The Innocent Anthropologist

by Nigel Barley

  It is revealed after death as two spikes under the upper jaw. If these are red or black this means the witchcraft has killed. Where there have been a number of deaths of confirmed witches in a single family, suspicion will normally rapidly centre on a particular relative. In pre-colonial times accused witches were put to the ordeal. They would be required, if male, to drink beer in which the knife of circumcision had been soaked; if guilty, their stomachs would swell up and they would bleed to death. Alternatively, they would be required to drink beer containing the poisonous latex sap of the dangoh (Euphorbica Cameroonica) cactus. If they did not vomit they would die and be held convicted as charged; if they did vomit, white vomit betokened innocence, red vomit guilt. The guilty would then be hanged by the blacksmith.

  On one occasion a woman was universally held to be a witch and to have conveyed the infection to her two daughters, both of whom had died. I was present at the examination of the skull of the second. The head was removed from the corpse by an old man using a bent stick. He was much admired for the dexterity with which he inserted the end in the eye socket and flicked off the head without losing any teeth that drop down into the stomach. The cadaver was some three weeks old and the stench was fairly bad; the man would receive a goatskin from the parents for this service. As usual there was a fair amount of ribald humour. The women were sent away: ‘If we bent down to pick up the head and farted you would tell everyone.’ They withdrew with considerable peevishness and the men examined the head. In my time in Dowayoland I examined a large number of skulls but could never convince myself that the difference between one held to show witchcraft and one free of it was based upon any perceived morphological distinction. The old men were always unanimous, however. The announcement of the finding of witchcraft was greeted not with anger but quiet satisfaction by the village. The woman was, in fact, a close neighbour of mine and immediately jokes began to fly about to the effect that only a white man, immune like all white men to witchcraft, could live next to her. She seemed annoyed at this slur and offered to walk over the skulls of the dead, in which case, were she the source of their witchcraft, she would die. The husband refused to let her. ‘What’s the point?’ he explained to me. ‘She’d only die and then I’d have to buy another wife.’

  There was none of the wide-eyed fear I had rather expected in the face of witchcraft; the whole thing was viewed in a rather deadpan, matter-of-fact fashion. Dowayos always stressed to me that there were different sorts of head witchcraft, only one of which was bad. Some forms merely gave a man clean teeth; other forms gave success in farming and involved no other person’s disadvantage. They would never quite believe me when I explained that such matters interested me because they did not exist in the land of the white men. I was unaware at that time of the Dowayo pedigree as a reincarnated magician that had been constructed for me. Dowayos would never call me a liar but they had a particular facial expression they would adopt when I was trying to put some particularly blatant falsehood over on them such as the existence of underground trains, or the absence of bridewealth in England.

  Healers were, on the whole, only too happy to work with me for the relatively small payment I was able to provide. Their only fear was that I would steal their remedies and set myself up in business. In primitive society knowledge is seldom freely available; rather it belongs to people. A man owns his knowledge. He has paid for it and he would be a fool to give it away without payment to another, just as he wouldn’t give away his daughters without brideprice. It was only reasonable that they should charge me. Dowayos justify their remedies by their pedigrees. An old remedy is better than a new one; any innovation is suspect as it does not carry the imprimatur of the ancestors. Consequently, there is no attempt to find new remedies.

