The Innocent Anthropologist

by Nigel Barley

  The walk of some nine kilometres on a rocky road was generally an enjoyable relief from sloshing around the muddy fields. After a couple of months of this, my feet and ankles were rich in all manner of noxious fungi that blandly ignored any of the remedies I had brought with me. Trousers had a life of about a month in the rains. After that they literally rotted away from the bottoms. Wearing shorts was the obvious solution but these made my assistant instantly sullen on the grounds that men of standing did not wear them; moreover, they offered no protection from thorns, razor grass or stinging reeds with which the bush was dotted.

  Once in town, I would install myself in the bar with all the other inveterate mail watchers. Sometimes there was beer to help pass the time as we sat and waited for the sound of the mail truck. Sometimes I would visit the market, a miserable group of old men and women selling a handful of peppers or strings of beads. I cannot believe that this was an economically viable occupation and was surely undertaken solely to relieve boredom. At the other end of town was a butcher who, two days a week, had meat. Since the big men of the town had reserved the major part for themselves in advance, all that was available for others was feet and intestines that were divided up with an axe. The quantity that one got for a fixed price varied capriciously since no scales were used. In and out of all this wandered the various functionaries, locals in various degrees of vagabondage, gendarmes holding hands and everywhere – children.

  Through my Friday mail run, I became acquainted with a number of the teachers in particular. One notable figure was Alphonse. Alphonse was a huge Southerner who had been posted as primary school teacher out in the bush beyond the River Faro. This part of Cameroon is so remote that it is virtually part of Nigeria. Nigerian money and goods are found rather than Cameroonian and a good deal of smuggling goes on. There Alphonse lived in total isolation among the Tchamba. A friend who visited him reported that his hut was minute and his only possessions were one pair of shorts and two sandals of different colour. There was no beer. At the beginning of the dry season a small cloud of dust would appear on the horizon on the road from Tchamba. Gradually, a small dot would become visible. It would be Alphonse walking, stumbling, crawling towards Poli, crying ‘Beer! Beer!’ He would install himself in the bar and proceed to spend his accumulated salary on beer. It is a strong argument for the existence of a beneficent deity that he never arrived during one of the lengthy spells when there was no beer. By about four in the afternoon, Alphonse would have reached the stage where he wanted to dance.

  He was a large man, gentle if unopposed, but prodigious in his furies. The tapster, often the truant pupil of one of the local teachers, would be dispatched to fetch his radio. As soon as the music started, Alphonse began to heave, like some great phenomenon of nature. Oblivious to the world, he shuffled, emitting low moans, drawing great draughts from his bottle, hips swaying, groin gyrating, head drooping. This would continue for hours until he reached a more advanced stage where everyone else had to dance as well lest he take offence. It was a matter of some concern whether the mail would arrive before Alphonse attained the point of social dancing. Alphonse was no respecter of persons and the bar would often contain nervously circling tax inspectors and gendarmes all dancing under his imperial sway, as he sighed and smiled happily in one corner.

  His chief ally and fellow hell-raiser was another Southerner, Augustin. Augustin had defected from the life of a chartered accountant in the capital and become a teacher of French. He was another rugged individualist in a state that treasured fawning conformity, the only man I knew who refused to buy a membership card for the single political party. A feud had begun between himself and the local sous-préfet; both were notorious for their uxoriousness. It was confidently predicted among the local functionaries that one day he would ‘disappear’ either through some political offence or because of his activities among the wives of the Poli Fulanis. Under the influence of drink he roared round the town on a large motorbike to the great terror of young and old alike, frequently falling off, but never suffering more than superficial damage. An atmosphere of imminent disaster surrounded Augustin; wherever he went there was trouble. On one occasion when he visited me in my village he blatantly engaged in fornication with a local married woman. Dowayos expect married women to indulge in adultery and regard the seduction of each others’ wives as an amusing sport. Augustin, however, had copulated with her in the husband’s own hut, a serious affront. The husband soon found out, and with the logic of group responsibility, decided that I must pay him compensation. I discussed this with the Chief and other ‘legal advisers’ and politely refused. The husband appeared outside my hut with his brothers. He would seize Augustin the next time he came to see me. Worse still, he would beat on his motorbike with sticks. It seemed politic at this point to warn Augustin not to come out to the village for a while. True to his nature, he appeared the next day; he even parked his motorbike in front of the wronged husband’s house. I was seriously concerned that there might be violence or that my relationship with the Dowayos would be jeopardized.

  The husband, in fact, appeared with his brothers. Augustin produced beer he had brought from town. We all drank in silence. Several more beers were produced and Zuuldibo, with his incredible drink-scenting abilities, materialized at once. My assistant hovered nervously in the background. I distributed tobacco. Suddenly the husband, who had sat brooding in the sort of smouldering silence one associates with drunken Glaswegians, began to sing a thin, tuneless song. Immediately all the other men joined in with gusto. The husband left. It is the anthropologist’s role to be the earnest drone who goes round afterwards asking to have the joke explained to him, so I began asking about what I had witnessed. The words of the song were, ‘Oh who would copulate with a bitter vagina?’ sung in mockery of women. It seemed that the husband, lulled by the beer, had decided that all-male solidarity was more important than the fidelity of a mere wife. The matter was never alluded to again. Moreover, Zuuldibo and Augustin became the firmest of friends and shared many drinking bouts together.

