The Innocent Anthropologist

by Nigel Barley

  Another incident that did much to cement our solidarity was an extraordinary visit by the new sous-préfet later in the year. As part of his modernization of the Dowayos, he came to announce that Dowayo cattle sacrifices must cease and that circumcision must be limited to the school holidays. A large party of officials and bureaucrats had driven out in a fleet of cars from Poli and held court under a huge tree. One after another, they gave impassioned speeches forbidding this or that. The Dowayos nodded solemnly and covertly grinned at one another. The Bamileke schoolteacher had prepared himself in advance for this visit, clearly having been tipped off by someone. He took the opportunity of denouncing the people of the village for their slothful and barbarous ways. For years they had promised him a new school but had put off building one. Whenever he returned after the holidays, he discovered that furniture and parts of the building had been removed. I shifted uneasily at this point, knowing that parts of my house had been previously incarnated in the sagging roof of his classroom. The Old Man of Kpan, crouching to one side, began to give me ‘significant’ looks and nod towards the mountains. This was right at the end of the dry season and although there were clouds everywhere, no rain had as yet fallen. But there, over by the mountains, some eight or nine miles away, rain was falling. The sous-préfet began a long oration about the value of education. The people here should take advantage of it and their favoured status as an underdeveloped area. The rain drew nearer. The schoolmaster, encouraged by favour from on high, presented a list of the names of parents who had been keeping their children away. Here was a second list, containing the names of parents who sent their children with no other sustenance but the traditional midday food – beer. The result was that the children were drunk all afternoon. At the moment he handed over the list, a squall of great power engulfed the entire party. Complaining and cursing, they all melted into their cars and disappeared back to town. We all fled to our huts. Both the rainchief and the schoolmaster ended up in mine and we drank coffee to warm ourselves up. ‘Did you see that?’ cried the Bamileke. These people! There are sorcerers here. Someone called that storm to stop me. These people won’t be helped.’

  Matthieu muttered a simultaneous translation in Dowayo in the rainchief’s ear. He and I chuckled. I had a long argument with the schoolmaster denying the possibility of anyone making it rain, the very existence of sorcerers, the impotence of magic; he defended all these beliefs earnestly. The rainchief sniggered more and more and finally became red in the face from hysteria.

  When the schoolmaster left I asked the Old Man whether he had made it rain. He turned on me a look like a cherubic tortoise. ‘But only God makes it rain.’ He collapsed in laughter, mightily pleased with the day’s work. ‘But if you come and see me next week I’ll show you how I help God.’

  By now, the rainmaker had told me most of what I was to learn about rainmaking. It depended ultimately on the possession of certain special stones, like those that maintained the fertility of cattle and plants. It was to be many months before I actually saw these in their secret cave up under the waterfall. Each time I was promised that next time it would happen. It was, alas, impossible on this occasion because it was still the dry season and to approach the stones might cause a flood, or because it was the wet season and we might be struck by lightning, or because one of the women was menstruating and thus dangerous to the stones. With thirteen wives around, there was hardly a time when one of them was not menstruating.

  For the time being, the rainchief showed me his portable rain kit. Once he had started the rainy season with the special stones on the mountain, he could cause localized downpours with the contents of a hollow goat’s horn. He took me off into the bush and we crouched down behind a rock with much extravagant looking round and scanning of the horizon. Inside was a plug of ram’s wool. ‘For clouds,’ he explained. Then came an iron ring. This served to localize the effect of the rain: if, for example, he were at a skull-festival, he would make it rain in the middle of the village until the people brought him beer. Next came the most powerful part of all. This was a great secret that he had never shown anybody. He bent forward earnestly and tipped up the horn. Slowly, there rolled forth into his hand a child’s blue marble such as one might purchase anywhere. I made as if to pick it up. Horrified, he withdrew his hand: ‘It would kill you.’ I questioned him about it. Was it not from the land of the white men? Certainly not; it had come from the ancestors many thousands of years ago. How did this stone make it rain? You rubbed ram’s grease on it. This was interesting, since human skulls also had to be rubbed with grease before being placed in the bush. I began to suspect that skulls, pots and stones were all related in a single complex. This in fact proved to be the case, the rainchiefs being the cross-over point from one area to another. Rainchiefs’ skulls cause rain and are often replaced with water-jars for festivals, while the mountain on which the rainstones are kept is called The crown of the boy’s head’. In other words, mountains are treated as if they were the ‘skulls of the earth’. Once again, a single model centred on stones and skulls was being used to structure many areas and bring rainfall and human fertility into relationship with each other.