  Healers were initially suspicious of my ‘clinic’ until they had satisfied themselves that I limited myself to the treatment of infectious diseases with white men’s roots and was not in competition with them. One particular case raised certain moral and strategic difficulties. The Chief’s brother, who lived several huts away, used to come and visit me quite often. He was a gangling, awkward and affable man who had a reputation for being not too bright. I realized one day that he had not been to see me for several weeks and, on inquiring whether he was away, I was informed that he was dying. He had suffered a severe bout of amoebic dysentery and the healer from up the cliff had been called. The examination of the entrails of a chicken had revealed that he was being afflicted by the spirit of his dead mother who wanted beer. This had been flung upon the skull but there was no improvement. Another healer was called. He revealed that, in fact, the illness derived from another spirit masquerading as the spirit of the man’s mother. Offerings were made but the young man still weakened. The Chief’s third wife, who had looked after him as a boy, was very distressed and came and wailed outside my hut asking if I had no roots that might save him. It was impossible to refuse, since I indeed had some powerful amoebicides and antibiotics. I explained to everyone that I was not a healer and that I did not know whether my roots might help but that if they wished me to try to heal him I would do so. I had been afraid of alienating the healers by this but they were quite prepared to find that a wrong diagnosis had been made. The man’s recovery was swift. He passed from a skeletal condition to good health in a matter of days and there was general rejoicing. The healers were in no way put out. They merely explained that this was a complex case of a man ill with an infectious disease but that various spirits had taken advantage of it to increase his sufferings. They had dealt with the spirits; I had dealt with the disease.

  It was only when they were ill that I really felt sorry for Dowayos and felt their way of life to be inferior to our own. Otherwise they enjoyed freedom, held themselves to be wealthy, had clear access to their major forms of sensual gratification in beer and women, and had their self-respect. Once ill, however, they died needlessly in agony and terror. There was no real help for them in the government hospital in Poli. There was a regulation that every patient had to turn up with a half exercise book to keep the records of his case in. Illiterate tribesmen had no need of exercise books and therefore never had one to hand; they were not on sale in Poli and the hospital staff refused to keep them as this was not part of their responsibility according to the rules. Patients would be turned away and refused urgent medical treatment until they could find an exercise book. Inevitably, I became a benefactor in this matter, as did the missions, but the effect was that many Dowayos did not bother to go to the hospital at all. There were doubtless many deaths as the result of this, and I found it impossible to condone the arrogant inhumanity of officials in such circumstances. I was guiltily aware that, when I myself was ill, simply because I was a white man I would be expected to jump queues and receive preferential treatment as did local grandees.

  Another sensitive moment cropped up at the visit of a French botanist on a whistle-stop tour through Cameroon researching for a projected botanical atlas showing the distribution of plants in the country. I arrived back in my village one day to find this gentleman ensconced in the schoolhouse while surveying the local flora in six hours flat. The Dowayos, of course, could not see why anyone should be interested in plants for their own sake. It was clear that he was trying to steal Dowayo herbal remedies that he would sell elsewhere at huge profit. He ran to a somewhat larger establishment than I did, having procured his own chickens in preference to the local models and two retainers to attend to his wants. We sat down in the middle of the bush to an absurd dinner, complete with tablecloth and serviettes, while Dowayo children crouched round us in a circle, wide-eyed with curiosity. He kindly explained to me how best to take botanical samples for later identification. Face-to-face with Africa, the differences between a French botanist and an English anthropologist seem minimal and we talked far into the night.

  The next day my local healer was more than a little brusque at this outrageous raid staged by my ‘brother’. I finally convinced him that we were not eve
n from the same country by referring to the fact that Zuuldibo had offered him beer which he had refused. He was a foreigner, like Herbert Brown at the Protestant mission. The distinction between these races and the English was like that between the terrible Fulani and the good Dowayos.

  By our lights, the remedies handed out by traditional practitioners are ineffective or even harmful. So alien to our world view are such practices as rubbing goats’ horns on a patient’s chest to cure tuberculosis that we do not even bother to check their effectiveness. We can handle them quite well under general principles of sympathetic and contagious magic, so that for the anthropologist they hardly register at all. This aspect of their beliefs never really struck me until I began to work with the rainchiefs; but that must be told in its place.

