by Nigel Barley
These last few days before the ceremony brought a major change in my conditions of life. I was in town on my mail run when there appeared an unknown truck laden with boxes, barrels and trunks. Unknown vehicles were always grounds for rife speculation. This one contained two unknown white people, a man and a woman. As resident white man it fell to me to go up first and poke my nose into their affairs. We had a conversation in rather awkward French, in the course of which it became apparent that we were all anglophones and my hand, with two broken fingers, was crushed in a manly grip.
Jon and Jeannie Berg, as they revealed themselves, were now missionaries to Poli – colleagues at the Protestant mission of Herbert Brown. They were young Americans, new to Africa, as baffled by the whole experience as I had been. It was Jon’s task to look after teaching in the Bible school; Jeannie was his helpmate. We all bore the heavy scent of higher education.
Once they settled in Poli they were the relentless goal of my mail runs. In their agreeable company one could speak English of a sort, eat bread that Jeannie baked in the kitchen, listen to music and talk about things other than millet and cattle. It was Jon’s task to communicate to Dowayos ‘the meaning of Christianity’, as it was mine to establish ‘the meaning of Dowayo culture’. We both helped each other to an understanding of the limitations of our mutual endeavours. Jon was the proud owner, moreover, of twelve barrels of trash literature that he generously lent out. I maintain that it was this, above all else, that kept me sane in Dowayoland. Those infinite longueurs between ceremonies, those terrible dull evenings after seven o’clock when all Dowayos were abed, became so much less frustrating with something to read. Fieldwork became the most concentrated literary experience of my life. Never before had I had such an opportunity to read. I read sitting on rocks, half-way up mountains, sitting in streams, crouched in huts by the light of the moon, waiting at crossroads by the light of oil-lamps. I was never without one of Jon’s paperbacks. When expectations failed and holy oaths to me were broken, I would simply slip into fieldwork gear, pull out my paperback and outwait the Dowayos.
I acquired an enviable reputation for stubbornness. If someone promised to meet me and did not turn up, I simply sat down with a book and waited until he did turn up. I felt that I had finally achieved a Western victory over the Dowayo notion of time.
Jon and Jeannie, apart from solving my transport problem and proving willing to haul supplies from the city, fulfilled several other needs. Jon lent me a key to his office, so I could use it when he was travelling. It had a real desk, the first flat writing surface I had seen in Dowayoland, electric light and paper. These luxuries cannot be appreciated by anyone who has not lived in an African mountain village. I could step through the door and simply leave Dowayoland for several hours at a stretch. I could spread out my notebooks and begin to analyse my data, to detect areas where my knowledge was sketchy, to scent other parts where inquiry might be rewarding, to pursue the demands of abstract thought without interruption or distraction – most un-African pursuits.
All this, of course, lay in the future on our first encounter, but events rather overtook my own expectations. I was engaged, as I mentioned, on the recording of the jar-ceremony. I turned up on the announced day and found, to my surprise, that the ceremony would indeed take place as advertised. I confess that climbing the mountain took rather more out of me than I had expected; by the time I reached the top I could hardly stand, and the world was swimming before my eyes. I recorded the ceremony as best I could, the decoration of the dead woman’s jar as a candidate for circumcision, the songs and the dance where a man carried the jar on his head. But something was definitely very wrong. I could hardly keep my eyes open, the weight of my camera seemed unbearable, Dowayo ‘explanations’ suddenly annoyed me beyond all measure. I was sitting on the wall of the cattle-park, working out the kin-relations between the various participants, when a man warned me not to sit in that particular place on pain of catching a horrible disease. I sought explanations from my assistant. The problem lay, he explained, in certain broken pots over in one corner. Therein accumulated certain gases that might draw the vitamins from my stomach. This gibberish was just too much for me and I found myself in a great rage, rather to my surprise since this was quite typical of the explanations I was used to from Dowayos who could read and write. In my normal frame of mind I would have noted this merely as an attempted translation of a traditional Dowayo perception into a pseudo-Western form. In fact, as I discovered by much painstaking inquiry later, the danger lay in the stones to ensure the fertility of the cattle that were buried under the broken pots. These could interfere with human sexuality and should only be approached by old men well past the age of paternity. In sitting as I was, I was risking my own fertility.
By the end of the ceremony, I was hardly able even to make notes and fled back down the mountain at breakneck speed to collapse on my mud bed. Next day, before the sun rose fully, I crept into town to see the doctor. He looked in my eyes, examined my bright orange urine under the microscope and declared that I had viral hepatitis. ‘You haven’t had any injections from a dirty needle recently?’ he asked. I thought back to the dentist at Garoua. The only cure was a regime of B complex vitamins, plenty of rest and rich diet. Given my current circumstances, this was out of the question. After some two days in bed, I felt rather better and went back up the mountain to finish the inquiry into the jar-ceremony.
Still rather bleary-minded, I continued my work for another week or so until Jon drove out to the village to see me with another missionary from N’gaoundere. I do not recall our conversation. It was something to do with the sexual connotations of penis yams, an example of which I had procured that very day. They exchanged meaningful looks and went into a huddle. It seemed that they were a little concerned at my condition and wanted to give me a lift to the mission hospital at N’gaoundere.