  I thanked and rewarded the Old Man, and Matthieu and I descended the mountain in pensive silence. When I returned to the village my fine fridge had stopped working, spoiling several weeks’ supply of meat. Hereafter it never worked properly again, seeming to know when I was not about to keep it in order. The moment my back was turned it would extinguish itself and simmer its contents to advanced putrescence in hours. Several times I returned to find Dowayos literally in tears before the ‘cold granary’, weeping at the waste of food, unable to relight the apparatus but resolute that they could not touch the contents as they did not belong to them. I soon relegated it to the status of a mere cupboard. ‘West Africa wins again,’ declared Herbert Brown delightedly.

  Up on the rainchief’s mountain I had conceived a plan. Jon and Jeannie had offered me a lift to N’gaoundere the next day on a supplies trip so I could put it into practice at once. Stopping only to jettison my rotten meat and change my shirt, I set off for the mission. Three days later I was back in the rainchief’s village. By a subtle combination of cajoling and bribery, I had weaned from Walter’s children a single blue marble that I bore triumphantly back with me.

  ‘You recall the stone you showed me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I asked you if it was from the land of the white men.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it the same as this one?’ I handed him the marble. With a gasp he examined it against the light.

  ‘It is the same. The clouds in it are darker.’

  ‘Would this stone cause rain?’

  He regarded me with amazement. ‘How can I know? I would have to try it, to see if it would work. I cannot tell you until I have seen it’. He shook his head, clearly puzzled that I would expect him to make statements not founded upon direct experience.

  It was not until my very last week in Dowayoland that I was finally allowed to visit the magic mountain itself. Having little time left, I felt that a final all-or-nothing attempt to prove the mysteries was in order. I announced that I would visit him on a certain day to say goodbye, glad to be making the perilous trip for the very last time. When we arrived the village was totally silent; the women had been sent away. We talked for a little while. Would my wives have sown my millet when I arrived back at my village? Did my father have many cattle? Would the rains have started? This was my cue. Matthieu had carefully rehearsed me in a little speech of thanks mingled with hurt reproach. I was grateful that he had talked to me but my heart was sad that I would return to the land of the white men without ever having seen the rainstones. This had to be put in rather a more ornate style to be acceptable in Dowayo. ‘It is like a little boy,’ I ad libbed, ‘walking with his father. His father says to him, “Do not be tired. When we reach the mountains, I shall carry you.” But when they arrive there, the father does not keep his wo
rd. “Do not be sad,” says the father, “when we are half-way up, I shall carry you.” But when they reach this point, the father does not keep his word …’ The Old Man took the point and clapped my little performance. He had guessed that I would be sad and had decided that I could be trusted not to repeat foolishly before women what I would see. We would go to the rainstones. Matthieu began to roll his eyes and begged me not to go: I should be killed. I reminded him that white men cannot be struck by lightning. The Old Man told me to take all my clothes off and he did likewise. He chewed up special plants. I recognized the aromatic smell of geelyo as he spat them all over me and rubbed them on my chest. I had to put on a penis sheath but as a concession to my ‘supple skin’ was allowed to keep my boots on. I was warned not to talk or make sudden movements and to touch nothing. Off we went.

