by Nigel Barley
The first man I saw the next day was Augustin, out for a break from the rigours of Poli. Like all good urban Africans, he would never entertain the thought of walking anywhere. He had managed to bring his motorbike all the way, had arrived late and spent the night with yet another obliging Dowayo woman who turned out to be a wayward wife of the Old Man of Kpan. It appeared that this was her native village and she had returned for the festival. Her brother had shown Augustin the door in no uncertain terms with dire threats that if the rainchief found out about this they would all be struck by lightning. My mental dossier on him, opened only the day before, was filling up fast.
The events of the day drove him from my mind. A Dowayo skull festival is a bit like a Russian circus, with four different things happening at once. After a final bout of excrement-throwing, the clowns began to clean the skulls. Meanwhile, girls originating from the village had been returned by their husbands and decorated as Fulani warriors. They danced on a hill, waving spears to the accompaniment of ‘talking’ flutes that speak by imitating the tones of the language. This is yet another aspect of the Dowayo tongue I never mastered. The flutes encouraged them to display the wealth of their husbands, who harried them mercilessly to put on a good show, tricking them out in sunglasses, borrowed watches, radios and other consumer goods, in addition to their robes. Some men pinned money to their heads.
In another part of the village were the widows of the men whose festival this was. They were decked in long leaf skirts with conical hats of the same vegetation on their heads, dancing in long lines like chorus girls. At the time I could only record as much information as possible, leaving any attempt at intelligent analysis to another time. Matthieu flitted from one group to another, recording as much of the material as he could, shoving his way to the front of every crowd in a way that I could never have done.
In the distance, yet another group appeared carrying a strange bundle and waving knives. Later, I found out that these were the circumcised carrying the bow of the man whose festival this was and singing circumcision songs. Suddenly, a group of boys rushed out screaming at them. I thought I was witnessing a genuine spontaneous brawl but from the enjoyment of spectators it became clear that this was a standard element. The uncircumcised,’ explained a helpful man beside me. ‘Always, thus.’ I could not resist asking why. He stared at me as if I was a fool. The ancestors told us to.’ He moved away.
Something was going on at the skulls and I dashed back, while Matthieu kept his eye on the battle between the two groups. The skulls of the men were being wrapped, with the argument that inevitably accompanied co-operative endeavour in Dowayoland, in what even I could recognize as the dress of a circumcision candidate. The skulls of women were ignominiously dumped on one side and forgotten. All women and children were chased away. The skulls of the men were jostled and the flutes I had seen in my roof were blown. ‘They are threatening the dead with circumcision,’ Zuuldibo explained enigmatically. A man hefted them on his head and a strange, haunting melody was struck up with odd, booming gongs, drums and deep flutes. Long trains of burial cloth were strung out from the bundle and supported by swaying men, so that it resembled nothing so much as a great spider. Others put on the bloody skins of the cattle slaughtered for the occasion, the heads resting against their own, a strip of raw flesh gripped in their teeth, and circled the skulls with an odd stamping motion, bowing and swerving. All was stink, noise and motion. At the entrance to the village, the widows danced and beckoned in the dead who moved slowly round the central tree before being placed where the skulls of slaughtered cattle are exhibited over a gateway. A man leapt up beside them, the organizer of the festival, and shouted: ‘It is thanks to me that these men were circumcised. If it were not for the white man, I would have killed a man.’
At the time, of course, I took this to be an allusion to myself, imagining that all manner of obscene happenings had been suppressed on my account alone. My first reaction was one of disappointment. ‘Don’t mind me,’ I would have shouted, ‘that’s what I came for!’ Subsequent inquiry revealed that in the old days a man had indeed been slain for such festivals and his skull pounded to pieces with a rock, but that the central government – French, German and Cameroonian – had put a stop to this.
