great delight in drilling me in verb forms until I could stand no more. He was rather less taken with a practice I adopted after the first couple of weeks.
I had with me a small, portable tape recorder that I nearly always carried with me; when talking to people in the fields I would sometimes record conversations. Dowayos loved to hear their own voices, but were not hugely impressed; they’d seen tape recorders before. Dowayo dandies affected radio-cassette players and most had encountered them at one time or another. What really had them murmuring ‘wonder’, ‘magic’ was my writing. Except for a few of the children, Dowayos are illiterate. Even the children write in French and, before the linguists did research on the Dowayo tongue, it would never have occurred to anyone to write in Dowayo. When I made notes in a mish-mash of French and English with important Dowayo phrases copied in phonetic transcription, they would delightedly watch me for hours, taking turns to look over my shoulder. When after a couple of weeks I was able to read back to a man what he had said at our last meeting, he was stupefied. Gradually, I built up a library of taped conversations, my notes on them, and the interpretations I had received subsequently. I was able to pick one at random and go through it, word by word, with my assistant, making him justify translations he had given me, elaborate on certain terms or beliefs and explain the difference between close synonyms. Once this became a standard procedure, our level of linguistic competence rose enormously. He became much more careful; I began to learn much faster. Instead of just foisting me off with an approximation, he would mark down points of difficulty for us to go over later and abandoned the stance of omniscience he had adopted initially.
Lunch would be some form of hard-tack, perhaps chocolate, peanut butter, rice. Then my assistant would go off for a siesta during the hottest part of the day and I would retire to my rock-like bed for an hour’s letter-writing, sleep or desperate calculation of my financial straits.
After some weeks the weather became much hotter, the rain came in sporadic downpours and I instituted the afternoon swim. Water is very dangerous in Dowayoland. A number of parasitic diseases are endemic, the worst being bilharzia. Many Dowayos suffer from it; it produces severe intestinal bleeding, leading to nausea, weakness and, finally, death. The life-expectancy in Dowayoland is so low anyway that many perish before it gets to this stage. I had been told many different things, at different times, by different people. According to some authorities, one foot injudiciously placed in a stream confers lifelong bilharzia; according to others, it is necessary to immerse oneself for hours in polluted water before infection is possible. A passing French geographer told me that the water was perfectly safe after the first heavy rains. These, it seemed, washed downstream the watersnails that carry the parasite. Thus, provided one avoided stagnant or slow-flowing water in the dry season, the risk was minimal. Since I had been tortured by the sight of Dowayos joyfully splashing in the cool streams while I laboured past bathed in sweat, I was greatly tempted to take the plunge; it was in any case impossible to travel far in Dowayoland without wading waist-deep across raging torrents. I therefore decided to accept the geographer’s diagnosis and go to the men’s bathing place, a deep pool in the granite rocks at the bottom of a waterfall, forbidden to women on the grounds that boys were circumcised here.
On the occasion of my first appearance at the swimming place, there were one or two young men on their way back from the fields who had stopped to wash. My anatomy was clearly the subject of florid speculation. On the following days there were twenty or thirty men who spontaneously appeared to see the great novelty of a white man with no clothes on. Thereafter, my value as an attraction tailed off rapidly and numbers returned to normal. I felt mildly insulted.
This place was delightful, set at the foot of the mountains from which the water gushed, cold and clean. The pool itself was shaded by trees and floored with sand. At various levels around the stream were ledges in the rock face on which one could lie in all possible variations of heat or cool.
Matthieu and I came here most days unless engaged elsewhere and it was in this all-male environment that the Dowayos first began to talk to me about their re
ligion and beliefs. Since it was abundantly clear that they had all been circumcised after the Dowayo fashion and I had not, conversation turned spontaneously around this topic with which Dowayo culture has more than a passing obsession.