  The slope was very steep and we slithered about on the loose rock. The Old Man was chuckling, obviously having a splendid time; I was somewhat less at my ease, being concerned for my camera and suffering much from the thorns that dotted the escarpment. Finally we arrived at a point just below the summit, at a height of two thousand metres. It was bitterly cold. A watercourse issued from above and beneath the icy spray was a hollow in the rock. Within were large, lumpy clay pots like waterjars; inside these were stones of various colours for male and female rain. The Old Man splashed them with the same remedies he had spat on me and held the rocks out for my inspection. There was one more thing. We splashed through the water to a large, white rock. This was the ultimate defence of the Dowayos. If he removed this the whole world would be flooded and all would be killed.

  We returned at breakneck speed, grateful for the comparative warmth of the valley, washed and dressed. The Old Man settled back in his hut. He had shown me everything. He had explained the various sorts of rain, how to make the rainbow by rubbing red ochre on a sickle and revealed the location of the rainpots. Was I happy? I was indeed very happy and rewarded him for his revelations. There was one thing more: I had not actually seen him make it rain. Would he now do so?

  He smiled indulgently. Had I not seen the remedies he had splashed on the stones? It would rain between here and Poli. We should now go down the mountain before dark. Darkness did not bother him, of course, he remarked, hinting at his rumoured ability to turn into the nocturnal leopard.

  The storm hit us at the very worst point of the descent where we were executing goat-like leaps across the fissures. Granite becomes very slippery when wet. At one point I was reduced to crawling on all fours. The Old Man was sniggering and pointing to the sky. Had I now seen? We were shouting above the storm to be heard. ‘That’s enough,’ I cried, ‘you can make it stop.’ He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. ‘A man does not take a wife to divorce her the same day,’ he replied.

  Matthieu and the rainchief were both cock-a-hoop about the tempest. I, of course, would never believe anything so against the grain of my own culture without much better evidence than this. I – like they – see what I expect to see. The anthropologist in the field is seldom troubled by the ‘false’ beliefs of those about him; he simply puts them in brackets, sees how they all fit together and learns to live with them on a day-to-day basis.

  Mariyo was delighted by our dilapidated condition when we returned to Kongle. The renowned impotence of the rainchief and his possession of so many wives led her to draw certain conclusions about my eagerness to climb the mountain – especially since the Old Man was so often away when I called. She had taken to calling me ‘my lover’ after the fashion of the mountain women. As an alternative outlet for my baser passions, she had invented a fat Fulani woman I kept in Garoua with a ring through her nose. This huge Fulani woman assumed mythic proportions; she was so fat that she had to be transported on a truck; she was incapable of walking without leaning on servants. In the dry season, I and my kinsmen would sit in her shade.

  I avenged myself by inquiring after the old Koma man who enjoyed her favours. Every tribe had someone to despise. For the Dowayos, the Koma fulfilled this very necessary function. A pagan tribe some thirty odd miles away across the river, the Koma were credited with a debased form of language by the Dowayos; they were savages who lived in incredible squalor, horribly primitive. Their ugliness was a standing joke among the Dowayos.

  Whenever I gave Mariyo a present I pretended that it had been left for her by her aged Koma, whom I had been able to understand very well as all his teeth had fallen out with age but he had led me to believe that this was in payment for sexual services. I described at length the costume of burial cloth she had made for him. Since he was so near death, they would not have to wrap his corpse but could tumble him directly into a grave in his outfit. On one occasion I captured a stick-insect and kept it for her, pretending I thought it was her shrivelled-up old Koma come to visit her. Whenever she looked tired, this was imputed to the efforts of her paramour when she went to fetch water; we both knew this was a mere excuse to rendezvous with her lover in the bush. These sessions did much to relieve the tedium of village life and were a major factor in the creation of such ‘acceptance’ as was granted me by the Dowayos.