I was far from convinced that such extreme measures were necessary but, luckily for me, they insisted on dropping by the next day on the way out of town. It seemed wise to ponder the matter. Armed with soap, I set out for the swimming-place but, a mere hundred yards from the village, was assailed by a huge bout of fatigue that made it impossible to continue. Sitting down on a convenient rock, I was quite unable to command my legs. It began to rain heavily but motion was still totally beyond me. I recalled that it was my birthday and simply collapsed in tears, in which condition I was discovered by Gaston, a man from a nearby village. I sobbed out my inability to walk and he simply picked me up and carried me back to my hut, where I slept until hauled to the hospital.
9
Ex Africa semper quid nasty
Any African hospital is a shock by Western standards. There is nothing here to remind us of the hushed tones and pastel hues of our institutions. The unpleasant and offensive aspects of the human body are not dealt with in side wards and behind screens; it is very much a public place. When a man is ill, his whole family insist on being there, cooking there, doing the washing, nursing the children and conducting domestic affairs in strident voices as if at home. There are blaring radios, hawkers peddling a hundred forms of trash, long queues of swaddled women and downcast men all clutching pieces of paper like charms. Male nurses cut through them, intent on their own purposes, oblivious to the clutching hands and wailing voices. The environs are an ecological disaster. Every leaf has been plucked to wipe hands, every twig to feed fires, every blade of grass has been pounded to death and the lunar landscape is dotted with neat piles of excrement on which furtive dogs feed.
In the midst of it all is a doctor, usually white, harassed and overworked, rushing from one emergency to another, combining in his own no-frills service the competences of a dozen hospital departments. Here I received treatment in the form of gamma globulin injections that made me incapable of moving my legs for two days and, once more, I was generously taken in from the rain by the Nelsons who clearly decided on a policy of feeding me up.
The great trouble with hepatitis, it
seemed, was that it could easily become chronic and dog me to the end of my stay. It was therefore important to identify which of the several varieties I had contracted. This could only be done at Yaounde. Here there was also a proper dentist who could produce a more serviceable dental repair until I got back to England. I was encouraged to seek this by the obvious distress of Westerners when my teeth flew out spontaneously in the midst of eating, talking or other forms of ordinary activity.
Financial disaster loomed on all fronts. Money was still not getting through to me. The bank was incapable of following the simplest instructions and my indebtedness to the mission was becoming something of an embarrassment. Now I had to face further expenditure on vehicle and personal repairs. In desperation I sent a telegram to my college asking them to advance me £500 to get me out of difficulties. If they could cable it to me, I would pick it up at the British Embassy in Yaounde.
My physical collapse had come at a relatively convenient time. The main ritual season was over and the harvest, which I particularly wanted to witness, had not yet begun. I had about three weeks to refit and return to the field. With luck I might just make it. Gritting my dentures, I set off for Yaounde.
Being in a delicate condition, I opted for taking a couchette and damn the expense. This was surprisingly clean and comfortable and in a style that seemed to hail from the Tierra del Fuego Railroad Co. of about 1910. My chances of a good night, however, were destroyed by the efforts of the attendant to install me in a compartment together with a formidable Lebanese woman and her willowy daughter. The attendant pointed me to a bunk and I stowed my kit and settled down to sleep. Abruptly he was seized by this Levantine virago. ‘No man sleeps in the same room as my daughter till she is married,’ she hissed. ‘She is a virgin,’ she elaborated. We both regarded her with renewed interest. I attempted to disclaim all ambitions upon the physical charms of her offspring. The girl giggled. The attendant ranted. I was ignored.
The attendant treated us to a long reading from the regulations despite constant heckling from the woman. This dispute went round and round with that lack of purpose that characterizes African arguments.
‘I know a director of the railway. I shall have you fired.’
‘My brother is an Inspector of Immigration. I will have you deported.’
‘Savage!’
‘Whore!’
An undignified tussle took place in the doorway, ending in great quantities of spitting. The girl and I exchanged looks of mute sympathy. It was time to be dogmatic and I roused myself with difficulty. The woman seemed to fear an attempt to assault her daughter from the rear and leaped to interpose herself with clenched fists. Profiting from her distraction, the attendant seized her from behind and began dragging her howling into the corridor. A large crowd, consisting largely of travelling policemen, gathered to watch with serene detachment, while meaner spirits urged the combatants on.
As for me, I limped off down the corridor where I found almost all the couchettes empty and chose one at random. The attendant regarded this as a vile defection and favoured me with his views on the Lebanese at great length until I bribed him to simply go away. At intervals throughout the night I would hear the door of the compartment down the corridor open as the lady sentinel spotted her enemy passing and hurled abuse after him. The next morning as we pulled into Yaounde, he was dedicating himself to preventing her getting a porter, while she attempted to pour her drinking water over him.
I rendezvoused with French friends, whom I’d met when I’d first arrived, at the usual bar and we gossiped about what had happened to whom. Most of the absentees seemed to have fallen foul of the extremely virulent venereal diseases that haunt West Africa, social life being so dull that fornication is the chief distraction. The souvenir vendors, to my horror, recognized me as the one who had passed through without buying anything the first time and were determined not to let me escape again.
