by Nigel Barley
So it was with the train. A technological development much appreciated by the locals is the cassette radio, so that a man may record a wavering cacophony broadcast through a thick hiss and crackle of atmospherics and play it back in public at high volume over and over again. There is always a competition between northern Muslims and southern Christians to establish prior rights to airspace. Winning this contest gives one the exclusive right to play one’s cassette regardless of the hour and determines whether the theme shall be the interminable tuneless West African pop of Nigerian pijin (‘O me mammy I don’ forget you’) or indigenous products (‘Je suis un enfant de Douala olé’) or the raucous wailing of Arab-style confections. Stopping for even a moment is interpreted as allowing the opposition its chance and is therefore discouraged. The principal difference between those areas of a city populated by local bureaucrats or foreign envoys is that of noise level. Africans seem genuinely perplexed by the Westerner’s predilection for creeping around in silence when presumably he could afford enough batteries to have his radio playing day and night.
Another basic difference between Christian and Muslim is that the Christian males urinate standing up and are thus quite able to reach the sink in the washroom for that purpose, whereas Muslims urinate squatting, a process effected with dreadful risk by spreading out their robes to a capacious tent and half leaning out of the open door of the moving carriage.
On this particular trip I sat opposite a German agriculturalist heading north for his second term of duty. He was, he revealed, in charge of a project to encourage the cultivation of cotton for export. Cotton is sold through a government monopoly and earns much-needed foreign exchange, so its production is heavily supported by central government. Had he been successful? Wildly so; in fact the people had spent so much time growing cotton that they had grown no food, prices had rocketed and a famine had only been averted by the intervention of the church relief projects. Strangely, he seemed in no way depressed by this outcome, taking it rather as a sign that cotton had come to stay.
During my time in Cameroon I met many such specialists, some of whom reproached me bitterly for being a ‘parasite on African culture’. They had come to share knowledge, to change peoples’ lives. I was only there to observe and might, by my interest, encourage pagan superstition and backwardness. Sometimes, in the silent watches of the night, I too wondered about that, just as in England I had wondered about the point of an academic life. However, when it came to the crunch they seemed to accomplish very little. For every problem they solved they created two more. I rather felt that it was people who claimed to be the sole possessors of the truth who should be ill at ease for the disruption they caused in others’ lives. At least one can say of the anthropologist that he is a harmless drudge, it being one of the professed ethics of the trade to interfere directly as little as possible in what one observes.
Such thoughts come to the fieldworker as he eats interminable bananas on a railway train. The journey, I’d been assured, would last three hours; in fact it took seventeen hours, but gradually the temperature dropped as we climbed the plateau towards the city of N’gaoundere. Night fell suddenly and the lights failed in the train. We sat in the gloom, eating bananas, talking broken German and watching the scrubby bush fade into blackness. Finally, when I’d begun to feel that I’d spend the rest of my life on this train, we arrived at N’gaoundere.
There was an immediate sense of alienation, much greater than in the South. N’gaoundere is regarded as the frontier between North and South, popular with Whites for its cool climate and rail link with the capital. Although changing under the impact of the railway, it still maintains large areas of traditional thatched compounds.
Further south, these have been displaced totally by a passion for corrugated iron or aluminium sheeting, unbearably hot in the sun and acting as a vast radiator which ensures that night becomes as hot as day. These corrugated shanties contribute greatly to the ugliness of African cities to a Westerner’s eyes. This is partly sheer ethnocentrism; while thatched huts are ‘picturesque and rustic’, corrugated huts are ‘slums’. N’gaoundere, however, was less immediately offensive than most African towns. In the dark, with hundreds of cooking fires glowing, it looked like a Westerner’s view of Africa. In the daylight one sees the piles of rotting rubbish through which the gilded youth picks its way on mopeds adorned with plastic flowers.
But for the moment, the German and I were totally absorbed in bargaining with a taxi driver. Whereas I would probably have accepted my historical role as someone to be robbed, the German devoted himself to haggling with the ferocity and apparent deep contempt for all taxi drivers that I came to note as the mark of a man who really knew his way around. The result was that we were delivered to the Catholic mission with minimum delay, at reasonable cost, and received warmly by the priests, whom he knew well.
