by Nigel Barley
No sooner had this blown over than there was more trouble. One evening I set off for the local hospital to visit a man from my village who had been bitten by a snake. My torch being defective, I soon got lost in the maze of footpaths that surrounded the town and was thankful, after half an hour’s blundering around in total darkness, to see a light ahead. I made for it and was amazed to find myself behind the house of the sous-préfet’s assistant. Pausing to explain myself to a lounging youth at the gate, I regained the main street.
Two days later, as I was working with the potters, Jon and Jeannie turned up in Kongle: the gendarmes had been round asking about me. An official-looking document summoned me to the police station for an identity check. Having assured myself that baking of the pots would not happen till the next day, I set off with them to town. The needle-chewing commandant took me to his office and we spent half an hour or so working out who I was and what precisely I was doing in Poli. This was accompanied by many hooded looks and significant stares. I began to be anxious.
It seemed that I was accused of taking a photograph of the back wall of the house where the sous-préfet’s assistant lived. This constituted ‘strategic information’. Witnesses had been found who swore that I had had a camera in my hand when found skulking around the house. How often did I go to Nigeria? My denials were brushed aside; there were witnesses. Did I know it was an offence to cross the border? I had been seen. This continued for some time until I was released with a stern warning that my behaviour would be watched. The obsession of Third World countries with spying is a constant menace to the fieldworker, only partly explicable by actual cases of research in sensitive areas being financed by interested parties. The real problem lay in my total inability to explain to someone who had no conception of pure research why a foreign government should be interested in an isolated tribe of mountain renegades. It was quite clear to the police chief that the only reasonable explanation lay in the nearness of the Nigerian border. Hence I was either a smuggler or a spy preparing the way for invasion. Quite what the value of a photograph of the back wall of the sous-préfet’s assistant’s house would have been in all this was never explained.
Only much later, when I came to know him better, did the sous-préfet tell me that he had been keeping an eye on things and would have protected me from his over-zealous gendarmes; he had regarded the whole thing as an enormous joke. At the time my own response was one of weary disquiet which was only increased by the fact that policemen suddenly started dropping unexpectedly at my village to check where I was. This event also coincided – by chance or design – with the loss of a batch of film I had posted in Poli. Jon, as ever, was a staunch support in these troubles and took me to the mission to pour beer into me until I felt better.
12
First and Last Fruits
I had now been away from England for about a year, and while I cannot say that I felt at home in Dowayoland I seemed to have reached some sort of intermediate stage where most things had a deceptive familiarity. It was time to start tidying up my notes and attack those areas that I had put aside till greater linguistic competence and personal contacts made research more feasible. One area of special importance was the agrarian rites of fertility. These centred partly on the Old Man of Kpan, partly on his relatives I had met over the far side of Dowayoland at those first skull-festivals I had attended. They involve treating the magic stones that ensure plant fertility with special remedies. In Kpan this is collapsed with the rainmaking: the remedies are thought to ‘repair the earth’ by falling with the rain. At the other end of Dowayoland the rituals involve setting a line of stones across each end of the valley as a ‘barrier against famine’. I now began a series of short raids into this area to talk to the holders of these secrets, the ‘Masters of the Earth’.
Once again, my car being still out of action, I relied on the generosity of Jon and Jeannie for transport. Thanks to them I was able to make frequent visits to this remote area without marches of more than ten miles and without losing touch with the Old Man of Kpan. To my great surprise, the people here were quite happy to show me all the paraphernalia of their ceremonies merely on the understanding that I would say nothing of it to women. Now that everyone knew that I was working with the Old Man, they were prepared to trust me too, especially since word had circulated that I was willing to pay the necessary costs. I spent several weeks clambering about from cave to mountain and skull-house and rushing back to Kpan to wheedle further information out of the Old Man. At the same time, the other rainchief at Mango sent word that he too was about to start the rainy season so I had to break off and rush up his mountain. Here, the mountain Dowayos performed the normal trick of sending us round and round in circles all day, hoping that we would get tired and go away. It is a strategy that has stood them in good stead since the arrival of the first government station in Poli. Being by now somewhat hardened to their methods, Matthieu and I paid a local to act as guide and doggedly refused to let him abandon us until we had found the rainchief, swearing that we would sleep outside his hut that night and follow him all the next day if we had to. The rainchief was soon discovered near by and proved most happy to see us; it seemed that the ‘leading round the mountain’ technique was merely standing orders for all outsiders. Strangely, he had heard of my difficulties with the police chief and these engendered sympathy; it appeared that he had had problems with him too.
