The Innocent Anthropologist

by Nigel Barley

  Dowayos never justify their choice of a wife in terms of beauty, but rather with references to her being obedient and good-natured. A woman must never see a penis after circumcision or she would become ill. A man should never see a vagina or he would lose all sexual desire. Hence the sexual act is a rather furtive affair conducted in total darkness, with neither party naked. The woman does not remove the bunch of leaves she wears fore and aft. In former times, men wore a loin-cloth that would be unfastened to allow removal of the gourd penis-sheath that was required for the circumcised. Nowadays shorts are the fashion and only old men or those engaged in ritual activity wear sheaths. As a joke, women make with their cheeks the plopping sound of a male privy member being removed from a sheath; this sound also serves as a coy euphemism for the sexual act itself. Women always expect to receive reward for sexual services even within marriage, a fact that has led to uncharitable comparisons between their conception of marriage and prostitution by mission preachers; there is always a strong sense of keeping of accounts even between husband and wife. Such information was built up piecemeal; my research into the festivals that stand apart from everyday life was quite different.

  By sheer good fortune I had appeared in Dowayoland in a year following a good millet harvest (Dowayo years run from one millet harvest in early November to the next); many had taken advantage of this abundance to organize skull festivals for their dead.

  At death a Dowayo body is wrapped in burial cloth made from local cotton and the skins of cattle that are slaughtered for the occasion. It is buried in a crouching position. Some two weeks later, the head is removed via a weak spot left in the wrapping for this purpose. It is examined for witchcraft and placed in a pot in a tree. Thereafter male and female (or uncircumcised) skulls are treated differently. Male skulls are placed out in the bush behind the hut where the skulls find their final rest. Female skulls are placed behind a hut in the village where the woman was born: on marriage a woman moves to her husband’s village; at death she moves back.

  After several years the spirits of the dead may begin to plague their living kinsmen, visiting them in dreams, causing illness, disdaining to enter the wombs of women so that children can be born and the spirit reincarnated. This is the sign that it is high time to organize a skull festival. Normally, a rich man will begin by soliciting the support of his kinsmen and offering them beer. If two beer parties pass without dissent, the affair is arranged. Dowayos become very fractious when in drink and it is unusual for a really drunken occasion to pass without dispute, requiring positive effort on the part of all present. The fact that two parties are not marred by fighting can be held to indicate a singular sense of common purpose.

  I had heard through Zuuldibo that such a festival was to be held in a village some fifteen miles away and conducted a preliminary foray to establish the truth of it.

  The timing of events in Dowayoland is a nightmare to anyone seeking to plan more than ten minutes in the future. Time is measured in months, weeks and days. The older Dowayos have only the vaguest notion of what makes up a week; it seems that the notion is to be viewed as a cultural borrowing like names for the months. Old people reckon in days from the present; there is complicated terminology for points in the past and future such as ‘the day before the day before yesterday’. With such a system, it is virtually impossible to fix precisely a day when something is going to happen. Added to this is the fact that Dowayos are firmly independent and resent bitterly anyone trying to organize them. They do things in their own good time. This took me a long while to get used to; I hated wasting time, resented losing it and expected return for spending it. I felt that I must hold the world record for hearing ‘It is not the right time for that’, whenever I sought to pin down Dowayos to show me a particular thing at a particular time. Arrangements to meet at a fixed time or place never worked. People were astonished that I should be offended when they turned up a day or even a week late, or when I walked ten miles to find they were not at home. Time was simply not something that could be allocated. Other more material things fell into the same category. Tobacco, for example, admitted no firm drawing of lines between mine and thine. I was initially disconcerted by my assistant helping himself to my tobacco stock without so much as a by-your-leave, though he would never dream of touching my water. Tobacco, like time, is an area where the degree of flexibility permitted by the culture is grossly at variance with our own. It is not permissible to retain possession of tobacco; friends have the right to go through your pockets and take it. Whenever I paid informants with a bag of tobacco, they would swiftly hide it about their person with blatant disregard for the rules of modesty and scuttle off home desperately worried lest they encounter anyone en route to their hiding place.