  Most Dowayo remedies are based upon the same three magic plants that are expected to deal with all forms of misfortune from adultery to headache. They divide each into several species that cannot be distinguished by the layman by mere physical inspection. Dowayos would always speak as if they were staunch positivists, never believing anything for which they had no direct sense evidence. ‘How do you tell one kind of zepto, for example, from another?’ I would ask. ‘How can I tell whether this is the kind that stops adultery or the kind that heals headaches?’ They stared at me in sheer disbelief at such simplicity. ‘By trying them,’ they would answer. ‘How else?’ They would then go off into long diatribes about stones that caused rain, people who turned into leopards, bats that vomited their excrement through their nostrils as they had no anus – all in violation of their positivist principles. It was impossible to know in advance how they would react to questioning in this sphere. Sometimes they would rattle out the three different ways of saying ‘I do not know’ with various degrees of exasperation. On occasions I would actually get a straight answer, but more often it was ‘I do not know. I have not seen. How could I know when I have not seen?’ I began to earn a reputation as a man who would believe anything.

  During this period I at last began to feel I was pulling in some data. I had begun to adapt to the demands of African life and field method. I remembered having read somewhere that goldmining consisted of shifting three tons of rubbish for each ounce of gold extracted; if this was true, fieldwork had much in common with gold-mining.

  My jaw, however, had not healed up; indeed, it had got much worse, An unpleasant mixture of blood and pus had begun to ooze from my gums. The time had come to seek help. I stopped off at the mission and found Herbert Brown, who was delighted to hear of the way in which Africa had confounded all my expectations, justifying as it did his own gloomy view of the Dark Continent. He undertook to attempt a repair of the car, although he could not say quite when it would be completed. If I had known it would take nine months, I would have been less grateful. As it was, I felt at least that I had shifted the burden a bit and hitched a ride on the mail truck to Garoua.

  I never understood the reluctance of the mail truck’s driver to take Whites in his conveyance; he would take anyone else for a small payment. When it came to a Westerner, he would invoke transport regulations as holy writ and refuse point blank. Sometimes a well-intentioned gendarme would lean on him on my behalf, but the whole process of getting out of Poli without transport added hugely to the frustrations of life. But finally I arrived at Garoua where, I had been informed, there lurked a dentist, the only other one in Cameroon being in the capital. After many red herrings involving putative Red Chinese dentists who turned out to be tractor drivers, I eventually tracked the man down at the local hospital.

  Being still at the stage of the Western woolly-minded liberal, I took my place in the queue and waited. After some time, a French businessman arrived. He shouldered his way to the front of the queue and gave the nurse 500 francs. ‘Is there a white dentist?’ he asked. The nurse demurred ‘He’s not white but he’s from France.’ The expatriate considered this and left. I stayed.

  As soon as the surgery door opened, I found myself propelled by waiting Africans to the front of the queue. Within was a certain amount of dilapidated dental equipment and a large diploma from the University of Lyons, which reassured me somewhat. I explained the problem to a huge man inside. Without more ado, he seized a pair of pliers and pulled out my two front teeth. The unexpectedness of the attack somewhat dulled my senses to the pain of the extraction. The teeth, he declared, were rotten. Perhaps, he hinted darkly, they had always been rotten. He had removed them. I was cured. I should pay the nurse outside. I sat blankly in the chair, blood gushing down my shirtfront, and tried to make him understand that he could now proceed to the next stage of his treatment. It is not easy to argue in a foreign tongue in the absence of two front teeth; I made little progress. Finally, he understood that I was a difficult patient. Very well, he declared huffily, if I was not content with his treatment, he would bring the dentist himself. He disappeared, leaving me wondering who had just operated upon me. I had fallen into the obvious trap of believing that anyone in a dental surgery, wearing a white coat and prepared to extract teeth, was a dentist.

  Another man appeared, also in a white coat. Swiftly, I asked whether he was the dentist. He agreed that he was. This other man was his mechanic; he also repaired watches. A dental repair to bridge the hole in my apparatus would be very expensive. It was very difficult and required great skill. He had that skill. I tried to explain to him that unless I could talk, I could not work. If I could not work, I could not pay him. He brightened visibly. I should return in the afternoon. He would confect a plastic device. As a valued patient, I qualified for an anaesthetic. He injected novocaine into my gums. It seemed a strange thing to do after the operation but I felt too wretched to care.