This rainchief was a bright and cheerful young man who would quite happily have started the rainy season there and then by slaughtering a black goat and smearing the blood on the rainpots hidden out in the skull-house. His adviser, however, a piratical old man who proved to be his uncle, refused to allow it. How were they to be sure I had not been in contact with a menstruating woman? What of the Dowayos who did not expect the rain for a few weeks yet? It was when he began to question the wisdom of letting an uncircumcised man approach the pots that I knew he was simply creating difficulties. Outsiders do not have to be circumcised to be present at Dowayo rituals; even foreign women are acceptable. We began to talk about money. I devoted an hour to shaking my head and looking horrified every time he mentioned a sum. In the end we agreed on a price. For the ultimate secret of Dowayoland, I did not feel cheated to pay some £8 which gave me the right to half the goat. The affair was swiftly dispatched with none of the air of awe that would mark it at Kpan. It was hardly more dramatic than a normal goat-slaying, the beast being thrown on its back and choked by a foot pressed into its throat. When it lost consciousness, its throat was slit, the blood being collected in a gourd.
We all rushed off into the bush to a distinctly down-at-heel skull-house that contained the rainpots. These were the same as those I would see later at Kpan. The area was forbidden to strangers and we had to crawl on our bellies under thorn bushes to reach the overgrown, gloomy glade where it stood. After a perfunctory splashing about we returned to the village and began a talk that lasted several hours.
It was here that I learned perhaps the most important piece of information for the interpretation of Dowayo cultural symbolism. Previous information about rainchiefs had linked together human fertility and rainfall. The ‘true cultivator’s’ harvest had linked together plant fertility and circumcision through the ‘beating to death of the old Fulani woman’. Here I learned of links between rainfall, circumcision and plant fertility. It appeared that the day the stones were wiped clean to begin the dry season was the day the mountain, ‘the crown of the boy’s head’, was fired for the first time (i.e. ‘dried’) and also the day that first fruits were brought to the village that year with the boys who had been newly circumcised. These too, I later established, were also changed from ‘wet’ to ‘dry’. Foreskins are despised by Dowayos quite explicitly as causing a boy to be wet and smelly like a mere woman; a circumcised penis is dry and clean. When boys leave the village to be circumcised they are ‘wet’ and have to kneel in the river for three days. When they are cut, it will rain continuously. Only gradually can they leave the riverside ca
mp and move out towards the mountains. Only at the dry season can they return to the village and are placed at the foot of the shrine on which the skulls of dead cattle are exposed. Here, the first fruits from the fields are flung on the same day. In other words, all the various spheres of fertility are brought together in a single system and the change from wet to dry season is tied up with the change from ‘wet’ uncircumcised boy to ‘dry’ circumcised man.
It was to take many more months of research and detailed analysis back home before the finer points of the system would be worked out, but the basic structure of all that I had witnessed and painstakingly noted in my time in the field suddenly held together and ‘made sense’. ‘Eureka’ moments are always exciting; the fact that mine came out of the blue, up a mountain, the man giving the information having no idea of its importance to me, added force to my pleasure in glimpsing the structure behind all these rites in all its simplicity. Matthieu must have found me strangely skittish as we came down the mountain. In my exuberance, I drank the cold water that came straight down from the mountain top without bothering to chlorinate or boil it. I shall never know whether this was the source of my punishment for such hubris or whether it was some virus lurking in my liver. Whichever it was, I went down with hepatitis again.
