The Innocent Anthropologist

by Nigel Barley

  I was beginning to feel rather less alone in Cameroon. It seemed that the worst had happened and been somehow overcome. I had found friends not too distant from my field location. I had a bolt-hole for when disease, depression and isolation struck me down. I could now get ahead with the work I had come here for.

  10

  Rites and Wrongs

  I had been away just over three weeks but was encouraged to note that the millet by the roadside was not yet ready for harvesting.

  Since reading Malinowski’s fanatical tirades against anthropology from the mission veranda, such spots have assumed great attractions for me and I always found them pleasant and profitable places from which to contemplate Africa. The main road to town passed just in front, behind lay the mountains lit up by the moon. It was a splendid place for being both nosey and idle.

  As I sat enjoying the view and benign warmth after the coolness of N’gaoundere, wafts of drumming blew in from the mountains. Once again, I felt rather like the archetypal white man in one of those sternly wholesome films the British made in the ’40s, listening to the natives far out in the hills and wondering whether this signified the massacre we had all feared. In fact I could recognize the sound of the deep death-drum. Someone was being buried, a rich man. With the echoes from the mountains, it was difficult to tell where the sound was coming from. I asked the cook, Ruben, whether he knew. He told me the sound came from Mango; in fact it came from my own village which was where I had placed it. My sense of duty beckoned me forth; hitherto I had not witnessed a major male burial. I bade my friends farewell and headed out to Kongle by the light of a borrowed torch.

  As I walked into the village I met my assistant who welcomed me warmly and asked for an advance on his wages. The death was indeed that of a rich man in the most distant part of Kongle, a compound where I had good contacts through a man named Mayo. Mayo was an old friend of Zuuldibo’s father and was treated by the administration as chief of Kongle in defiance of the wishes of the people and the rules of inheritance. Zuuldibo’s father had hit on the notion that if the administration could levy taxation, then so could he. He had raised a special tax for himself and been most aggrieved when told that this was not permitted. There had developed a great feud between the sous-préfet and the people of Kongle, and Mayo, who had always had the more tedious aspects of chiefship foisted on to him, was regarded as the agent of the government. Strangely, Mayo and Zuuldibo remained the best of friends and Mayo was a universally popular figure. I thought him quite the nicest Dowayo I ever met. He was generous, helpful, high-spirited and had put himself out to assist me on numerous occasions. I was pleased to note that Matthieu had just returned from Mayo’s village and had made notes on the proceedings.

  We set out at dawn the next morning for the ‘place of death’. Mayo insisted on bringing out a deckchair, covered, I noted, with burial cloth, and setting it up right beside the body where it considerably impeded the activities of the participants.

  The body had already been wrapped once with the skin of a steer slaughtered for this purpose by his brothers. Round and round the village ran women in leaves of mourning, banging empty calabashes together and wailing. To one side of the special enclosure for male dead sat the widows, staring stonily ahead of them. Foolishly, I sought to greet them; they are not allowed to speak or move. The men considered this a great joke and giggled and sniggered as they wrapped the cadaver. Other kinsmen, especially affines, were bringing in material to wrap the body, skins, cloth and bandages. The dead man’s son-in-law arrived, bringing his wife. He has to stand her in the cattle-park and fling his offerings at her belly, indicating the link between himself and the family of the dead. Wife-givers to the family of the dead fling their offerings in the faces of his kinsmen. This is normally a gesture of insult and accurately indicates the relations of respect and inferiority a man shows towards his wife’s parents and their superiority with regard to him.

  There was a great deal of joking going on between the men. Later, I was to learn that these were men circumcised at the same time as the deceased. They have a lifelong obligation to insult each other jokingly and make free with each others’ property. Suddenly there was a torrential downpour and everyone melted away. ‘Where have they gone?’

  ‘They have gone off to defecate in the bush.’

