The Innocent Anthropologist

by Nigel Barley

  As it was, even with the most striking animals such as leopards, I had problems with informants. Popularly, Africans are supposed to be seamed with native wisdom and the folklore of plants and creatures. They are expert in identifying them from spore, scent, marks on trees. They engage in meticulous analysis of which plant a certain leaf, fruit or bark belongs to. It is their singular misfortune to be constantly interpreted by Westerners who have various axes to grind. In the days of the bland assumption of Western cultural superiority, it was intuitively obvious to all that Africans were wrong about most things and simply not too bright. It was therefore not surprising that their minds never rose higher than their bellies. The anthropologist was inevitably cast in the role of the refuter of this view of primitive man, seeking to show that there was a sense or logic in his ways and possibly a wisdom in his mind that escaped the Western observer. In these days of the New Romanticism, the ethical anthropologist is surprised to find himself suddenly on the other wing. Primitive man is used by Westerners nowadays as surely as he was by Rousseau or Montaigne to prove a point about their own society and castigate those aspects of it they find unattractive. Contemporary ‘thinkers’ pay as little heed to fact or balanced judgement as their forebears. An example that particularly struck me even before Dowayoland was at an exhibition of Red Indian artefacts. A wooden canoe was displayed. ‘Wooden canoes,’ we were informed, ‘operate in harmony with the environment and are non-polluting.’ Beside it was a picture of its process of construction with Indians burning down large tracts of forest to obtain the correct timber and discarding most of the wood to rot. The ‘Noble Savage’ has risen from the grave, and is alive and well and living in N.W.1 as well as some anthropology departments.

  The basic truth about Dowayos is that they knew less about the animals of the African bush than I did. As trackers they could tell motorbike tracks from human footprints but that was about the pinnacle of their achievement. They believed, like most Africans, that chameleons were poisonous. They assured me that cobras were harmless. They did not know that caterpillars turn into butterflies. They could not tell one bird from another or be relied upon to identify trees accurately. Many of the plants did not have names though they used them quite often, and reference involved lengthy explanations: That plant you use to get the bark you make the dye from.’ Much of the game in Dowayoland has been exhausted by trapping. As far as ‘living in harmony with nature’ is concerned, the Dowayos are non-starters. They reproached me often for not bringing a machine gun from the land of the white men to enable them to finally eradicate the pathetic clusters of antelope that still persist in their country. When Dowayos began cultivating cotton for the government monopoly, amounts of pesticide were made available to them. Dowayos immediately adopted it for fishing purposes. They would fling it into the streams to be able to recover the poisoned fish that floated to the surface. This poison rapidly displaced the tree-bark they had traditionally used to suffocate fish. ‘It’s wonderful,’ they explained. ‘You throw it in and it kills everything, small fish, big fish, for miles downstream.’

  Every year they start vast bushfires, quite deliberately, to speed the growth of new grass. The resulting conflagrations involve vast slaughter of young animals and considerable risk to human life and limb.