It was when I was at my lowest ebb that Augustin and his latest of many female companions favoured me with a visit. They considered my condition gravely; the disease was known to them. ‘The best thing is to vomit,’ Augustin declared roundly. ‘You must vomit a great deal.’ His companion dissented: ‘He must be purged. Only powerful purging can remove the illness. In my village many die from this disease.’
‘Purging is no good. He must vomit.’
‘Not so. You purge until there is blood.’
The discussion went back and forth. I thanked them and noted the various substances that would make me strain and spew to their satisfaction.
Some kind soul at the mission at N’gaoundere had passed on to me the secret of curing hepatitis – a decoction of guava leaves in hot water. It certainly seemed to help more than anything else. Later I learned that a German pharmaceutical company was testing a drug based upon just this compound. I had dispatched Matthieu to hunt guava leaves, which are not normally found this far north. He claimed to know of a tree in a riverside grove some five miles away. I could scarcely believe that we were talking about the same species but he confounded me by returning later in the day with a bag full of what indeed were guava leaves.
My condition slowly improved. The Dowayos were so impressed that they started treating the disease with the same remedy; so every anthropologist in some way changes the people he studies. My only other known effect was in toponymy. The place where my garden proved the suitability of the climate for the cultivation of lettuce was known, years later, as ‘Salad Place’.
It was during this period that the first rains of the year actually arrived. The inexorably torrid heat of the late dry season was immediately quenched by the first downpour amid general rejoicing. I myself was somewhat less ecstatic than most since the roof of my new hut leaked like a sieve all night. I was reduced to crouching in one corner, shivering horribly, with my suitcase balanced on a ledge above my head to keep off the rain and my notes clutched in my hands. The next morning the thatcher blandly informed me that all new roofs shared this feature; it would stop after a few days. I will not claim to have believed him; I simply lacked the experience necessary to refute his assertions. The statement looked dangerously like those made by figures who had rented me leaking boats, assuring me that the wood would soon swell to make them watertight, or the Cameroonian dentist who swore to me that my gums would shrink to fit his wobbly dentures. After a miserable week of constant inundation I felt it time to invoke my guarantee of satisfaction, and repairs were undertaken. To my surprise, these consisted of simply hitting the roof with a piece of wood; to my even greater surprise, it worked.
During this time, with the neurosis of a man coming to the end of his fieldwork, I transferred my notes to the mission to preserve them from the damp, termites, goats, little boys and other menaces that my imagination conjured up.
It was while I was alone there, Jon and Jeannie being off in the bush about their business, that I was summoned to the door by loud shouting. It was the welder, an enormous fellow who revelled in the self-given name Black Buck. ‘Hey, White Man,’ he called, ‘your car just tried to kill me.’ It appeared that he had been welding a section onto the car, whose existence I had tried hard to forget, when it had slipped and narrowly missed falling on him. He seemed to feel that this had occurred through some malevolence on my part.
‘Are you all right?’ I inquired.
‘All right? Look at this.’ From within his trousers he produced an enormous penis and waved it accusingly at me. The relevance of this disclosure escaped me until on closer examination a small cut was revealed for which he demanded ‘urgent care’. I was frankly at something of a loss, not knowing where to lay my hands on appropriate medications. A rapid search offered nothing but concentrated bleach. Feeling that on the whole this was not a good idea, I urged him to consult Herbert Brown, just down the hill, as I knew he kept supplies for such emergencies. Black Buck shuffled off, still outraged.
It was not until I had returned to my labours of classifying notes that it occurred to me that Herbert Brown was not there, having gone off to repair a truck, but that his wife, a somewhat nervous lady, was. I pictured Black Buck ambling up to the door and exposing himself. Perhaps I should run down the hill and intervene? But on the whole discretion seemed the better part of valour. Since I heard no piercing scream, I assumed that Black Buck had been discreet about the area of his injury.