  This outing was my first visit to the valley known as the Valley of Borassa Palms on account of the numerous examples of this species that flourish only here. On old maps the road is still shown as running through the valley, but it has now fallen into considerable disrepair. Nevertheless, by careful driving it was possible to penetrate several kilometres into the brooding valley with its great vista of the mountains that mark the border with Nigeria. The villages here were much closer to the traditional mountain Dowayo type than in my own area. It was also impossible to understand a word anyone said, the tones being somewhat different, having been exaggerated into huge swoops and leaps. After a couple of hours on the road with Matthieu and Zuuldibo sailing on ahead, we arrived at the compound of the Chief of the area. The huts were so close together, for defensive purposes, that one had to get down on hands and knees to wriggle between them. The entrance huts were so low that we all had to get on our bellies and crawl to get in at all. In Kongle, the average height for a man is about five feet six or less. Here, there were husky six-footers, who must have found these arrangements a considerable inconvenience.

  We were received with great ceremony by the Chief, an astonishing old pirate with one eye and decorative scars cut deep all over his face. There was beer about and Zuuldibo began attacking it with a vengeance. I began to fear that we would spend all day here. It was confirmed that the skull festival would occur; the exact date remained a little hazy. It was not until we were doing the ‘day after the day after …’ business that I realized the Chief was drunk. Zuuldibo was making great strides to catch him up. He spoke Dowayo, the other Fulani. One of his sons joined us and spoke French. After some time it became clear that he had no idea who I was, having taken me for the Dutch linguist some thirty years my senior who had lived in his village for years and only recently left. It seems all white men looked the same to him. He would be delighted to have me attend whenever the ceremony happened. He would send me word. I knew from experience that he would not, but thanked him heartily and managed to lure Zuuldibo away by making my water bottle available to carry enough beer to see him through the journey.

  It was by now late afternoon on a very hot day and the skin was coming off my face in handfuls. Dowayos observed this closely, doubtless hoping that my true black nature would soon start showing through. Even aged Dowayos trip along at about twice the European walking speed, leaping from rock to rock like goats and I began to regret the lack of water. My entourage bore with me kindly, being amazed that any white man should be able to walk at all. They all had inflated notions of our helplessness, susceptibility to illness or discomfort which were explained by the fact that we had ‘supple skin’. It is a fact that the skin on the feet and elbows of Africans is inch-thick, horny hide that enables them to walk over sharp rocks or even glass, barefoot, without risk. Finally we reached the car and set off, giving a lift to a passing woman. Scarce had we travelled a mile before she vomited, in typical fashion, all over me. While I was in Dowayoland, many people and dogs availed themselves of the opportunity to vomit over me. In the wet season there was no problem; you pulled up at a river and jumped in fully clothed, to wash it off.

  Back at the village, I was pleasantly surprised at my assistant’s native wit. Seeing
the way things were going in the drunken Chief’s compound, he had slipped away and sought out a young lady of his acquaintance, who would be engaged in preparing the beer for the festival. From its state of fermentation, he inferred that it would be ready in two days and sour in four. This fixed the date. This initiative coinciding with pay day, we were both somewhat surprised when I gave him a small bonus. The incident marked a turning point in our relations and he became suddenly assiduous in ferreting out information and festivals. As he left, he pointed out that the trip had been unnecessary, since one would be able to tell by the number of people passing through the village when the ceremony would be held. Moreover, there was no need to ask permission to attend. Festivals were public affairs; the greater the number of outsiders, the greater the success.