  Often both Alphonse and Augustin would be at the bar awaiting their salaries with all the pointless anxiety of expectant fathers. There were always huge disputes about the calculation of income tax. I noted with interest that Cameroonian schoolteachers received almost the same salary in Poli as I did in London. They also received free air tickets for internal travel which they mostly sold on the black market, unless the functionaries cheated them out of them. Actually getting one’s hands on the mail was a nostalgic return to the jostling bureaucracy. It was necessary to queue endlessly while all manner of details were noted minutely in school exercise books with much careful ruling of lines and precision rubber stamping. Identity papers were examined at great length. A skilled clerk could make the delivering up of a single letter last ten minutes.

  Then would come the post-mortem. Those with no mail would retire to the bar to grieve. Those with mail would normally end up at the same place to celebrate. Since it was dark before seven, I almost invariably ended up trudging back to Kongle in the dark. In England one forgets how dark nights can be since we are seldom far away from some form of lighting; in Dowayoland they were pitch black and everyone carried a torch as an absolute necessity. Dowayos refuse to go beyond the boundary fence at night; darkness terrifies them. People huddle together in the smoky glow of campfires until the light returns. Outside are wild beasts, sorcery, the giant ‘Pimento-head’ who rains blows on unwary travellers and strikes them dumb.

  They were truly amazed that I would roam the bush in the dark, regarding it as an act of foolhardy bravery. That I would do so alone was the act of a madman. In fact I never felt safer than in the deserted bush at night. The air would cool to the temperature of an English summer’s night, generally the rain would ease off though lightning flickered silently over the high mountains. The constellations were new and splendid. Often the moon would rise later and make the scene as light as day. There were no really dangerous large preda
tors in the area; the chief risk was treading on snakes. There was a peace and tranquillity that were far removed from the turmoil of a village and a blessed relief from trying to make sense of the Dowayos, from being stared at and pointed at, shouted at and interrogated. One’s essential privacy, the first casualty of African life, was magically restored. I always arrived back from my nocturnal treks refreshed.

  Very occasionally I would meet people, often rushing headlong in groups to escape from the terrors of the night, visitors having incautiously tarried in mountain villages, men returning from festivals. Sometimes they simply turned tail and bolted at the mere sight of me. The next day, there would be much amusement as they told their tale of meeting Pimento-head but having escaped from his clutches; everyone was careful to avoid the conclusion that the considerable increase in the frequency of Pimento-head sightings was largely due to my efforts. They considered that the fear of the giant was a healthy preventative of ‘wandering about’ in women. ‘Wandering about’ implied adulterous liaisons. There were even herbal charms that turned into Pimento-head that the men placed at the crossroads for this purpose. It did no harm to give the women a fright.

  Gradually, as I pieced together the relations between rainchiefs, ordinary Dowayos and blacksmiths, I also formed a picture of the relations between men and women. For the physical details I relied on what close contacts, my assistant, men from the village, could be lured into revealing at the swimming place. This was lavishly supplemented by Augustin’s own considerable fieldwork among pagan women. Once I had suggested one or two themes to bear in mind, he proved a rich source of information on sexual mores. He was able to confirm the odd mixture of wantonness and prudery in sexual matters exhibited by Dowayos.

  Dowayos are sexually active from a relatively early age. Since Dowayos do not know how old they are one has to estimate such things, but they seem to begin their explorations about the age of eight. Sexual activity is not discouraged. A boy will be allowed to spend the night with a girl of his choice in her hut, though the mother will be expected to keep an eye on things and wanton promiscuity is not approved. Sexual relations take a turn for the worse at puberty. Premarital pregnancy carries no stigma, indeed it is taken as a welcome sign that a girl is fertile, but menstruation carries the risk of imbecility if a male comes into contact with it. A further complication is circumcision. This can happen at any age from ten to about twenty, all local boys being cut at the same time. A man may marry before he is circumcised and even have children; it is not unknown for a father to be circumcised alongside his son, though this is rare. But uncircumcised males carry a taint of femininity. They are accused of emitting the stench of women, the result of their dirty foreskins; they cannot participate in all male events; they are buried with women. Worst of all they cannot swear on their knives. The strongest oath in Dowayoland is ‘Dang mi gere’, ‘behold my knife’. The reference is to the knife of circumcision, a powerful object that has the power to slay witches and would certainly kill a woman. If a man uses this oath to a woman, he is very angry and she is risking a beating. Uncircumcised males who use it are mocked mercilessly and beaten if they persist; it was considered hilarious whenever I did it.