  Being themselves sexually active, the Dowayos were truly baffled by my asexual life and the men would always ask me about it. How did I survive? Why did I not become ill? There are two basic models of sexual relations in Africa. In one, women are weakening and dangerous to a man, robbing him of his essential virility; in the other, his sexuality feeds on them. The more he fornicates, the stronger he becomes.

  Rather to my surprise in view of their notions of male ‘closure’ in the practice of circumcision, the Dowayos opted for the latter model. They found my ability to live without a wife truly mysterious and compared it to the habits of the Catholic fathers who lived asexually but in the company of nuns. The priests had wisely insisted on calling these not ‘sisters’ – since sisters are to Dowayos simply any woman of the same age – but ‘mothers’ with whom sexual relations are not permitted. The rumours of my vastly raunchy expeditions to the city were soon established and lent credence to Mariyo’s jokes. Since one of my principal occupations on such trips was the search for spare parts for equipment that had fallen foul of pervasive African entropy, the expression ‘I’m going to the city for parts’ rapidly acquired a salacious ring between Jon and myself. Alas, actual journeys bore little resemblance to these orgies of the collective imagination. Sexual encounters in Africa are so unromantic and brutish in their nature that they serve rather to increase the alienation of the fieldworker, not to moderate it, and are best avoided. I know from informal conversations with colleagues that such is not always the case. The sexual position of the fieldworker has undergone a radical revision in line with changes in the sexual mores of the West. Whereas in the colonial era other races were not permitted as sexual partners – like those of different social class or religion – nowadays lines are much less clear cut. It is astonishing how many lone females were able to wander around unmolested among ‘savage’ peoples largely because, for the natives too, they did not figure on the sexual map. Nowadays, however, things have changed and the solitary female is almost required to engage in sexual relations with her people as part of new ideas of ‘being accepted’. Any unaccompanied female who returns inexperienced tends to excite surprised and almost reproachful comment among fellow students. An opportunity for research has been neglected.

  For the male, of course, passing opportunities arise and are often less awkward as being institutionalized on a commercial basis. This is a whole area – like the ethnographic assistant – that is absent from the anthropological literature but not the anthropological experience. The fieldworker may well decide that the whole thing is best avoided on the grounds of the huge complications it would cause in his domestic and personal life, but the problem must surely arise for all marooned for long periods in an alien culture. In my own case, being viewed by Dowayo men as having no sexual existence in the village was a considerable blessing; I was allowed all manner of f
reedoms that no Dowayo male would be permitted. For a man to be alone in a hut with a woman is normally taken as sure proof of flagrant adultery; but to imagine me fornicating with Dowayo maids was frankly farcical, and I for one was glad that this was so.

  Problems about my precise nature and status also troubled the police. Matters came to a head towards the end of the dry season. Firstly, there was the incident of the irregular helicopter. A Swiss mission organization, vastly endowed with funds, had decided in its wisdom that the pagan montagnards could best be converted by a pastor descending upon them by helicopter in their remote fastnesses. Certainly the effects must have been dramatic. One day, when I was at the mission, this machine descended from on high and hovered above, emitting a loud bellowing noise: clearly it was the intention to summon someone to the local landing strip. Since I was the only one about who could drive, I borrowed a car and set off. The helicopter contained two rather bemused divines from N’gaoundere looking for Herbert Brown who had left that morning for N’gaoundere by road. They were trying to spot his car from the air. In a swirl of dust they were aloft and gone at precisely the moment when a truckload of gendarmes, armed to the teeth, turned up to arrest the ‘smugglers from Nigeria’ that had been reported as landing. I was hauled out of the car. Where was their landing permit, their flight plan, pilot’s licence? My protestations of baffled ignorance clearly cut little ice. I was unable to say precisely who was aboard or what they were doing, or give the registration number of the aircraft. My unwillingness to swear that the aircraft had never at any time been closer than ten miles to the border was taken as incontrovertible proof of smuggling activities. It took some time to disengage myself and re-establish my credentials as a harmless idiot.