  All these factors were involved in the simple problem of talking to Dowayos about leopards. The linguistic difficulties alone were considerable. The Dowayos have a perfectly adequate word for leopard, naamyo. For ‘lion’, however, they use the compound ‘old-female-leopard’. For lesser wildcats such as the civet cat or serval, they use the compound ‘sons-of-leopard’. The name for elephant is dangerously close, differing only by tone from ‘lion’. To make matters worse, the first French-speaking Dowayo I asked about the terminology made a genuine mistake and gave me the word naamyo as meaning ‘lion’. The problem of knowing, when I used the compound ‘old-female-leopard’, whether we were talking about lions, aged leopards of the female sex, or both at the same time, became acute. In the end I managed to lay my hands on some postcards depicting African fauna. I had at least a lion and a leopard and showed them to people to see if they could spot the difference. Alas, they could not. The reason lay not in their classifications of animals but rather in the fact that they could not identify photographs. It is a fact that we tend to forget in the West that people have to learn to be able to see photographs. We are exposed to them from birth so that, for us, there is no difficulty in identifying faces or objects from all sorts of angles, in differing light and even with distorting lenses. Dowayos have no such tradition of visual art; theirs is limited to bands of geometric designs. Nowadays, of course, Dowayo children experience images through schoolbooks or identity cards; by law, all Dowayos must carry an identity card with their photograph on it. This was always a mystery to me since many who have identity cards have never been to the city, and there is no photographer in Poli. Inspection of the cards shows that often pictures of one Dowayo served for several different people. Presumably the officials are not much better at recognizing photographs than Dowayos. When I was collecting vocabulary of several obvious areas such as names of the parts of the body, I drew an outline of a man and a woman with somewhat hazy pudenda so that they could point to areas that bore a single name. This drawing was considered a major wonder and for months afterwards men would come to my hut to ask to see it. (They were particularly anxious about whether I had depicted the penis in its full circumcised glory – in which case they would have asked me not to show it to women.) The point was that men could not tell the difference between the male and the female outlines. I put this down simply to my bad drawing, until I tried using photographs of lions and leopards. Old men would stare at the cards, which were perfectly clear, turn them in all manner of directions, and then say something like ‘I do not know this man.’ Children could identify the animals but were totally ignorant of their ritual importance. In the end I made a trip to Garoua. There, in the market, is a stall bearing the splendid title ‘Syndicate of traditional healers’. Here are to be found many weird and wonderful things, parts of plants, leopards’ claws, bats’ eyes, hyenas’ anuses. I bought some leopard’s claws, the foot of a civet cat and a lion’s tail. With these I was able to establish which animal we were talking about.

  That did not end the problem, however. The Dowayos ‘explained’ the relations between these animals with a story: ‘A leopard took a lion as wife. They lived in a cave in the mountains and had three children. One day the leopard roared. Two children were afraid and ran away. They became the serval and civet cat. The one who stayed became a leopard. It is finished.’

  It seemed natural to ask whether this had happened only once or whether this was the origin of all servals and civet cats. Some said one thing, some another. Some maintained that this was the origin of all civet cats but that servals were born only from servals. Others claimed that servals were born thus but civet cats were the offspring of civet cats alone.

  This was no isolated phenomenon. The most straightforward questions about birds, monkeys, or whatever were fraught with the most appalling complexities that seemed to bear precious little resemblance to bland statements about The Dowayos believe that…’ that one reads in standard monographs. What the Dowayos believed was a matter that it was hard to establish by the obvious means of simply asking them. At every stage all sorts of interpretations were involved if one was to be fair to their thought.

  So, life continued for a while. My one festival provided fuel for a many a day’s research. The fieldworker can never hope to maintain a good rate of work for very long. In my time in Africa, I estimated that I perhaps spent one per cent of my time doing what I had actually gone for. The rest of the time was spent on logistics, being ill, being sociable, arranging things, getting from place to place, and above all, waiting. I had defied the local gods with my intemperate urge to do something. I would soon be cut down to size.

  8

  Rock Bottom

  The
next period of my stay was without doubt the most unpleasant I have ever spent anywhere, a time when I wallowed in the sin of despair.

  The rot set in when I decided to go to Garoua for supplies. The decision was rather thrust upon me; I had nothing left to eat, barely enough petrol to make the city limits and fifteen hundred francs (about £3). Such circumstances are conducive to bold action. I had promised Augustin a lift and we rendezvoused at first light behind the main street in the hope of sneaking out of town without being loaded to the gunwales with millet or gendarmes after a lift. A swift dash freed us from the town and we resigned ourselves to the heaving, wrenching crawl over the worst part of the road, leading down to the tarmac. We never made it. Some five miles short of our goal, I rounded a corner to find that the road had simply disappeared in the rain. It is a bad Western habit to assume that because a road goes into a corner, it will continue round the other side. With a terrifying crunching of metal, we plunged into a foot-deep ditch right across the track.