  The Dowayo form of circumcision is very severe, the entire penis being peeled for its whole length. Nowadays some boys undergo the operation at the hospital but this is considered scandalous by conservative Dowayos on the grounds that not enough is removed and the boy is not isolated completely from women for up to nine months. The operation converts the imperfect being of natural birth, via a process of death and rebirth, into a wholly male person. It was made clear to me, on payment of six bottles of beer to the circumciser, that I was ‘honorary circumcised’. I considered it a cheap price for exemption.

  Women are not supposed to know about circumcision. They are told that it involves an operation to seal the anus with a piece of cattle-hide. This necessitates all manner of fictions. In the dry season all vegetation shrivels up in the arid heat and there is very little cover. Dowayoland is full of males walking around staring airily into space, desperately containing themselves until the coast is clear so that they can dive behind a rock to relieve themselves. In fact, women know full well what goes on, but must not publicly admit so. I considered it one of the marks of my anomalous status as a largely asexual being that women would admit this to me. It was a long time before anyone bothered to tell me about this division of knowledge. I had merely assumed that women knew about circumcision but that it was shocking to talk about it before them. There are all sorts of subjects relating to ‘men’s secrets’ that must not be mentioned before women – ceremonies, songs, objects. In practice, it usually turned out that women knew a lot about what happened but had often not perceived the full picture. While they knew that the penis was involved in circumcision, they did not know that the whole ritual that boys go through during this operation is virtually identical with that undergone by the widows of the dead at the festivals held some years after the deaths of rich men. Thus it was unlikely that they knew that the whole skull festival was modelled on the boys’ ritual at circumcision. The complete model of the culture was available to men only, as I discovered later.

  It has been pointed out that women are strangely absent from anthropologists’ descriptions. They are supposed to be difficult, ill-informed sources of knowledge. In my own case, I found them extremely helpful – after an unfortunate start.

  As usual the problem was one of language. I wanted to talk to an old woman about changes in Dowayo behaviour over the years, and thought it wise to ask her husband for permission beforehand. ‘But what do you want to talk to her about?’ he asked. ‘I want to find out about marriage,’ I said. ‘I want to talk about customs, about adultery, about …’ There was a gasp of horror and disbelief from both husband and assistant. I swiftly ran a mental check on the tones I had used but could find nothing wrong. I went into a huddle with Matthieu. The problem lay in a Dowayo idiom. In Dowayo, one does not ‘perform’ a custom, one ‘speaks’ it. Likewise, one does not ‘commit’ adultery, one ‘speaks’ it. I had therefore announced my intention of performing rituals with the man’s wife and committing adultery with her.

  Once that misunderstanding had been cleared up, I found her a most useful informant. Whereas men regarded themselves as the repositories of the ultimate secrets of the universe and had to be cajoled into sharing them with me, women knew that any information available to them was unimportant and could quite happily be repeated to an outsider. They often opened up new fields of inquiry for me by alluding in passing to some belief or ceremony I had never heard of, that the men would have been reluctant to mention.

  Male and female lives remain largely separate. A man may have a large number of wives but he spends his time with his male friends and she spends her time with co-wives or female neighbours. The pattern is broadly similar to that in the North of England. A woman prepares food for her husband and children but he eats separately from her, possibly with an elder son. They cultivate separately. She grows her food, he his, although he may help with certain of the harder parts of the agricultural cycle. They meet for sexual purposes in his hut in accordance with a rota worked out in advance between the wives. There is little familiarity or affection by Western standards. Dowayos told me with wonder about an American missionary in Dowayoland whose wife would run from the house to greet him when he returned from a trip. They cackled with amazed amusement at Dowayos having to ask the missionary’s wife for lifts instead of the husband, and at the way he never seemed to beat her.

  It should not be assumed from this that Dowayo wives are poor, browbeaten shrinking violets. They give as good as they get, and stick up for themselves with a will. Their ultimate sanction is simply to walk out and return to their parents’ village. The husband knows that in these circumstances he will have great difficulty in gaining the return of the cattle he has paid for the woman. He may well end up with neither woman nor cattle. For this reason, he will delay th
e actual transfer of cattle as long as possible. Wives desert their husbands not infrequently and the system of cattle transfer in Dowayoland is every bit as much subject to delay as the most efficient Cameroonian bank. The frequency of marital breakdown and the failure of many husbands to ever finish payments for wives can enrage the ethnographic inquirer as he finds the same woman being entered two or three times in his calculations. Thus a woman may leave her husband for another and each man will placidly inform the anthropologist that she is his wife. The first husband is quite willing to say how much he paid for the woman but omits to mention that the cattle of brideprice were never delivered. The second husband indicates the price he paid for the woman but forgets to say that he paid this to her wronged first husband, not to her parents. By now, the first husband may well have used the cattle to repay other debts in women – long overdue. The parents of the erring wife now go to the second husband to try to make him pay up the cattle that the first never delivered, threatening to take the woman away. He ripostes by mentioning an unliquidated debt three generations back where one of his female relatives was not paid for. A hopelessly convoluted lawsuit ensues.