The Innocent Anthropologist

by Nigel Barley

  I quite forgot about the matter until I received word in late January that my garden was ready and that I should visit it. It was an extremely hot day, even for the season, and fogged by heat-haze. The earth was scorched a dark brown and seamed with deep cracks. But there, after some two miles’ trek into the bush, was a pocket of bright green. As we grew closer we could see that it was a series of terraces built into the river bank. It had obviously involved a great deal of work. The wet season would clearly wash it away so that the gardener would have to begin the whole enterprise again next year. The gardener appeared and insisted on watering the crop with great expenditure of effort and lavish gestures of brow-wiping just to make sure that the amount of labour involved in such a climate was not lost on me. He explained how he had collected black earth and goat droppings and transported them out to his plot, how he had watered the shoots lovingly three times a day and protected them from animals. It was true that the carrots had been eaten by locusts and that the onions had fallen prey to the cattle of nomadic Fulani, but he had protected the lettuce. There they stood, three thousand heads of lettuce, all planted on the same day and due to mature in about a week. All this, he explained with an expansive gesture, was mine! I must confess to being somewhat taken aback by my sudden emergence as lettuce king of North Cameroon. There was no possibility of beginning to cope with such an abundance of greenery. I did not even have any vinegar.

  In the next few weeks I ate more lettuce than anyone should ever be asked to. I supplied it to the mission; the bureaucrats of Poli feasted on it; bemused Dowayos received it as gifts and fed it to their goats as unfit for human consumption. I had tried to persuade the gardener to sell it in town but he met with scant success. In the end we fell out as to how much I should pay him. Since I had originally conceived of the garden as an economy measure that would add variety to my diet, I was more than a little disgruntled. I had offered the gardener 5,000 francs for the part of the crop I could eat. He could keep the rest and sell it in town. He had insisted on 20,000 francs and would not budge.

  The case went to court and the lettuce grew, went to seed and rotted. Following Mayo’s advice on correct legal procedure, I had supplied the chief with six bottles of beer to help him in his deliberations; my adversary would do likewise.

  The case was rehearsed at length under the central tree. I stuck to my point that the crop was useless to me and that the gardener had never been asked to grow three thousand heads of lettuce but merely to try a little of each packet of various sorts of seed. My opponent stuck firmly to the point that he should be rewarded for all the work of the garden regardless. We repeated ourselves to the point of exhaustion. Finally the chief intervened; I should offer to pay 10,000 francs. Having learned the lesson that one should never agree too swiftly to anything, I hummed and haa’d and finally agreed, saying that I did not wish the gardener to be sad. The gardener reluctantly accepted, saying that he did not wish me to be sad, but said he would give me back half the money to show his pleasure at my generosity. So he ended up with the sum I had offered in the first place. Honour was satisfied all round, everyone seemed happy, but I was never quite sure I had understood what had been happening and no one seemed able to explain it to me.

  My involvement with the courts suggested the possibility that reports of law cases might provide useful historical background. I had read some of those published in old colonial periodicals while still in England and they had proved most informative. The only place where such material might be available was the sous-préfecture in Poli. I was curious to see the new sous-préfet and it would doubtless be politic to seek him out and introduce myself. I trekked into town in the company of the village schoolmaster.

  This gentleman was a young Bamileke, a dynamic and entrepreneurial tribe of the South-West sometimes referred to as ‘the Jews of Cameroon’: wherever there is industry, profit and trade, they will be found. They are dominant in many of the professions and form the backbone of the teaching staff in the North, where they are posted as a form of national service to an underdeveloped area. The teacher had formed the habit of dropping by my hut in mid-morning for a cup of coffee during school break. His conversation would consist of variations on a single theme – the horrific primitiveness of the North. These people are like children,’ he explained. ‘You clean them up, dress them, teach them right from wrong and, of course, they find it hard. They cry. But afterwards they feel better for it. That’s what we Southerners do in the North.’

  He would expatiate for hours on the need to teach them how to think logically which, naturally, required that they learn French. Sometimes he would tell me stories of the fighting in the South against the French and calmly recount how he had aided in the murder of a white schoolteacher by his relatives – all this as we sat quietly sipping coffee.

  The new sous-préfet was a small, dapper little man in Fulani robes with decorative scars cut deep into his cheeks. The Dowayos called him buuwiilo, ‘the Black White Man’. Already a sense of change had come over the town. The administrative building was being repaired, the new palace was inhabited. In the market, traders were being obliged to use scales to sell goods and prices were displayed. Most astonishing of all, the road had been repaired and a regular bus service had begun with the cities. He was a new broom determined to sweep clean.

  The Black White Man welcomed me cheerfully and we had a long chat about his plans for the area. He spoke excellent French and had travelled widely in Europe. He was determined to civilize the Dowayos, which meant turning them into Frenchmen, as he himself had been turned into a Frenchman. It was noticeable that when we were interrupted by Fulanis on business, he insisted on speaking French to them. He would be delighted to have someone look through the law reports for me; I could even take them away with me. I was amazed. Never before or since did I receive such co-operation from a government official.