The bathing over, we would make a turn through the fields, trying to track down any beer parties being held that day. Here, beneath a woven shade, we would find anything up to twenty men and women intermittently hoeing and drinking. Millet beer has been described by an eminent French colonial official as having the consistency of pea soup and the taste of paraffin. The description is accurate. Dowayos take nothing else at midday and become remarkably drunk on its very low alcoholic content. This was a constant source of wonder to me. I had made an early policy decision to drink native beer despite the undoubted horrors of the process of fabrication. On my very first visit to a Dowayo beer party, this was put severely to the test. ‘Will you have beer?’ I was asked. ‘Beer is furrowed,’ I replied, having got the tones wrong. ‘He said “Yes”,’ my assistant explained to them in a tired voice. They were amazed. No white man, at this time, had ever been known to touch beer. Seizing a calabash, they proceeded to wash it out in deference to my exotic sensibilities. This they did by offering it to a dog to lick out. Dowayo dogs are not beautiful at the best of times; this one was particularly loathsome, emaciated, open wounds on its ears where flies feasted, huge distended ticks hanging from its belly. It licked the calabash with relish. It was refilled and passed to me. Everyone regarded me, beaming expectantly. There was nothing to be done; I drained it and gasped out my enjoyment. Several more calabashes followed. They were astonished that I was not drunk. It is virtually impossible for a Westerner to get drunk on millet beer; he simply cannot hold the required amount. Dowayos, however, rapidly become falling-down drunk on factory-made beer. It is not uncommon for them to make a bottle last three days, during which time they claim to be constantly inebriated.
The Chief, Zuuldibo, was always hovering on these occasions; he never missed a beer-party, though he steadfastly refused to undertake agricultural labour in payment. The simplest way of finding one was to send out Matthieu to find Zuuldibo. Since Zuuldibo’s dog had taken to following me in the hope of bounty, we made a rather bizarre procession. My first successful speech in Dowayo was: ‘Matthieu follows the Chief. I follow Matthieu. The dog follows me.’ This was held to be wit of the highest order and much repeated.
After a session in the fields, I would always try to be at the crossroads about nightfall as people returning to the various areas of Kongle passed by. A couple of felled trees had been brought here as seats and the men sat and gossiped and swatted mosquitoes until it was time to eat. A meal of oatmeal or instant mashed potato (very expensive but real potatoes rotted in days) with a can of soup finished off the day and I would retire to write up notes, record questions to ask the next day and read anything I could lay my hands on.
My one real luxury was a gas light I had bought in N’gaoundere. Although I had to drive 150 miles to change the cylinder, this only had to be faced every couple of months and I had a spare. It meant I could work after dark, a huge boon since night falls before seven o’clock all the year round. I was much visited by Dowayos wanting to see this wonder and had great difficulty explaining that it was not electricity.
So the first few weeks passed and I began to feel my way into village life. As the Dowayos began to drift back to the villages the edge was taken off my loneliness, but I was still subject to huge bouts of depression when trapped in my tiny hut by the rain. My health had not fully recovered from the attack of malaria. This was partly due to the monotony of my diet that often led me to skip meals or just to force as much down as I could by regarding food as essential fuel.
It was months before I felt I had made any progress in the language at all and I was quietly convinced that I would return having learned and understood nothing. The worst thing was that Dowayos seldom if ever seemed to do anything, have any beliefs or engage in symbolic activity. They just existed.
My frustration at not being able to follow more than a fraction of what was said around me began to focus on my hapless assistant. It seemed to me that he told me nothing but incorrect verb forms; I began to doubt whether half the time he understood what I was saying, even whether he was able to speak the dialect of mountain Dowayos at all. I had seen him, on occasion, exchange furtive looks with other men when certain topics were raised and I scented conspiracy.
The position of a fieldworker’s assistant is a difficult one. He is expected by the locals to take their part in any clash of loyalties with his employer; in an African society the life of a man who incurs the wrath of his kinsmen can be made very uncomfortable indeed. At the same time, his employer expects him to act as his agent in dealing with local people and tipping him off on strategies and contacts. For an ethnographer, anxious for the truth, working through the medium of the convoluted loyalties of a partly literate schoolboy is a frustrating business; it is aggravated by the fact that each party may have quite different notions of what is expected of him. Most Dowayos, extrapolating from their experience of missionaries, expect white men to be fanatical Christians. They were very surprised, therefore, when my assistant went to prayer meetings on Sundays while I did not. I had to make a point of bumping into the Christians on their way back and spending time with them just to show that my absence was not from feelings of superiority on my part.
