As the plane landed on the darkened airfield at Duala a unique smell invaded the cabin. It was musky and sultry, aromatic and coarse -- the smell of West Africa. Warm rain was falling; it felt like blood trickling down our sweaty faces as we hiked across the tarmac. Inside the airport was the most amazing chaos I have ever witnessed. Crowds of Europeans were huddled in desperate groups or screaming at Africans. Africans were screaming at Africans. A lone Arab was floating disconsolately from one desk to another. In front of each was the mad, jostling throng I recognized as a French queue. Here I had my second lesson in Cameroonian bureaucracy. It seemed that we had to collect three pieces of paper relating to our visas, health certificates and immigration arrangements. Numerous forms had to be filled in. There was a heavy trade in ballpoint pens. When the French had elbowed their way through to have the privilege of waiting in the rain for their luggage, the rest of us were attended to. Several of us made the mistake of being unable to supply exact addresses to which we were going and the names of business contacts. A large official sat at his desk reading the newspaper and ignoring us. Having established to his satisfaction our relative hierarchy, he interviewed us with an air of one not to be trifled with. Seeing the way things were going, I relented and supplied a wholly fictitious address, which was the recourse adopted by several others. In future I was always studiously precise in filling in all forms which were doubtless eaten by termites or thrown away unread. We all went back round the three desks again and through customs, where a drama was being enacted. A Frenchman's luggage had been opened and found to contain certain aromatic substances. In vain the man claimed that these were herbs to cook the sauces of French cuisine. The official was convinced he had captured a major trader in marijuana, even though it was common knowledge that a trade existed growing it inside Cameroon and smuggling it out. The French jostlers were back in operation and seemed to be doing quite well until the huge form of an immaculate African who had got on the first-class section at Nice sailed through. With a click of his gold-adorned fingers he indicated his luggage, which was promptly seized by porters. Luckily for me, my own luggage impeded the removal of his and so I was waved through and out into Africa.

First impressions count for a lot. The man whose knees are not brown will be marked down by all manner of people. At all events, my camera case was promptly seized by what I took to be an enthusiastic porter. I revised my ideas when he swiftly made off into the distance. I set off in pursuit, using all manner of phrases uncommon in everyday speech. "Au secours! Au voleur!" I cried. Fortunately, he was delayed by traffic, I caught up, and we began to struggle. It ended with a swift blow that laid open the side of my face and the case was abandoned to me. A solicitous taxi driver took me to my hotel for only five times the normal fare.

The next day I tore myself away from the charms of Duala and flew on to the capital without incident, noting that I had adopted the loud, hostile manner of the other passengers towards porters and taxi drivers. In Yaounde I suffered a long bout of bureaucracy; as it took about three weeks to have my documents processed there was nothing to do but play tourist.

My first impression of the city was that it had few charms. It is unpleasantly dusty in the dry season, a vast morass in the wet season. Its main monuments have all the appeal of motorway café architecture. Collapsed gratings in the pavements offer the unwary visitor a direct route to the town sewers. Newcomers seldom survive long without wrenching at least one limb. The life of expatriates centres around two or three cafés where they sit in deep boredom, staring at the passing yellow cabs and fighting off the attentions of souvenir sellers. These are gentlemen of the greatest charm who have learnt that white men will buy absolutely anything as long as it is overpriced. They offer for sale a blend of perfectly acceptable carvings and absolute rubbish as "genuine antiques". The whole trade is practised with something of the air of a game. Asked prices are something like twenty times what is reasonable. Should a client protest that he is being robbed, they giggle and agree, cutting their price to five times the going rate. Many enjoy something like a client | patron relationship with jaded Europeans, fully aware that the more outrageous their lies the greater will be the amusement they cause.

Far more interesting were the young French community of co-opérants, people doing foreign service as an alternative to national service in the army. They had somehow managed to set up a replica of provincial French social life incorporating factors such as barbecues, motor rallies and parties with minimal regard to the fact that they were in West Africa. I rapidly established links with one ménage, one girl and two boys who were variously engaged in professional teaching and later proved invaluable. Unlike the diplomatic community, they actually left the capital and had information about the state of roads, the vehicle market, etc., and spoke to Africans who were not their servants. It came as a great surprise to me after the officials with whom I had to deal, how extremely friendly and pleasant the people were; I had by no means expected this. After the political resentments of West Indians and Indians I had known in England, it struck me as ridiculous that it should be in Africa that people of different races should be able to meet on easy, uncomplicated terms. Of course it turned out not to be quite as simple as that. Relations between Europeans and Africans are complicated by all kinds of factors. Often the Africans concerned have learnt to conform so well that they are little other than black Frenchmen. On the other hand, Europeans resident in Africa tend to be rather weird people. Their conspicuous ordinariness is perhaps the reason the diplomatic community fare so badly; madmen -- and I met several of them -- fare very well despite the havoc they leave behind them.