  At the time, I naïvely assumed that this was merely an interval in the ceremony where those who had been occupied here since early morning would break off by common consent and relieve themselves in the bush before continuing. Only later would I find that it was an integral part of the ceremony – an oblique reference to the reality of circumcision between brothers, an admission that the anus is not sealed. Matthieu, Mayo and I retired to a hut until the rain blew over and Mayo told me of what the men do at the crossroads in the early morning after a death. It was typical of Mayo that he would volunteer information of this kind whereas it had to be dragged out of most men.

  The men go out to the crossroads. The clowns and sorcerers are there too. The brothers of circumcision are there. Two face each other, sitting down. They put grass over their heads. One says, ‘Give me your cunt.’ The other replies, ‘You may have my cunt.’ One copulates with the other. They do it with a stick. A man sets fire to the grass. They shout. They join the other men. It is finished.

  Mayo found this whole episode quite hilarious and literally fell about laughing. It was only polite to do likewise but my mind was elsewhere trying to ‘make sense’ of this information. Dowayo festivals always made me feel punch-drunk, overwhelmed by the suggestiveness yet lack of definition of their symbolism. I felt the whole time that there was a large chunk missing, some major and obvious fact that no one had bothered to tell me so that I was simply holding the whole thing upside down and looking at it all wrong. I already suspected what it was – circumcision – but no one was quite ready to talk about that yet. I would have to piece it together very slowly over the next months. In fact, this whole episode is simply an abbreviated version of what happens when a boy is circumcised, and derives its structure from that, as do all festivals in Dowayoland. All life crises, all major calendrical festivals are depicted in terms of circumcision. This is why circumcision dress keeps cropping up in the most unlikely places, the dead woman’s water-jar, the wrapping given a corpse.

  There was a shout outside. While we had been inside, the men had returned and tied a red hat to the body, just like the circumcision candidate wears. The corpse was jostled and threatened with circumcision. Sometimes a naked boy is required to lean back against the body and a red thread is cut away from his penis simulating circumcision.

  Matthieu and I stayed far into the night recording songs and collecting gossip of all kinds; the tapes would provide employment for some time to come.

  We had hardly returned to the village and set about our first meal of the day when we heard that there was to be another skull-festival nearby, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the next day. Nothing would happen at the burial for perhaps two days while the body was ‘lying in state’, so that could be left simmering while we went over to the other big event.

  While we were eating Matthieu had assumed a sly expression that I had come to know and fear. He was always so long working round to something that it was a blessed relief when he came to the point. At last he came out with it. While I was away he had spent his time visiting relatives but also in sorting out the contents of my hut. He had come across an old suit dumped in the bottom of a suitcase. This I had brought with me on the advice of a colleague: ‘You’ll need at least one suit.’ I never discovered why. I had carried the thing around with me for months awaiting an occasion to put it on, and had finally relegated my colleague’s tip to a long list of ‘crazy and useless advice for fieldworkers’. Matthieu, however, had other ideas. He requested earnestly that I wear the suit to the skull festival. It would impress people, he claimed. I refused point-blank. He sulked. Well then, there was another matter. I should have a cook. It was not right that I
cook myself; moreover, on occasions such as today it would have been a fine thing to return and find food awaiting. He had a ‘brother’; he would bring him. For the sake of peace and quiet I agreed to talk to him, but had secretly not the slightest intention of saddling myself with a domestic establishment.

  Next day I was roused by Matthieu even before dawn. He was all smiles. He had a surprise for me. The cook he had mentioned, his brother, he had sought him out. He had made breakfast. This consisted of intestines burnt black in copious quantities of cooking oil. I hated the way Dowayos swamped everything in oil. The cook was presented to me to receive my congratulations. He was a youth of about fifteen who had the peculiarity of having six fingers on both hands. This quite distracted and interested me. I would have to find out about notions concerning cripples and deformity. The youth attributed his success at cooking to the contact he had had with Whites in Garoua. Had he perhaps been a cook there? No, a dustman. I felt tired; this was a problem I would have to come back to when I was feeling stronger. I would talk to him again this evening.