  We parted on the best of terms and he promised to come and look me up in my village as he was making a point of visiting every part of his territory to see for himself what was going on. I scarcely took that seriously, not expecting any official to venture away from the comforts of his residence; but I was wrong. He did indeed come and see me, and toured round the village asking some very sharp questions indeed. The Dowayos were terrified. The presence of a Fulani official was about as welcome as the visit of an ancestor. As he left, he indicated the village with an expression of beatific optimism: ‘Just think. In a few years all this will have given way before progress. Already things are getting better. Why, today I bought lettuce in the market. Someone has started growing it.’ I managed to mumble something noncommittal. It seemed a shame to crush such a rare bloom as faith in the future.

  To a Westerner it is truly striking how many of the attitudes of Africans are those that have been discarded in the West. Any colonial administrator of the nineteen-forties would agree with the opinions of my Bamileke schoolteacher or Fulani sous-préfet, though the two Africans would doubtless reject the comparison. Faith in that ill-defined notion, ‘progress’, the certainty that natives were characterized by stubbornness and ignorance and had to be forced into the present for their own good, tied them to those earnest imperialists.

  Not only the ‘good’ parts of imperialism linger on; the ‘bad’ parts are there too. The economic exploitation in the name of development and the crass racialism and brutality are typical components of the scene. They are doubtless as truly indigenously African as anything can be. There is no need to accept the romantic liberal’s view that all that is good in Africa comes from native traditions, all that is bad from the legacy of imperialism. Even educated Africans find themselves unable to accept that it is possible to be both black and a racist, though they still possess what we would call slaves and spit on the floor to clean their mouths after uttering the mere name of the Dowayos. The double standard was neatly exemplified by one college student with whom I was discussing the massacre of whites in Zaire. It served them right, he maintained; they were r
acists. You could tell they were racists as they were all white. Did that mean that he would take a Dowayo woman as his wife? He looked at me as if I were insane. A Fulani could not marry a Dowayo. They were dogs, mere animals. What had that to do with racism?

  The Fulani were eager to dissociate themselves from the negroid peoples surrounding them. They had heard of a South American people called the Bororo; this they connected with the name applied generally to the nomadic Fulani, the Mbororo. It was clear proof that Fulanis hailed from South America and had merely colonized these inferior races. Several young men offered me this theory worthy of a Thor Heyerdahl. It explained their light skin and long, non-frizzy hair, their straight noses and thin lips. They were often at great pains to point out that my exposed parts, brown from the sun, were the same colour as theirs, pale from wear.

  The dry season development that most delighted the Dowayos was the arrival of my fridge. I had long sought to buy a paraffin refrigerator, regarding them wistfully in the city shops, but they cost more than I could afford and the difficulty of transporting them put the whole matter out of the question. In the abandoned house of the Dutch linguists who had worked on the language of the Dowayos there lingered such a machine. One day I had the good fortune to bump into them at N’gaoundere and they offered to lend it to me. I could not believe my luck; I should have cold water and fresh meat. My reliance on tinned food would be reduced; and some of the pressure on my finances would be relieved. I set it up outside my fine new house, the roof of which was just being completed. It was considered a great joke when I asked why they had left off the normal spikes that protect a house-dweller against witchcraft. Everyone knew that a white man was not subject to attacks from witchcraft just as everyone knew that he must live in a square, not a round house. My own house was consequently built square and, instead of witchcraft remedies, an empty beer bottle was placed on top.

  To celebrate, Jon and Jeannie came out and we drank cold beer with an ecstatic Zuuldibo. My ‘cold granary’ was a source of great wonder to everyone. It baffled them – as it rather did me – how a fire in my ‘granary’ made it cold. I could not resist the temptation of showing them ice, which none but the greatest sophisticates had previously encountered. They were terrified. Never having experienced such extreme temperature difference, Dowayos would insist that ice felt ‘hot’; if they touched it, it would burn them. I never fully convinced them that it was merely water in another form. Watching it melt in the sun, they would say, ‘The cold matter has gone away. Only the water inside is left.’ Even the Old Man of Kpan was obliged to come and see this wonder, in accordance with his role of keeper of arcane mysteries.

  This enabled me to re-establish contact with him and remind him of his promise that I might visit him. The trip was arranged for the following week. His son would come to guide us.