There is a widespread impression that missionaries have taken upon themselves the mantle of medieval hospitality to travellers. Some do, indeed, provide lodging but this is more likely to be for their own personnel flitting between conferences than for vapid wanderers. They have suffered greatly from penniless hitchhikers who expect to be able to live off the fat of Africa as easily as they do in Europe. Under their onslaught, hospitality has necessarily been curtailed; otherwise missions would find themselves exclusively in the hotel business.
But I was eager to move on to the Protestant mission where I believed myself to be expected. With delays in documentation, I was now two months into my fieldwork time and had not even seen a Dowayo. I had a nagging fear they might not exist, the word ‘Dowayo’ being a native term for ‘no one’ that had been dutifully noted in answer to some district officer’s question. ‘Who lives over there?’ I inquired politely at the Catholic mission. Yes, it seemed the Dowayos did exist. Fortunately the Catholics had had very little to do with them, they were terrible people. At the school the Fathers ran they were always the very worst pupils. Why was I interested in working with Dowayos? The reason for their mode of life was simple: they were ignorant.
4
Honi soit qui Malinowski
Young anthropologists know all about missionaries before they’ve met any. They play a large role in the demonology of the subject, beside self-righteous administrators and exploitative colonials. The only intellectually respectable response to a tin rattled in one’s face by someone collecting for missionary work is a reasoned refutation of the whole concept of missionary interference. The documentation is there. Anthropologists point out, in their introductory courses to students, the excesses and shortsightedness of Melanesian missions that culminated in cargocults and famines. The Brazilian orders in the Amazon are charged with trading in slaves and child prostitutes, stealing land and intimidating the natives with force and threats of Hellfire. Missions destroy traditional cultures and self-respect, reducing peoples all over the globe to the state of helpless, baffled morons living on charity and in economic and cultural thraldom to the West. The great dishonesty lies in exporting to the Third World systems of thought that the West itself has largely discarded.
All this was in the back of my mind when I reached the American mission at N’gaoundere. It was something of a betrayal of anthropological principles even to be talking to missionaries: anthropologists have been obsessed with keeping themselves free of this taint since Malinowski, self-styled inventor of fieldwork, first issued his impassioned cry to the ethnographer to get up off the mission veranda and go out into the villages. Still, I would be on my guard against the devil’s wiles and might save myself much time by talking to people who had actually lived in Dowayoland.
To my great surprise, I was received with much warmth. Far from being rampant cultural imperialists, I found the missionaries – except for one or two of the old school – to be extremely diffident about imposing their own views. Anthropology seemed, in fact, to be accorded a rather embarrassingly high position as a sovereign remedy against unfortunate cultural misunderstandings – a
position which I could not honestly have claimed for it.
My original contact was Ron Nelson, who ran a mission radio studio whose programmes were distributed over much of West Africa – when the transmitters were not being nationalized by any particular government. He and his wife radiated a sort of calm strength far removed from the god-squad hysteria I had rather expected; after all, anyone who went out to Christianize the heathen must be a religious fanatic. I certainly found the latter among some of the more extreme groups working in Cameroon, people who railed against me for taking a couple of fertility dolls back to Europe on the grounds that I was importing the devil into God’s territory; they should be burnt, not exhibited. Fortunately they were in the minority and, it seemed, a declining one if the younger missionaries I met were anything to go by.
On the whole, it was surprising how much work was being done on the local cultures and languages, translation work, pure linguistic research and attempts to adapt liturgy to local symbolic idiom; my own research would have been quite impossible without the mission’s support. My funds having now been incautiously committed to the maw of an African bank, it was thanks to a loan from the mission that I was able to set myself up for the field in the first place. When I was ill, the mission hospital patched me up. When I was stranded, the missionaries put me up. When I ran out of supplies, they let me buy at their store which was theoretically only for their own personnel. To the jaded, ravenous fieldworker this was an Aladdin’s cave of imported goodies at reduced prices.