Whereas when I first arrived in Cameroon I had been greatly impressed by the ugliness and squalor of Yaounde, I now saw the city as a haven of beauty and good taste, brimming over with the comforts of civilization. Something drastic seemed to have happened to my standards in the few intervening months. I found myself also unmoved by rather shocking collocations of wealth and poverty. As we sat at the café, in mainly white company, a small child stood on the pavement and, driven by I know not what path to political radicalism at so tender an age, began to rail against foreigners. The clientele of the café found this hugely amusing and threw coins that the child scrabbled in the dirt to pick up.
I was soon installed in my friends’ flat and noted once again how different are the priorities of French and English young people. The unattached English or Americans one meets in such circumstances live either off the land or out of tins, but the French insist on their cuisine. Their lives, when not teaching, consisted of motor rallies in the jungle, parties in the Embassy area and touristic enterprises. One was an enthusiastic taxidermist and specialized in the stuffing of pangolins (scaly ant-eaters). These, it seems, are extraordinarily difficult beasts to kill and he was always experimenting in new ways of doing them to death. It was not unusual to find the bath full of remarkably lively pangolins that he had purportedly just drowned, or the lid being forced off the freezer by pangolins he had ‘frozen to death’.
By a strange coincidence, the new doctor at the Polyclinique turned out to be known to me, being the boyfriend of the sister of an old friend, and we had once met in a bar in La Rochelle. It was extremely comforting to find the world such a small place and working on such very African principles of extended kinship. He arranged for me to have blood tests, a process that I regarded with somewhat mixed feelings. It seemed counterproductive to have needles stuck in me as the cure for having needles stuck in me.
The next day I called in at the Embassy to see if there was any trace of my money. To my surprise, I discovered that I was the subject of much diplomatic activity. Hugely exaggerated reports of my maiming and disfigurement had reached them via the Foreign Office in London, and a member of the Embassy was even toying with the idea of going beyond the confines of the capital to look for me. Characteristically they went into elaborate explanations of the many ways in which they couldn’t help me. They did arrange for me to jump the queue to see the dentist, but denied firmly all knowledge of money.
I was forced to spend two weeks in Yaounde while my teeth were being repaired and took full advantage of it to eat meat, bread and, on one exquisite day, a cream cake. (When I returned to England I adopted a policy of eating two a day until I regained normal weight.) There is no more cheering experience than being able to walk about again after an illness. Life was full of hedonistic pleasures. I went to dinner with a man who ran the local tobacco company and could not explain my sudden, all-enveloping sense of well-being until I realized that I was sitting in an upholstered armchair for the first time in four months. In Dowayoland, I sat on rocks or on the Chief’s rickety deckchairs, at the mission on stiff-backed chairs. There were cinemas too, with various luxurious features, such as systems whereby you could hear the soundtrack at the back without having to rely on word of mouth passed from the front of the house. Best of all, they had roofs not made of corrugated iron so that a heavy shower did not obliterate everything.
But this euphoria was short-lived. Life for the Whites centred on the various bars where they forgathered in the evening to share each others’ boredom and complain about Yaounde. Since I was absolutely forbidden alcohol on pain of a relapse, these places were infinitely boring for me, and in the end I was not sorry to return up-country; other considerations apart, I was convinced that the Dowayos would have begun the harvest the moment my back was turned.
I dropped in at the hospital to pick up the results of my blood tests. The first report informed me I was suffering from ‘sample lost’. The second diagnosed ‘no reagent for this test’. Predictably, it had been a waste of time. However, I felt much improved physically and could pronounce most o
f the basic sounds of the English language with my new teeth. Only my finances had suffered. It was not for several more months that the Embassy discovered that money had in fact been sent to me and was lying in a drawer somewhere. I was impressed by their tact in sending me an invitation to the Queen’s birthday party so that it arrived the week after the event; on the back someone had written, The ambassador will not be surprised if you are unable to come.’
I regained N’gaoundere without incident, rendezvousing with Jon and Jeannie for a lift back to Poli. Reinforcements had just arrived from the States in the form of the Blue family whose patriarch, Walter, was to teach at the mission school. He, Jon and I rapidly became soul-mates. Walter, soon established as Vulch thanks to the locals’ rendering of his name as ‘vulture’, was a Times crossword addict and spent tortured hours wrestling with them on the veranda, groaning and whooping in alternating despair and exultation. He was also highly musical and soon acquired exclusive rights to a wizened and wheezy piano that had suffered much from damp and termites; it was only much later when he gained access to a more finely tuned instrument that I realized that he could play. His wife Jacqui was the perfect foil, firmly in charge of practical matters: making clothes, keeping hens, hitting pieces of wood with hammers, producing children that Vulch would dandle absently while solving a crossword. Through the house passed a constant stream of visitors; they always seemed glad of more. Arriving from the bush, one never knew quite who would be in residence, luggage laid out among the seething children, cats, dogs and chameleons that variously constituted the ménage.