  The day of the festival dawned bright and sunny. I woke to the normal sounds of Dowayos standing outside my hut saying to Matthieu, ‘Is he still in bed?’ ‘Hasn’t he got up yet?’ It was a quarter to six. This was the first opportunity to test my equipment – cameras and tape-recorder – in the field. I had shown Matthieu how to operate the recorder and we had agreed that he would be in charge of that while I concentrated on photographs and notes. This pleased him greatly and he strutted around pushing people out of his way and making sure that everyone was aware of his onerous responsibilities. One of the bridges had washed away in the interim and another five kilometres were added to the journey on foot. Particularly unpleasant was the crossing of a raging torrent, slipping on the wet rocks and trying to hold equipment over our heads. Matthieu, being a plains Dowayo, fared about as badly as I did, while our escort, a montagnard of about fifty, shepherded us carefully across, clinging to the rocks with his bare feet.

  Bands of people were teeming over the bush on small paths, all converging on the festival. The women had relinquished their customary leaves for strips of cloth, a sure sign that this was a public occasion. By law, Dowayos have to wear clothes and it is forbidden to take photographs of bare female breasts. If strictly observed, this would make photography impossible and so, like most others, I disregarded this regulation, uncomfortably aware that it might cause trouble if the gendarmes had turned up. When we reached the village we were overwhelmed by the number of strangers to be greeted. A swarm of grinning children followed us, giggling and wrestling in the mud, doddering old men shook hands with us, obliging youths offered to let me listen to their radios so I would not be deprived of constant Nigerian music. Patiently, I tried to explain that what I really wanted was Dowayo music. The old men were pleased, the younger baffled.

  An enormous crowd had gathered in the cattle park, ankle deep in mud. Zuuldibo was already installed on a grass mat, resplendent in sunglasses and a sword. We drank beer and he tried to explain what was going on.

  There were always numerous problems with Dowayo ‘explanations’. Firstly, they missed out the essential piece of information that made things comprehensible. No one told me that this village was where the Master of the Earth, the man who controlled the fertility of all plants, lived, and that consequently various parts of the ceremony would be different from elsewhere. This is fair enough; some things are too obvious to mention. If we were explaining to a Dowayo how to drive a car, we should tell him all sorts of things about gears and road signs before mentioning that one tried not to hit other cars.

  Dowayo explanations always ended up in a circle I came to know well. ‘Why do you do this?’ I would ask.

  ‘Because it is good.’

  ‘Why is it good?’

  ‘Because the ancestors told us to.’

  (Slyly) ‘Why did the ancestors tell you to?’

  ‘Because it is good.’

  I could never find a way round ‘the ancestors’ with whom all explanation began and ended.

  Dowayos baffled me at first by the way in which they used their categories prescriptively. ‘Who organized this festival?’ I would ask.

  ‘The man with the porcupine quills in his hair.’

  ‘I can’t see anyone with porcupine quills in his hair.’

  ‘No, he’s not wearing them.’

  Things were always described as they should be, not as they were.

  Then, again, Dowayos are addicted to joking. I always made a point of noting what special leaves various participants were wearing at festivals since it seemed reasonable that their special costumes might be important. I was constantly deceived by ‘jokers’, males circumcised at the same time as a man or females who began to menstruate at the same time as a woman. They would turn up in a bizarre collection of weird leaves and disrupt matters generally. It was important to identify them at the start lest their particular absurdities be considered part of the standard practice they were subverting.

  It was also important to realize that the same person might be active at a festival in several different capacities. At this particular event one of the clowns, who alone may handle the skulls, was also younger brother of the dead man for whom the whole thing had been organized. He would therefore alternate between being a clown and being an organizer and it was far from clear to an outsider where one began and the other ended. He was also doing many of the jobs normally performed by a skull-house sorcerer on the grounds of the extraordinary infirmity of the latter. So he was one man but occupied three separate positions in the cultural system.

  All this, naturally, was way above any level of analysis of which I was capable at that time. I merely sat on a wet rock, watched, asked idiot questions and took photographs of the parts that seemed interesting.