To begin with I was distressed to find that I couldn’t extract more than ten words from Dowayos at a stretch. When I asked them to describe something to me, a ceremony, or an animal, they would produce one or two sentences and then stop. I would have to ask further questions to get more information. This was very unsatisfactory as I was directing their answers rather more than sound field method would have prescribed. One day, after about two months of fairly fruitless endeavour, the reason struck me. Quite simply, Dowayos have totally different rules about how to divide up the parts of a conversation. Whereas in the West we learn not to interrupt when somebody else is talking, this does not hold in much of Africa. One must talk to people physically present as if on the telephone, where frequent interjections and verbal response must be given if only to assure the other party that one is still there and paying attention. When listening to someone talking, a Dowayo stares gravely at the floor, rocks backwards and forwards and murmurs, ‘Yes’, ‘It is so’, ‘Good’, every five seconds or so. Failure to do so leads to the speaker rapidly drying up. As soon as I adopted this expedient, my interviews were quite transformed.
But the main problem lay not so much in my assistant’s fidelity and honesty as in his age. Age brings status in Africa; the Dowayo way of showing respect is to address someone as ‘old man’. Thus venerable Dowayo Nestors would call me ‘old man’ or ‘grandfather’. It was scandalous that a mere child of seventeen should be present at the conversations of such learned elders as ourselves. He may have been fairly invisible to me, but to the Dowayos he stuck out like a sore thumb. In later days, he would be peremptorily dismissed by aged Dowayos before we got down to serious matters, and I would consult him later with any linguistic problems that had come up. Fortunately, he had some obscure kinship with the people of the principal rainchief and this sufficed to excuse his presence in the early days, otherwise I – like others who had worked among the Dowayos – would have returned huffily convinced of the pig-headed stubbornness of that race.
7
‘O Cameroon, O Cradle of our Fathers’
The one break in the weekly routine was my Friday afternoon visit to town. Its justification was that I had to collect my mail which arrived from Garoua every Friday. This was a blatant falsehood: the mail only arrived in theory on Friday. The Fulani chief of Poli held the contract to deliver the post in his truck but when he did so, or whether he did so at all, depended entirely on personal whim. Should he decide that he wanted to spend a few days in the city, he would do so and the mail would not arrive for another week. It was a matter of sup
reme indifference to him that none of the schoolteachers or other functionaries received their pay, that drugs for the hospital would be held up, that the entire town would be inconvenienced.
Moreover, mail is so slow that the first two months all I received was letters from the bank in Garoua with outrageously inaccurate statements of my account. By some sleight of hand I now had three accounts, one in Yaounde, one in Garoua, and another, quite mysteriously, in a town I had never even visited.
An important feature of ‘collecting the mail’ was that it provided me with a break from my assistant. I had never in my life spent so much time in the uninterrupted company of one person and had begun to feel like one married against his will to a most unsuitable partner.
Hence Friday afternoons began with the cheerful filtering of water for my trip, which I insisted on undertaking on foot, firstly because petrol was impossible to obtain in Poli and so had to be carefully husbanded, secondly because otherwise I had to take the entire village. In the rainy season there was a copious flow of water so I contented myself with simply filtering it for drinking purposes. In the dry season all waterholes become stinking stagnant pools and it is necessary to boil it or add chlorine. My water bottle became a great joke among the Dowayos who were amazed that I could make a litre last most of the day, but they accepted this as a peculiarity of the white man. In fact, they have their own system of water prohibitions of which mine was but a logical extension. Blacksmiths, for example, cannot draw water with other Dowayos; they must be offered water by others. Ordinary Dowayos cannot drink mountain Dowayo water unless offered it by the owners. Rainchiefs cannot drink rainwater. It is part of a system of regulated exchange that governs the passage of women, food, water between the three groups. Since I did not exchange food or women with other groups, it was appropriate that I should have my own restrictions on water. Other Dowayos would never touch my water unless I literally put it in their hands, believing that a disease would result from uninvited drinking.