  I spent a somewhat awkward interval wandering around Garoua, gap-toothed and werewolf-fanged. People approaching me crossed the street to avoid passing too close. There was so much blood on my chest that I looked as if I had been mortally wounded. I could only lisp and stutter explanations to inquisitive gendarmes who clearly suspected me of some vile act of human dismemberment.

  In the afternoon I returned and received two plastic teeth that balanced precariously on my gums and a bottle of pink liquid to gargle with. I was charged ten times the legal rate for treatment but knew no better than to pay up. As I left, I noticed the syringe I had been injected with lying on the floor.

  Learning to cope with this dreadful prosthetic device was a complication I could well have done without. The Dowayos, of course, were delighted with it: many of them have their front teeth filed away to resemble my condition. I asked them why they did this? Was it for beauty? Oh no. Was it – and here the anthropologist was indulging his fancy – to provide for the body an entrance which was the same shape as the gate at the entrance to the village? Oh no, patron. They did it, they informed me, so that if a man’s jaw locked solid, they could still push food into his mouth and he could eat. Did this happen often? As far as anyone knew it had never happened, but it might. My ability to remove my teeth, and even more, their own ability and willingness to remove themselves in mid-conversation, were matters of great interest to Dowayos.

  It was now nearly harvest time and the Dowayos were fitting as many wet-season ceremonies as they could into the last month before the end of the rains. After death there are ceremonies to place a man’s bow, which is attached behind the skull-house, and a woman’s water-jar, which is returned to her brothers by husband or son. I was particularly keen to see these. Only once all the ceremonies had been witnessed and recorded would any analysis of their rationale or structure become possible.

  Matthieu, pleased by the way that my removable teeth had elevated his status, reported that there were rumours that my local healer was about to perform this ceremony for his dead wife. I always hated going up to see him because it involved crawling up a crumbling rock face with precipitous drops, but there was nothing for it. The man had chosen this inhospitable place to live for several reasons. Firstly, it was traditionally the way Dowayos were s
upposed to live, cultivating the hillsides on terraces so steep that they do so on their knees. Moreover, being several hundred feet higher, the climate was more suited to growing small varieties of millet that were more valued by Dowayos than the gross forms that flourish on the plains. In theory all offerings to the ancestors should be in this higher form of millet and the beer made with it is stronger. Finally, there was less trouble from the ravages of cattle in the fields.

  This would be a relatively easy location to work in: mountain villages are cool, the man was sure to make me welcome, and it was not far from my own hut. I checked cameras, recorder, etc., and made a preliminary visit to grease my host’s palm and glean his motives for organizing the ceremony and what preparations had been made. This was always a wise move. Once a ceremony was under way, there would be so many marauding kinsmen that no one would have time for an anthropologist’s foolish questions. Moreover, it gave me time to look at the sort of answers I was getting and the sort of questions I was putting and see whether they could not be improved on. I would follow this up with a second visit several days after the festival to clear up any points that arose in the heat of performance and check identities, inconsistencies and differences with other villages’ ways of conducting the ritual. It was also a chance to get good pictures of ritual paraphernalia that would not have been returned to their owners yet and which might not emerge clearly in photographs taken during the ceremony. I had decided as a matter of policy to send my undeveloped films home and have friends check them there. Having them developed in Cameroon would be both expensive and unreliable, and keeping them for eighteen months in such a climate very risky. It meant that many would be lost in the mail and that I would not be able to see them myself until I returned to England, but on the whole it seemed the wisest course. The great disadvantage was that it considerably increased my contact with the officials at the post office who were past masters at ineptitude and unhelpfulness, even by local standards.