  That first day, apart from the clowns, there was much to see. The clowns were extravagant, their faces painted half white, half black. They wore rubbish or old rags and spoke in a high-pitched scream partly in Fulani, partly in Dowayo, shouting out obscenities and nonsense. The cunt of the beer!’ they screamed. The crowd roared with pleasure. They exposed themselves, produced ear-shattering farts by what mechanism I know not. They attempted to copulate with each other. They were delighted with me. They ‘took photographs’ through a broken bowl, ‘wrote notes’ on banana leaves. I managed to give as good as I got; when they asked for money, I solemnly handed them a bottle-top.

  Just outside the village were the skulls of the dead, male and female segregated. Goats, cattle and sheep had been slain in large numbers and their excrement flung on the skulls. The organizers lopped the heads off chickens and spattered their blood on the deceased. The clowns immediately began to fight for possession of the carcasses, stamping around in the mess of mud, blood and excrement. The heat was intense, the crowd enormous. It was considered amusing by the clowns to seek to splash those present with as much blood and filth as possible. The stench was terrible, and several Dowayos began to vomit, thereby adding to the miasma. I removed myself out of range. A torrential downpour began, and Zuuldibo and I huddled miserably under a tree, holding palm-leaves over our heads.

  There was a murmuring in the crowd and it became clear that a little old man was the centre of interest. He was small and wiry, mouth set in a firm rictus, the result, as I later discovered, of a second-hand set of false teeth. To see him remove these was apparently one of the wonders of Dowayoland. He sat bolt upright under a red umbrella, looking to the right and the left with an expression of benign omniscience. No one would tell me who he was. ‘An old man known for his goodness,’ Zuuldibo explained. ‘I don’t know,’ said Matthieu, looking furtive. The old man was brought a large jar of beer which he tasted and then disappeared into the bush. There was tension in the air. No one spoke. After some ten minutes the old man reappeared. The rain began to ease off. A general sigh of relief was obvious even to me. I had no idea what was afoot but knew better than to press for an explanation; perhaps Zuuldibo would be more forthcoming in private.

  There now followed one of those considerable longueurs that characterized all organized Dowayo activity. I found myself able to drop into ‘fieldwork gear’, a state almost of suspended animation where one is able to wait for hours with
out impatience, frustration or expectation of anything better. After a long time it became clear that nothing further could happen today. Some relatives, it seemed, had misunderstood the date of the festival and not turned up. Perhaps they would come tomorrow. There began a fervent arranging of accommodation. Matthieu went away to arrange my own lodging. Zuuldibo announced he would sleep under a tree as long as there was beer.

  A short trek through the bush, across two rivers and through stinging reeds, brought me to my own rest in the hut of an ingratiating man, who expelled his son so that he himself would have a roof for the night. Upon my inquiry, the man gave me to understand that his son would receive the sexual favours of a Dowayo maid that night and so not be the worse for it.

  The hut was the most squalid I’d yet seen. A box in the corner contained a selection of rotting chicken carcasses, an indication presumably that the man had offered their blood to the ancestors that day. In the roof beams were various artefacts for use at later stages of the festival: the flutes played when a man has been slain, the horse tails and burial cloth that are used to ornament the skulls before a man dances with them. The floor was covered with filth. The bed, when I settled into it, proved to contain several half-gnawed hunks of meat and bones, remnants of sacrificed cattle.

  Away in the main village, there was drumming and singing and the rhythmic rise and fall lulled me to sleep, curled up under my own wet clothes. A scratching at the door roused me; I had momentary fears of another Coo-ee lady, but it was only Matthieu bringing me hot water in a seething calabash. ‘It’s boiled for five minute, patron, safe to drink.’ I had concealed a mixture of instant milk and coffee about my person, with copious sugar for any Dowayo who might want it. We split the coffee between us, Matthieu adding six spoons of sugar to his own. Rousing myself to a sense of duty, I asked about various of the articles in the roof and received enlightenment. ‘The old man, today, is the Old Man of Kpan, head of all the rainmakers. Zuuldibo will introduce you tomorrow.’ He left and I heard a Dowayo say loudly, ‘Is your patron asleep already?’