But the mission was not only an emergency support for an anthropologist totally unprepared both materially and mentally for the bush, it was an all-important sanctuary where, when things simply became too much, one could flee, eat meat, talk English and be with people for whom the simplest statement did not have to be prefixed by long explanations.
The French missionaries also took me somewhat under their wing, clearly taking the view that we Europeans must stand together in the face of Americans. My favourite was Père Henri, a jolly, energetic extrovert. He had lived for a number of years with the nomadic Fulani and, as one of his colleagues put it, ‘never been able to bring himself to preach to them’. He was totally in love with the people and spent hours discussing subtle points of grammar with so-called ‘pure Fulani’ speakers. His room at the seminary out in the hills was a shrine and a laboratory. With the aid of the most amazing Heath Robinson devices he collected recordings from ethnographic informants, edited them, typed them up and cross-referenced them all with switches operated by a swipe of the elbow, a stamp of the foot, a bang of the knee. He was a man who seemed to rev at twice the speed of normal mortals. On hearing that I was after a vehicle for the bush, he immediately whisked me off on a whistlestop tour of his contacts that involved viewing a number of broken-down jalopies at inflated prices. We ended up at the airport bar, run by a typical French colonial who turned out to be a Cockney who knew a man who knew a man, etc. By the end of the afternoon cars were coming round for the second time and Père Henri had negotiated a complicated series of options and prerogatives with insurance I could fill in for myself to cover anything under the sun. In the end I bought Ron Nelson’s car with money loaned from the mission and piled in some mission supplies, fully intending to take off immediately for the field. Various people had lent me material they had accumulated from the mission’s twenty-odd years in Dowayoland, not just linguistic information but outlines of kinship organization (wildly wrong) and all manner of ethnographic odds and ends that enabled me to convince the Dowayos that I knew far more about their culture than I was letting on and would detect half-truths and evasions as easy as winking. I had corresponded with two Summer Institute of Linguistics researchers while still in England who had furnished me with a word-list, an outline of the verb system and the basic phonemes, so I felt as well equipped as anyone needed to be. I fondly pictured myself heading out into the bush the next morning, the air clean and fresh, to begin from scratch a ruthlessly profound analysis of the culture of my very own primitive people. It was at this point that bureaucracy laid me low again.
The existence of a huge, antiquated French administrative system in an African cultural climate is a combination fit to defeat the most assiduous. It was broken to me gently by my hosts, with a form of bemused tolerance reserved for the innocent or dull-witted, that I could not leave town in my Peugeot 404 without sorting out the papers. At various points there would be gendarmes with nothing on their minds but the inspection of documents. Since it was impossible to tell in advance which could read and which could not, attempting to bluff one’s way past was something to be undertaken only in an emergency.
I trooped off to the préfecture with the required documents in my hand. Then began the most convoluted and bizarre paper-chase. I was told I would be charged £120 registration fee, and after only a small amount of the by now expected jostling and arrogance I secured a piece of paper to take to the Finance Ministry who rejected it on the grounds that it did not have 200 francs’ worth of fiscal stamps on it to pay administration costs. Fiscal stamps, under rules apparently spontaneously invented for that day alone, could only be purchased at the post office at the counter marked ‘parcels’. The post office had no fiscal stamps for any sum less than 250 francs, so I attached one of these. At the Finance Ministry this was held to be improper and contrary to good administrative order. The Inspector would have to decide what to do. Alas, it was to be regretted that the Inspector was ‘detained at lunch on business’ but he would surely return. He did not return that day. I found a fatalistic Fulani taxi driver, similarly becalmed, who drew great comfort from his Muslim religion in this time of adversity. He was also involved in a major campaign to pay his electricity bill and rushed from one office to another trying to catch both off their guard. He was greeted with growing disapproval and I guessed that it was as punishment for his indecent haste that my piece of paper was finally stamped by competent authorities and I moved on to the next stage, after a mere three hours. Returning the next day, I revisited the office I had started from and exchanged all my pieces of paper for yet another in triplicate; these I exchanged after some hours for several more that I had stamped over on the other side of town (with but a short detour to buy more fiscal stamps). At the Finance Ministry the taxi driver was still there, deep in prayer, convinced that only direct supernatural intervention could aid him. I sped on past.