  It was obvious at once that there was something amiss with the steering. It whined and grumbled and doggedly refused to affect the direction of the wheels. Having lived on a Junior Lecturer’s salary, I had had precious little to do with cars and was at a loss how best to proceed. Clearly, help was in order. Normally Herbert Brown could be relied upon to mend anything; wondrous tales were told of his mechanical prowess. With two coat hangers and an old plough, he would improvise a gearbox. His engineering solutions were never elegant but often worked. He would return them to customers with the remark, ‘It’s just a load of junk, but out here nothin’ works for long.’ Alas, he was away. There was nothing else for it, I still had to get to Garoua. We pushed the vehicle to the side of the road and continued on foot, flagging down a bush-taxi when we reached the tarmac. I did not, at that time, take the inscription on the door ‘God’s will alone decides’ as an omen.

  We arrived without further disaster, having carefully obeyed the injunctions painted on the inside of the vehicle telling us not to spit, fight, vomit or break windows. By now, it was nearly midday and Augustin took me to dine in his favourite African restaurant where the choice consisted of take it or leave it. I took it, then left it. I was brought a cow’s foot in a large enamel bowl of hot water. When I say ‘cow’s foot’ I do not mean something based upon a cow’s foot, but the entire article complete with hoof, hide and hair. Try as I might, there seemed no way of even getting into it. I declared a sudden loss of appetite. Augustin seized it and reduced it to bones with the dedication of a swarm of driver ants.

  Two notable successes marked this trip. Firstly, I charmed some money out of the bank to which I had so rashly committed my finances. Secondly, we arranged a lift back to Poli with the sous-préfet’s mechanic. This was, I foolishly thought, an incredible stroke of good fortune. After being driven for hours round various Fulani areas of the city on incomprehensible errands, we set off for Poli. The road is very narrow and patronized by huge lorries with trailers hauling cotton and petrol back and forth between Chad and the N’gaoundere rail link. I noted with dismay that when he passed one of these monsters by swerving over to the verge with one wheel inches away from a three-foot drainage channel, the driver closed his eyes tightly.

  Nonetheless, we reached my abandoned vehicle as night fell. He made a rapid inspection. There was no problem; all he had to do was hit it. He crawled underneath and there was heard the clang of metal on metal and what I took to be Fulani oaths. Beaming, he emerged. It was not perfect but would get me to Poli whence I could send for a new part.

  I was frankly delighted. Augustin and I embarked and set off at a sedate pace. The steering indeed felt a little strange but worked with a certain approximation. The road was covered with owls. They would sit on the surface and fly up to attack the headlights of cars; the slaughter of them on the roads is very great, and they terrify Dowayos. Owls are thought to carry sorcery under their wings at night. Should a man hear the sound of one about his compound or cattle, he immediately seeks remedies against them.

  We arrived at the top of the big hill leading down to Poli and began to descend. It was not until we approached a narrow bridge crossing a ravine that I realized that the steering had gone again. I had time to recollect the sharp spikes along either side of the bridge – all that remained of the balustrade after an accident that had killed a sous-préfet at this very spot several years before. We struck a tree, bounced off, struck a rock and headed straight for the ravine. I was already standing on the brakes to no great avail. We were poised an instant on the edge and then plunged over.

  A sapling caught us neatly and gradually collapsed under the weight. In complete calm, I turned off the engine, asked Augustin if he was all right and evacuated the vehicle. At the top of the ravine, something suddenly snapped in both of us and we sat looking at the jagged rocks and laughed hysterically – not, of course, from amusement, but from some wave of sheer emotion compounded of terror, relief and incredulity. I think we probably sat there quite a while. At this stage, we seemed to have got out of it very lightly. Augustin had bruised his chest. I had hit my head on the wheel and one or two toes, fingers and ribs seemed to have suffered. Hiking into town, we set about a couple of beers Augustin had secreted against dire emergencies. We felt we had qualified.

  The next day the full awfulness of the situation was brought home. An inspection of the wreck convinced me that repair would be a protracted and expensive business and that we had indeed been lucky to escape without serious injury. We had a check-up with the local doctor who declared us both unharmed. From the fact that I still have fingers and toes set at odd angles and a lump on two ribs, I infer that his examination failed to show up a number of minor fractures. The worst part was the condition of my jaw. Two teeth at the front seemed very loose and my whole jaw began slowly to swell up, causing me considerable pain.