The occasion now degenerated into a mere beer-drinking and general dance and we decided to head back to Kongle. On the way, Zuuldibo made a detour and led us out to an isolated compound on the slopes of the mountains. Inside sat the Old Man of Kpan. We went through elaborate greetings. I was clutched to his heart and he went into an ecstasy of sighing, moaning and clucking like a maiden aunt over a favourite nephew. More warm beer was prepared and we sat around in the gathering gloom talking, the Old Man occasionally breaking off in mid-phrase to gasp out his delight at my presence. He understood that I was interested in the customs of the Dowayos. He had lived a long time and seen much. He would help me. I should come to his house in a short while. He would send for me. This was his busy season – he looked knowing; I tried to look knowing back. I would be the second white man to visit his valley. ‘Was the first French or German?’ I asked, trying to fix the period. ‘No, no, a white man like yourself.’ I handed round some cola nuts I had with me and we took our leave, picking our way through the granite boulders and waterlogged paths down to the main track. Thick mist was beginning to build up in the valley bottoms and the night was going to be very cold indeed. We were all shivering by the time we reached the car, and looking forward to fleeing to the comforts of Kongle. Weather is essentially local in West Africa; rainfall in one spot may be twice as hard a few miles away. Kongle was always ten degrees warmer than this end of Dowayoland at night; round the other side of the mountain was hotter still.
As soon as the car came in sight, it was clear that something was very wrong. It appeared to be at a strange angle. In the whole time I was in Dowayoland the only time anyone ever stole from me was at the mission, and so I had acquired the habit of leaving everything unlocked when away from civilizing influences. Perhaps someone had released the brake and moved it?
A moment’s inspection revealed all. I had parked on the edge of a ravine, the road in front leading down to the washed-out bridge. The torrential downpour of the previous day had softened the edge sufficiently for the weight of the car to cause it to crumble. It was now perched with the wheels of one side over a sixty-foot drop, so perfectly balanced that it swayed slightly to the touch. It was a situation where brute physical force was required, and everyone was still at the festival. There was nothing else for it. Clutching notebooks, camera and recorder, we all turned around and trudged dispiritedly back. It was a miserable end to a good day. Zuuldibo further depressed us by insisting on making statements such as ‘It is man’s place to suffer.’ These had clearly been acquired from local Muslims as one of the comforts of their religion. He had a seemingly inexhaustible stock of such platitudes. ‘Man proposes, God disposes,’ he intoned as we wallowed in the icy river. ‘No man may know the future,’ he declaimed, crawling on all fours up to the village.
We then searched for the local chief. If there is one thing less profitable than trying to fix the time of a meeting with Dowayos, it is trying to find a person or place. The Chief was variously reported, with complete confidence, to be in his hut, in Poli, ill, drunk – everything but dead and in France. I never established to my satisfaction whether this reflected a basic epistemological difference between us – unlike notions of ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘evidence’ – or whether they were simply telling lies. Were they telling me what they thought I would wish to hear? Did they hold that firmly believed error was better than doubt? Was it simply a cultural rule that you tried to confuse outsiders as much as possible? I inclined towards the last view.
Finally he was located and went into loud lamentations over our misfortune. Nothing could be done at night, he explained, because of the dangers of the dark, but tomorrow morning he himself would organize the affair. ‘It is a man’s place to suffer
,’ I said. Zuuldibo giggled.
Matthieu and I shared a hut in the middle of a banana plantation, feeding off the produce, in the bitter cold. The hut was provided with the remains of a fire and a sleeping dog who ignored us. I realize now that it must have been someone’s cooking hut, but why it was out there in isolation remains a mystery. Moreover, no sane Dowayo would ever allow a dog to lie inside a hut by the fire. Matthieu, indeed, reacted in true Dowayo fashion and began looking for a log to beat the dog on the head. When he found one I pre-empted him by putting it on the fire. We spent the night lying on the beaten dirt floor in our wet clothes. I had the better of it since the dog adopted my feet as its resting place, but it will not be remembered as my most cheery night in Dowayoland. The cold was intense, Matthieu snored, the dog had a cough. I tried to calculate the odds of the car I had not yet paid for toppling over the cliff, comforting myself with thoughts of all the good material I had collected that day, even if I did have no idea what it was all about. Shortly before dawn I fell asleep, head on my camera case, notebooks under my hand – rather like a medieval apprentice sleeping with the tools of his trade.