By the end of the following day I had spent something like £200 and was approaching the end of my Odyssey. The man who had sent me off initially received me with great amusement at the préfecture and shooed other clients out of his office to offer me a chair. ‘Congratulations,’ he said with a huge grin. ‘Most people take much longer than that. Have you the documents, the receipts and the declaration?’ All these were swiftly produced. He slipped them into a folder. Thank you. Drop by next week.’ Rather melodramatically, I recoiled in horror. He smiled beatifically. ‘We have run out of registration cards, but expect them within a few days.’ It is some indication that I had begun to adapt that I stood my ground, argued with force and venom and left the office with a temporary card and the entire folder in my possession.
The drive to Gouna, my turn-off, was through torrential rain and quite uneventful. The road was tarmac and, by local standards, good. Having been warned of certain of its more interesting features, I drove slowly as I descended from the plateau on to the plain and the temperature rose as if I were driving into an oven. One of the principal hazards of driving in the area is road-safety features. For example, there are a number of bridges which are only wide enough for one-way traffic. To ensure that drivers do not approach these at incautious speed, the authorities have judiciously placed a double line of bricks across the road – in those days without warning signs – on either side of the bridge. The burnt-out wrecks of cars and trucks whose drivers were unaware of this precaution are littered about the river beds. Many of them were killed. Spotting the new wrecks on the road was a standard way of relieving
the boredom of driving through the featureless scrub. When one travelled by bush-taxi, each wreck was the occasion for a new story from the inevitable well-informed fellow passenger. Over there was a truck from Chad that had burst into flames because the petrol tank had been split open. That was the carcass of the motorbike ridden by two Frenchmen. They had been travelling at over eighty miles an hour when they hit the bricks and one had been impaled on the railings of the bridge.
Lest the seasoned traveller become too blasé, the authorities would also mark out areas of soft tarmac with granite boulders that were invisible at dusk. At a later stage one of these nearly cost myself and some friends our lives.
But for the moment I drove the two hundred kilometres quite contentedly, this being my first close look at the bush with its villages of mud huts, waving children and heaps of yams for sale by the roadside. It was now high wet season in late July and the landscape was a mass of stunted green bushes and grass. The bushfires of the dry season ensured that no real trees ever properly established themselves, and in the distance I could see the mountains of the Godet range, jagged teeth of bare granite, where the Dowayos lived.
Some hours later I reached Gouna and searched in vain for the petrol-station marked on my map. It simply did not exist. There is a great difference between any landscape as represented on a British map of the ordnance survey type and the French map with which I had equipped myself. Unlike its British counterpart, it told me little about river-crossings and whether churches had steeples or spires but dwelt expansively on restaurants and noble prospects. From my French map, it would have seemed that I was destined to move easily from one place of sensual delight to another.
For the first ten miles or so the dirt road was comparatively easy going. To either side of me stretched well-tended fields of what I clearly identified as maize and turned out to be millet, interspersed with areas of blackened scrubland. There, at last, hoeing contentedly in their gardens to either side of the road, were the people I had come to see, the Dowayos. First impressions were favourable. They smiled and waved, pausing in their endeavours to follow my passage up the road with their eyes and fell to lively discussion – clearly attempting to identify me. The road gradually became worse and worse until it was just a series of shattered boulders and deep craters. I had clearly wandered from the track. At this point two small boys hurried up carrying their shoes on their heads to protect them from the mud. To my relief they spoke French. This was indeed the road. Was it not very bad? It had been better. I learnt later that the funds for its repair had mysteriously disappeared. The sous-préfet had, about the same time, bought a large, low, American car. It was held to be poetic justice that the state of the road prevented him driving it to town. I gladly gave the boys a lift to their school, which they assured me was just up the road. As we bucked and juddered along, we took on various others until I had a fine collection of seven or eight.