  Hoping for the best, I reverted to Kongle and continued my researches into leopards and wildcats, dosing myself with Valium to get to sleep at night.

  One of my principal concerns now was the classification of disease, and in pursuit of this I spent a lot of time with one traditional healer in particular who had the disadvantage of living at the top of a sheer cliff above Kongle. We would spend hours collecting roots, discussing the identification of disease and the differences between various treatments.

  Dowayos, as mentioned, divide diseases between ‘infectious diseases’, head witchcraft, ancestor interference and pollutions. Only infectious diseases or accidental injuries that may be caused by witchcraft can be helped with herbs. The attribution of one particular disease to a specific cause is quite complex. The names of some diseases refer both to symptoms and a causal agent (like our word ‘cold’ which implies certain symptoms and a viral cause). Other names are just symptoms (like ‘jaundice’ that can be the result of many diseases). To tie up symptoms with diseases, various forms of divination are used. A healer may be called to cast the entrails of a chicken into water, the man may be viewed through a glass ball by a specialist who can thus determine his malady. The most common form of divination, however, is to rub the plant zepto between the fingers while calling out the various forms of disease that may afflict the man. When the zepto breaks, this shows that the correct name has been found. The diviner then moves on to the causative agent – witchcraft, ancestors, etc. Next comes the remedy. Three divinations normally suffice to give full information. If the sick man cannot come to the diviner himself, he should send some of the straw from the roof of his granary, the most private and personal area of a man’s compound.

  If a named ancestor is held to be responsible, a man is dispatched to the skull house with blood, excrement or beer to fling on the skull of the importuning kinsman.

  Pollution diseases usually require the attention of experts – circumciser, sorcerer or rainchief. Often, causes and effects can be linked in a rather oblique fashion. For example, what we would term a sprain is held to hurt because worms have got into the limb; worm
s come from rain, so only the rainchief can cure them. Contact with the affairs of the dead, on the other hand, involves treatment by the sorcerer and consists of rubbing the garments or other personal belongings of the dead man onto the victim. The worst pollution diseases come from the blacksmith and his wives, the potters. Excessive contact with them, especially with the tools of their trade, causes what one can only term an ingrowing vagina in women and a prolapsed anus in men. The bellows that afflicts men is a remarkably phallic object and the fact that it attacks the anus rather than the penis has to be connected to the ‘official’ version of circumcision, claiming it to involve sealing of the anus.

  Other men set up charms that cause pollution illness to protect their property. A close contact of mine was the clown for the village of Kongle. He was proprietor of the only orange tree in the area and was inordinately attached to me since the time I bought two hundred oranges from him. (I should confess that I had not intended to buy two hundred oranges but twenty; an inadequacy in my handling of numerals lay at the root of the problem.) To protect his tree from the ravages of children, he attached certain plants and goat horns to it so that anyone who stole his oranges would cough like a goat and have to come to him to be cured.

  Some Dowayos make a good income from the possession of magic stones that cause everything from toothache to dysentery. Those afflicted have to come to them for the cure. Dowayos see nothing wrong in making money in this way.

  Head witchcraft is transmitted from close relatives in peanuts or meat. It fears sharp objects and a boy should therefore not be exposed to it before circumcision or he may bleed to death. At night it wanders around and is said to look like a small chick; this is what is carried under the wings of an owl. It sucks the blood of men and cattle and may kill them. Protection may be had by putting sharp thistles or porcupine quills on the roof of one’s hut. After death, skulls are examined for witchcraft. I did not at first grasp that people who die ‘of witchcraft’ are generally not the victims of witches, but witches whose witchcraft has been injured by such charms: once the witchcraft is injured the owner dies. Dowayos use this to explain the high mortality rate among young men who go to the city to work in the dry season. They are only young – mere boys – who have not learned to control their witchcraft. It is especially excited by the sight of meat on butchers’ slabs and cuts itself on all the sharp knives lying around there.