  In keeping with Dowayo notions of time, the festival was not at the stage it should have been; this had the advantage of enabling me to see parts the Dowayos had kept quiet about. This, in all fairness, was not their fault. I had asked to see the ‘throwing on the skulls’, my understanding being that this was the name for the whole ceremony. It was the name but also, unfortunately, the technical term for just that part where excrement and blood were thrown on the skulls. Thus when I asked to see ‘throwing on the skulls’ that was precisely what I had got. Meanwhile all sorts of provocative acts were being performed by other people I did not know were involved at all. The men, for example, performed a narcissistic dance with mirrors. Brothers of circumcision were required to climb on the roofs of the huts of the dead and rub their anuses against the roof ridge. Women performed all sorts of strange acts with penis yams that quite baffled me until I discovered that they were a mere adaptation of what boys do after they have been circumcised. In other words, the widows of the dead are treated as if they have just been circumcised after taking their final leave of their dead husbands. The common feature is that they are now totally reincorporated into normal life after a period of exclusion from it. Their husbands, who undergo the skull-ceremony, are treated as if they have just been circumcised. The common feature here is that they may now be placed in the skull-house where the circumcision ritual itself has its final climax.

  Very little of this was clear to me at the time, of course. I was far too busy just writing it down to be able to even speculate what it was that I was noting with such industry. I often simply fired questions at random in the hope of hitting something to ask further questions about. The problem of working in the area of symbolism lies in the difficulty of defining what is data for symbolic interpretation. One is seeking to describe what sort of a world the Dowayos live in, how they structure it and interpret it. Since most of the data will be unconscious, this cannot simply be approached by asking about it. A Dowayo, when faced with the question, ‘What sort of a world do you live in?’ is rather less able to answer than we ourselves would be. The question is simply too vague. One has to piece it all together bit by bit. Possibly a linguistic usage will be significant, a belief or the structure of a ritual. One then seeks to incorporate it all into some sort of scheme.

  For example, I have already explained that blacksmiths are set apart from the rest of Dowayos and that this separateness finds its expression in rules enforcing separate cultivation, eating, sex, drawing of water. An anthropologist would suspect that other forms of communication would also stress the separateness of blacksmiths; there might well be beliefs about language, for instance. I found that blacksmiths were supposed to speak with a particular accent, different from other Dowayos; their sexual isolation might be stressed by beliefs about incest or homosexuality. The last I found a particularly awkward area. My opportunity to broach the subject came on the occasion of the castration of a bull whose testes were being eaten by parasitic worms. I was interested to note that, had several cattle been due for castration, this would have been performed in the circumcision grove where boys are cut, another example of the identification of cattle and men. As all the cattle were driven in so that the diseased one could be caught, two yearlings tried to mount each other. I pointed this out, hoping that similar practices would be imputed to some group, with luck, blacksmiths. The further I went in my questioning, the more awkward and embarrassing it became. The truth seems to be that homosexual practices are largely unknown in West Africa except where white men have spread the word. Dowayos were incredulous that such things were possible. Such behaviour in animals was always interpreted as ‘They are fighting over women’. Males will have much more physical contact than is normal in our own culture but it carries no sexual overtones: friends walk hand in hand; often young men will sleep entwined together but this is not thought to involve sexuality. Dowayos who had not seen me for some time would often sit in my lap and stroke my hair, amused at my embarrassment at such public behaviour. So my hopes that smiths might have a reputation for homosexuality were unfounded – but they did eat dogs and monkeys; most Dowayos will refuse both. An anthropologist would explain that this is because both are too close to humans. Eating them, therefore, is the culinary equivalence of incest or homosexuality.

  And so one picks one’s way through the morass of data by a process of constant error and revision. On this particular day, however, I confess to being more preoccupied with the problem of my cook and how to disembarrass myself of his dubious services. Fortunately an excellent solution finally occurred to me; I would employ him as one of the people to build my projected new house. Feelings would be spared all round. He would doubtless be better at throwing mud than cooking food.