The saddest cases are the diplomats who seem to pursue a policy of minimal contact with the locals, fleeing from locked office to locked compound via the café. For reasons that will become apparent later, I occasioned the British community some inconvenience.

It was at this point that I made two blunders that reveal how very little I knew about the world I was moving in. First, I went to the post office to send a telegram to N'gaoundere, my next staging post up the railway line, warning them of my imminent arrival. It got there a fortnight later, which was considered about average by old hands. It also acquainted me with a very odd Australian who, despairing of arrogant officials and locals who had learnt their jostling from the French, was reduced to standing in the middle of the floor shouting to everybody's surprise, "I've understood. I'm the wrong bleedin' colour in' I?" He thereupon declared in good round terms that he never intended to write to his mother again from Cameroonian territory.

Time was passing and African cities are by no means cheap; Yaounde is classed as one of the most expensive places on earth for a foreigner. While I was living in no great style, money was going fast and I simply had to get out; I would have to make a scene. Steeling my nerve, I went to the Bureau of Immigration. Behind the desk sat the supercilious inspector I had dealt with on previous visits. He looked up from the documents he was reading and began an intricate process involving a cigarette and lighter, ignoring my greeting, and threw my passport on the desk. Instead of the two years I had asked for, I had been mysteriously given nine months in the country. Thankful for small mercies, I left.

As an Englishman I was perhaps unreasonably impressed by the fact that complete strangers would greet me and smile at me in the street, apparently without ulterior motive.

Luckily, I was able to sell him one of my own stamps at which point he exploded in maudlin Commonwealth affection and insisted I take beer with him. After several of these he revealed that he had been travelling for more than two years and never spent more than fifty pence a day. I was suitably impressed until he took his leave without paying for the beer.

It was then I made my most serious error so far. Hitherto, I had kept the major part of my research grant in the form of a certified international cheque which I carried on me at all times. It seemed to me prudent to deposit this in a bank, which only took me about an hour of the jostling and arrogance treatment. I was blandly assured by a plausible young man that a cheque book would be sent to me at N'gaoundere within twenty-four hours and that I would thus be able to draw on the account as necessary. Incredibly, I believed him. In fact it took some five months to gain access to the money I had so lightly deposited. However, at the time it seemed a victory for reason in view of the many stories of crime circulating in ever more horrific versions among the white community. Many of the men have adopted the fashion of carrying small handbags, after the effete Continental manner, in which to keep the documents they are obliged to carry. It appears that gangs of huge African women roam the streets after dark snatching the purses of lone males, beating up those bold enough to resist. This is quite feasible. Africa is the home of the most astonishing physiques, both male and female, the result of lives of continuous hard physical labour and a diet low in protein. A willowy Westerner feels initially dwarfed by the pectoral developments of Southern Cameroonians.

A little more jostling sufficed to buy a ticket, with about the same amount of form filling as one needs to buy life insurance.

It was with a certain sense of relief that I checked out of the hotel, mentally saying goodbye to the piped African guitar music that raged night and day, and running the gauntlet of the whores for the last time. These ladies are perhaps the least subtle members of their trade I have ever seen. A perfectly accepted mode of approach is to walk straight up to the intended male and simply grasp him between the legs in a vice-like grip; one should always avoid being closeted in the lift in such circumstances.

Soon afterwards I was safely at the station, becoming increasingly sceptical about the delights of the air-conditioned train described to me by the airlines girl in London. It consisted of First World War rolling stock, hailing by some mysterious process from Italy. It was lavishly embellished with exhortations in Italian about what to do and not to do with the water supply and toilet facilities. Problems of translation had been solved at a stroke by simply discontinuing them.

Travelling in West Africa seems to have much in common with travel by stage in early Westerns. There is a fairly standard cast. It seems much the same whether one is travelling by train or bush-taxi; the latter plays a major role in getting about inside the country. Bush-taxis are big Toyota or Saviem vans built to accommodate from twelve to twenty persons into which the proprietors seek to introduce between thirty and fifty. Should the vehicle give the false impression of bursting at the seams, a popular expedient is to drive off at speed and apply the brakes, which always makes room for one or two more at the back. It seems to be required that each vehicle shall contain a couple of army corporals or lieutenants. Gendarmes normally find themselves the best seats, beside the driver, and blandly refuse to pay for them. A couple of southern schoolteachers resentful at being sent to the Muslim North are standard. With but little prompting, they entertain the company with tales of their sufferings in that benighted area, denouncing the lack of entrepreneurial spirit, the savagery of the pagan inhabitants, the inedibility of the food. Then there will be a pagan woman in blue plastic shoes suckling a child, an operation that seems to involve most of the women full time. A couple of gaunt Muslims from the semi-desert of the North, swathed in Arab robes and clutching prayer mats and kettles of water, complete the assembly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.