  To my great surprise, the boy arrived on the appointed day and Zuuldibo insisted on accompanying us. The trek was enlivened, as we approached the daunting mountains for the first time, by encounters with mountain dwellers. I was amused to note that the women here greeted me as their ‘lover’. It was explained to me that this was a peculiarity of the area and much play was made of it. Having crossed the long, hot plains, dotted with salt-licks where wild beasts and cattle sought sustenance side by side, we began the climb. Temperatures at this time of year could be well over 110°F at noon, and both Matthieu and I were soon bathed in sweat. I had brought drinking water which he piously declined, but he was unable to avail himself of the only stream we passed since – as I have mentioned – highland water is forbidden to lowland Dowayos unless offered by a local resident. The Old Man’s ‘son’ turned out to be some sort of a cousin and was not empowered to make the offering. The path climbed steadily through patchy trees. At whatever time of year one travelled, it was at grave risk to life and limb. In the wet season one could hang on to vegetation while clambering up rock-faces, but the ground was covered with grass and occasionally one foot would simply shoot off into space as the path became a dotted line on the cliff wall. In the dry season one could see the surface and better place the feet, but there were no handholds to rectify a mistake.

  We shared our journey with jibbering baboons who sent loose shale cascading down on us from above. Beneath was a sheer drop of three hundred feet or more to a river which hissed through granite boulders. We all laughed nervously when Zuuldibo remarked on his fear of falling as he did not know how to swim. After several hours’ rough passage we came out on a plateau with fantastic views over the whole of Dowayoland and away towards Nigeria. Just when I thought it would be all plain sailing, the mountainside became fissured with deep clefts. Crossing these involved quite simply leaping across the chasm and clinging to the dirt on the other side until you had regained your balance.

  Finally, we emerged in a cool green valley, abundantly watered by a brook that seemed to flow from the very summit itself. At the bottom nestled a fairly large compound – the home of the rainchief. We were greeted by a number of young women, wives of the Old Man, who clucked and fussed over us. Did we want to sit outside? – inside? Would we eat? Would we take water or beer? Did we like drink cold like white men or warm like Do-wayos? The Old Man was in a distant field treating a sick woman; he would be brought. We sat for perhaps an hour, chatting and dozing and then word came that, when the messenger arrived to tell him of our coming, he found that the Old Man had already set off for Poli by another path. I was convinced that this was a put-up job but had to accept it with good grace. On the mountain Matthieu and I could not hope to catch up with even an aged montagnard; pursuit was therefore out of the question. Zuuldibo, who had been dozing, announced that he had dreamt that one of his cows was ill and would therefore have to return to check whether this was true or whether it was simply the spirit of an ancestor playing tricks on him. We were obliged to go back down the mountain.

  This marked the beginning of my campaign to win over the rainchiefs and persuade them to share their secrets with me. All ‘experts’ – missionaries, administrators and the like – were convinced that the stubborn unreasonableness of the Dowayos would ensure that I got nothing out of them. I confess that I thought so too.

  However, I began a policy of visiting them all, one by one, of asking them to visit me when they passed through Kongle, and of shamelessly playing off one against the other. I pretended to the rainchief of Mango that I had only come to him in the hope that he might be able to tell me something about the real rainchief at Kpan. When I next saw the Old Man of Kpan, I confessed that I had erroneously once considered him to be a rainchief but had learned that he really knew little about it. Perhaps he could tell me, however, about what happened at Mango? Since these two were great rivals, the shaft hit home. On one occasion, when the Old Man of Kpan passed through Kongle, he was told that I had gone to Mango for two days. He finally broke, and I began a series of visits to him. On the first occasion he confessed that his father had been a rainchief and that he had asked around on my behalf and found out one or two very general points about the techniques involved. I was careful to be effusive in my thanks and to reward him generously even though my finances were once more in dire straits.

  Over the next six months I trekked up his mountain six or seven times. Each time, he failed quite to live up to his promises, but told me just a little more. Each little detail he let slip I could use to talk to people from my village; they assumed that I knew more than I did and let slip a little more still. A golden opportunity came when Mayo developed a feud with the Old Man over non-payment of brideprice. He intoned a great denunciation of the rainchief and all his works, listing his past misdeeds, killing people with lightning, destroying fields with porcupines, etc. He was not afraid of the Old Man even if he caused a drought. He pointed out to me the various mountains involved in rainmaking, their differential importance and what sorts of stones caused various varieties of rain. By the time he and the Old Man were reconciled, I had a pretty good idea of the whole complex. It
was crucial, however, to verify my information and try to witness the operations themselves since it was the focus of several areas of symbolism concerning sexuality and death.

  Several events helped bring us together. The rainchief was mooted to be the man who had the magic plant called zepto that cured male impotence. This was in no way refuted by his own affliction by this complaint as noised abroad by his thirteen wives and confirmed in the private investigations conducted by my friend Augustin among the unsatisfied ladies of Dowayoland. The Old Man of Kpan asked me whether white men did not have roots to cure impotence. I replied that I had indeed heard of such things but could not say whether they worked. This reply pleased him greatly, marking me out as a ‘man of straight words’. Through the offices of a sex-shop in London I managed to purchase a quantity of Ginseng in a lavishly illustrated bottle and gave it to him as all I could offer in this direction. The only upshot was a case of diarrhoea. He did not take this ill, however, agreeing that even the best remedies sometimes went wrong. He shook his head sagely, There are no remedies that make an old field new,’ he remarked.