  Besides the other interests of this festival, it provided me with another opportunity to speak to the Old Man of Kpan, since this event was happening in his own back garden. As usual, he was surrounded by a considerable retinue, someone holding a red umbrella over his head, and sated with beer. He was eager to compare dentures and, finding his own to be a vastly more sophisticated device, was moved to invite me to visit him in a month’s time. He would send me word.

  The rainy season was now officially over and it would not rain again for five or six months, a matter of great comfort to me since I have always hated rain. On the way back from the skulls, however, there was a remarkable storm. It began with a faint moaning sound in the mountains that grew to a dull roar. Looking up at the sky, we could see huge clouds building and swirling round the peaks. It was obvious we should not reach the village before its full force hit us. The wind raced across the plain, tearing at the grass and ripping leaves from the trees. It was clear to Matthieu that this was no ordinary storm but a personal demonstration by the rainchief of his power. I must confess that had I not been a totally prejudiced Westerner I should have been inclined to agree with him, for the storm was quite remarkable. The rain lashed us so that we were saturated from head to foot in seconds and shivering from the cold. The buffeting of the wind was so violent that it tore the buttons off our shirts and we were obliged to call a halt at a log bridge. This consisted of a split tree trunk covered with moss that spanned a gorge some forty feet deep. It was simply impossible to teeter across this in the wind and so we sat down to wait, Matthieu terrified that the Old Man would send lightning to kill us. I told him that white men cannot be struck by lightning so he should stick to me and no harm could come of it. He believed this at once. West Africa has apparently the highest incidence in the world of people being struck by lightning. I remember sitting there thinking that, since almost every vehicle has a motorjo, a man whose task it is to tie down baggage and climb on the roof to let goods down for passengers, the expression ‘my postilion has been struck by lightning’ is probably more useful here than anywhere else on Earth.

  Finally, the fury died down and we regained the village. The story of the storm rapidly did the ro
unds and I spent the evening chatting quite openly about rainchiefs; overnight it had become an acceptable subject of conversation.

  Some of the Dowayos had already begun to harvest, although it was rather early, and it was clearly time for me to become ubiquitous in the fields. For the harvest a threshing floor must be constructed. This consists of a shallow depression scooped in the earth and plastered with mud, cattle excrement and sticky plants to form a firm base. It must be protected against witchcraft with spiky remedies: thistles, barbs of millet stems or bamboo, even porcupine quills are used. Here the heads of the cut millet are normally allowed to dry for several days before being beaten with sticks to dislodge the grain. This is very hard work and hated by Dowayos. The husk is fiercely irritating to the skin and even the toughened hides of Dowayos come up in huge weals. They sit around alternately beating and drinking, scratching with an unrestrained enjoyment that brooks no modesty. I became especially interested in the threshing floor. Everywhere such places are the focus of symbolic elaboration and there is a complex of prohibitions attaching to them in Dowayoland. I already knew that there was a special class of ‘true cultivators’ who had to take special precautions. I had already arranged to visit one of these for his harvest in some two weeks time and would find out then about his special place in the cultural system. I had made a point of getting on good terms with the local women, knowing that they would be a good source on such matters, being prone to having their sexuality disrupted by breaches of taboos, and had learned that a pregnant woman should never go inside a threshing floor. This was not what I had expected. Elsewhere in Dowayoland human sexuality and plant fertility are held to affect each other beneficially. For example, the first time that a girl menstruates she is shut up for three days in the grinding hut where millet is made into flour. Only those linked by marriage can accept germinated millet. Blacksmiths, with whom sexual relations are forbidden, should not enter a woman’s field if millet is growing there. In other words, a series of parallels is established by the culture between various stages of the millet cycle and the sexual processes of women. In accordance with this, I would have expected childbirth and threshing to be paired off as well. It would have fitted my model very well if a cure for difficult childbirth had been to sit the woman in the threshing circle. I puzzled about this for a long time. I even borrowed Jon’s office for a day while he was away to sit down with my notes and try to find out what was wrong. If this was incorrect, I might well have to scrap everything I had worked out thus far concerning the ‘cultural map’ of the Dowayos.