Being now sufficiently recovered to undertake another trek, Matthieu and I made a final outing to the western end of Do-wayoland to see the harvest of the borassa palms. These give a spherical, coconut-like fruit that has to be treated in many ways like a human skull, and placed on the cattle-shrine lest scorpions plague the village. I had never seen one of these before and was quite keen to taste them.
When we arrived at the village of the ‘Master of the Earth’ we found him surrounded by this fruit, contentedly munching its flesh. It is eaten in two ways. It can be soaked in water to cause germination; the young shoot is then consumed and is rather like celery. Alternatively, it can be eaten straight. The flesh is fibrous and orange in colour; its texture is rather like a doormat, the flavour like a peach. Having chewed away manfully for some time, I began to get the hang of it and find it rather enjoyable. A kindly old woman, clearly perceiving that the fruit held difficulties for me, brought me a calabash of the flesh ready stripped. This was very much more tender. I remarked On it to Matthieu.
‘Of course, patron,’ he replied, ‘she has already chewed it for you.’
Now that it was getting near end of term, interested parties began to visit me, eyeing certain of my possessions and remarking how desperately they needed a blanket or what a nice saucepan I had. The Chief said how much he would miss me and talked about all the things we had done together, how much he had enjoyed them though they had put him to much trouble. Matthieu began telling me absently about the problems he was having buying a wife. ‘You have to get them young,’ he explained, ‘and form them to your will.’ His intended was about twelve. ‘If they’re young, they always want money for school.’ He sighed. Who did he know who could let him have enough money to put his wife through school? Only Mariyo seemed to think of me as anything but a source of material benefit; when we talked of my departure she wept and said she would miss having me to talk to.
The whole town was abustle with the impending national festival. Various attractions had been set up, and the Dowayos were required to produce a number of dancers to perform the circumcision dance. This interested me considerably since I had been unable to witness circumcision itself. Years are divided into male and female. Circumcision can only occur in a male year; I had arrived in a female
year. Moreover, even after the change of years there was not sufficient millet to feed the boys for their protracted stay in the bush. The festival had not been performed for some five years and the situation was becoming a scandal. I had therefore to rely on informants’ descriptions of what they had undergone, circumcisers’ accounts of how the affair was organized and such photographic material as I could glean from records and missionaries who had spent many years in Do-wayoland. The absence of this central part of Dowayo symbolism was not, however, as serious as it might otherwise have been since most other ceremonies were ‘quotes’ from circumcision, reproducing exactly what happened on that occasion.
I was nonetheless glad to be able to witness the dance of the boys before they are cut. They are decorated in burial cloth, leopard skins, animal horns and a great weight of robes and other decorative material. Two boys who had already been circumcised were obliged to undertake this uncomfortable and rather humiliating task, since there was no time to teach younger boys how to deport themselves. They were disgusted at the idea and refused point blank to have anything to do with it. Zuuldibo made promises of beer and money and they reluctantly accepted. The next day he appeared at my hut asking me to reimburse him since, after all, the whole thing had been organized simply because it would interest me.
His own generous indulgence in sloth was threatened by an edict of the sous-préfet’s declaring that everyone must keep a garden. Zuuldibo declared that it was pointless to have a garden until one had a good cactus fence around it to keep out marauding animals. He reckoned that it would be about a year before he could tell whether the roots of the cactus had taken. Next, he declared that it was senseless to have a field unless one also had a hut in it around which beer could be offered to workers. Alas it was not the right season to build, so this too would take another year. On the whole, he felt that the first hoe of dirt would be turned in about three years’ time, but every morning he would gravely announce that he was ‘going to his field’ and he would sit there under a tree, often with me, and talk about whatever came into his head. I sometimes felt like an unpaid psychiatrist as he rambled on about his dreams, the women he had known, the burdens of high office.