Matthieu roused me at first light. The phlegmatic dog slept on. After a relatively short spell of dithering, we set off with four stalwart men towards the car. A Peugeot 404 is a very heavy car and I could not really see that four men would do much good; I had been thinking more in terms of twelve. From student debauches, I seemed to recall that it took four to move a Mini. Zuuldibo entertained us with a tale of a man suffering from diarrhoea with whom he had shared that night. Dowayo has all manner of extraordinary sounds to describe motion or smell. Zuuldibo rang the changes on all of them, so that everyone was in high spirits by the time we reached the car. Without waiting for instructions the men crawled round to the side over the ravine and, clinging with bare toes to a ledge, simply lifted the car with insulting ease and pushed it back on firm ground. Their obvious lack of effort suggested that two might have done it. Zuuldibo was ecstatic, clapping his hands and slapping his thighs. He let off another stream of tongue-trills, clicks and nasalizations to celebrate. I was embarrassed, realizing that I ought to be handing out change as a token of thanks. Alas, I had none on me and so passed out a few paltry cigarettes. The men were visibly crestfallen but made no complaint. After this I always made sure that I went on location with water, a tin of meat, small change and anti-malarial pills for a week; I had taken none for two days and began to fear the worst. I could already feel a fever developing and was anxious to get back to my kit with all speed.
A day’s rest re-established our morale. The only lasting damage seemed to be my feet. Strange blotches of blood had appeared around the nails of my big toes accompanied by intense itching. I had jiggers. These are unpleasant burrowing parasites that lay eggs in the living flesh until the whole foot is rotten with them. Old Africa hands will tell you to place yourself firmly in the care of the locals who have ways of digging them out with a safety-pin without bursting the egg-sacs. Alas, Dowayos have no safety-pins and lack experience with these creatures. Having to fall back on my own resources I dug them out with a penknife, taking liberal quantities of flesh with them, to avoid eggs, and washed the wounds with alcohol and antibiotic. This drastic but necessary proceeding somewhat reduced my mobility for a while, but that was relatively unimportant. At last I had material to work on and began by elucidating the notes I had made at the festival. Each page of notes would keep me occupied for several days, checking what it was that I had seen, how it compared with the festival in my own village, what other cultural knowledge it implied. For example, the man who carried the skulls at the dance was not just anyone, he had to be in a duuse relationship with the dead man. To understand what this word implied, I had to sort out all the kinship terms. Trying to do this even roughly with French equivalents is quite impossible, but the mistakes Dowayos make when speaking French are very helpful. For example, they cannot distinguish between nephew and uncle, or between grandfather and grandson. This suggested that the same terms would be used for them in Dowayo, and indeed this proved to be the case. The terminology is strongly reciprocal. If I call a man by one term, he calls me by the same term. But it took me a long time to work it all out. In the end, I collected together my last three bottles of beer – since Poli had run out, the last beer for two hundred miles – and borrowed the schoolhouse with its blackboard. The men lounging at the crossroads were only too glad to come and talk to this benevolent madman in return for the beer. They rapidly picked up the principles of kinship charts and we had a most informative session. Much has been written about primitive peoples’ ability or inability to deal with hypothetical questions. I was never sure whether my difficulties with them were purely linguistic or whether much more was involved. ‘If you had a sister,’ I would start, ‘and she married a man, what would you call …’
‘I haven’t got a sister.’
‘No, but if you had a sister …’
‘But I haven’t got a sister. I have four brothers.’
After a number of frustrated attempts at this, Matthieu intervened. ‘No, no patron. Like this. A man has a sister. Another man takes her. She is his wife. The man calls her husband, how?’ He would get an answer. I adopted this style and had no more trouble – until we got to the term duuse. ‘Who is your duuse?’ I tried.
‘We joke with him.’
‘How do you know he is your duuse?’
‘As children we are told. We joke with him.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘He can live anywhere.’
‘If he is your duuse, what does your father call him?’
Pause. ‘He will call him grandfather.’
‘What does your son call him?’
‘My son calls him grandfather.’
Light began to dawn.
‘Do you call him grandfather?’
‘Yes.’
In Dowayoland all old men are called grandfather by young men. The usage meant nothing but an age difference. I had spent most of an afternoon sorting that one out the previous day. I tried another line. ‘Is your duuse one of your own family or a relative through marriage?’ ‘Own family,’ said one. Through marriage,’ said another. ‘He is like a grandfather.’
I tried another tack. ‘How many duuse do you have?’
‘I cannot know.’
It occurred to me that the word might refer to other aspects of the world than biological kinship, that it might be a term of an entirely different type. I tried everything, residence, skull-house affiliation, exchange relationships, and still did not feel I knew what the term meant. I adopted another ploy of getting people to introduce me to their duuse and we would sit down and painfully trace the relation between them. Finally, I built up a picture of what it was. A duuse was someone to whom I was linked by a common relative of great-grandfather generation or beyond with at least one female linkage in between. In other words, it was someone such as my mother’s grandfather, for whom no other term existed, who belonged to a different skull-house than myself and was on the very fringes where it was impossible to trace clear kinship links. This explained why, even when I got two duuse together, they would often give me different accounts of the links between them. A man, then, would have a great number of potential duuse out of which he would select a small group with whom to joke and engage in ritual activity.
Similar problems arose over the most trivial things: the feathers a man wore on different occasions, the leaves used for special rituals, the animals that might or might not be killed. All of these were potentially important for understanding what sort of a cultural world the Dowayos lived in. For example, the leopard occupies a place of great significance in their world, although there have been no leopards in Dowayoland for thirty years. Leopards are slayers of men and cattle and are equated with this aspect of Man. Circumcisers, as shedders of human blood, are required to grunt like leopards hunting, while the boys they cut dress as young leopards. If one kills a leopard, one is r
equired to undergo the same ritual as one who has killed a man. Man-killers are referred to as ‘leopards’ and allowed to wear leopard-claws on their hats. When talking about their burial rites, the Dowayos made great play with the fact that the leopard, like themselves, puts the skulls of the dead in trees, a reference to its habit of dragging its prey into a tree to eat it. Powerful and dangerous men such as the rainmakers are believed to be able to turn into leopards. All these diverse attitudes come together and ‘make sense’ if one looks at them as a way of thinking about the wild and violent part of man’s nature.
But even such a simple and – to an anthropologist – obvious area of research took weeks of sustained effort to sort out. People were reluctant to talk about rainchiefs and leopards. I only found out by chatting to a boy I bumped into while walking into town on one of my Friday mail runs. Rain trapped us under a tree and the conversation turned quite naturally to rainmakers. He pointed out to me a mountain with a permanent cloud over it. ‘That’s where one of them lives,’ he said. ‘Domboulko. Even in the dry season there’s always water there. But the best is my father at Kpan. When he dies, I shall buy the secret of rain after he becomes a leopard.’ I pricked up my ears and began to mine this vein of pure gold as the youth chatted on quite unconcernedly about precisely the things that interested me most. By the time we reached Poli, I knew about the importance of special mountains and caves, the existence of stones to make rain, the power of the rainmaker to kill with lightning (and the fact that he had false teeth). Once I knew about these things, it was no problem to check on them with people from my village. But that piece of the picture concerning leopards and rainchiefs had only come my way through sheer luck. If I had not been on that particular road at that particular time I might never have heard it, or only much later.
