After all these trials and tribulations, I had finally arrived among "my" people, I had my assistant, I had a pen and paper. Having been faced with so many impediments, it was with something of a shock that I realized I was now in a position to "do anthropology". The more I regarded this concept, the less clear it became. If asked to produce a picture of someone about this business, I would be far from sure what he would be doing. All I could offer would be a man who might be climbing a mountain (on his way to "do anthropology") or writing up notes (having "done anthropology"). Obviously a fairly wide definition was required rather like "learning a foreign language abroad". Any time actually spent talking to Dowayos would be considered legitimate, I decided.

There were a number of problems about this. Firstly, I could not speak a word of their language. Secondly, there were no Dowayos in the village that first morning; they were all scattered about the fields, hoeing between the millet shoots. I spent the entire day inventing things that had to be done to make my hut an efficient place to work in.

The Chief had kindly lent me a large hut in a side-compound of his own area of the village. My immediate neighbours were two of his wives and his younger brother. It was only later that I realized he was showing considerable trust in assigning me such a position that would normally only be given to in-laws of a favourite wife. The previous incumbent had left a large number of unidentifiable little bundles, spears and arrowheads thrust into the thatch. (I could not help thinking of Mary Kingsley discovering a human hand in her hut while among the Fang.) Once removed, my equipment was disposed among the roof beams. I set up a map of Poli I had acquired in the capital. This was a major wonder to Dowayos who never grasped its principles and would ask me to tell them where to find villages I had never visited. When I was able to, they would ask me to name the people who lived there and could never understand why I could accomplish the first but not the second.

As another sign of special favour, the chief had assigned me two folding chairs such as I had seen on my first visit to the village. These proved to be the only chairs in the village and whenever a person of status visited the chief they would be hauled back to his hut. So they oscillated between us like a dinner jacket I had shared with three other undergraduates while at university.

For the first three weeks the rain poured down with relentless fury. The very air was saturated. Mould grew on any exposed surface and I feared greatly for the lenses of my camera. Time was spent trying to learn the basis of the language. Africans are normally bi- or tri-lingual to some degree but have no experience, for the most part, of learning a language in anything but social encounters. The idea of recording a verb in all its forms, tenses, moods, to see the overall system is totally alien. They learn their languages as children and can switch effortlessly from one to another.

My furniture was completed by a bed of beaten earth, quite the most uncomfortable bed I have ever encountered anywhere. I had bought, at huge expense, a thin mattress stuffed with cotton which the chief much coveted. Beds were all his ambition. He confided to me that he wished to die in an iron bed he could leave to his son. "The termites will not be able to eat it," he chuckled gleefully. "They will go crazy."

The Dowayos never could appreciate the difficulties their language offered to a fieldworker from Europe. It is tonal, that is, the pitch in which a word is spoken totally affects its meaning. Many African languages have two tones; the Dowayos had four. There was no difficulty in telling a high tone from a low but in the middle, it seemed, anything could happen. The matter was complicated by the fact that Dowayos also combine tones to form glides and a tone may well be affected by the tones of neighbouring words. Added to this were dialect problems. Some areas collapse tones together as well as using different vocabulary and syntax. Since what counts is relative tone, I found it initially hard to switch from talking to a woman with a high-pitched voice to a man whose high tones might be about the same level as a woman's low tones. What really depressed me was a routine that became standard. I would meet a Dowayo and greet him. There was no problem about this; I had made my assistant school me long and hard in "Is the sky clear for you?" "The sky is clear for me, is it clear for you?" "The sky is clear for me too", which had to be gone through for each person you were greeting. The English tend to set little store by these rituals, regarding them as an empty waste of time, but the Dowayos are not hurried like ourselves and easily take offence if they are neglected. I would then make some remark of a fairly inane kind such as "How is your field?" or "Have you come far?" Their faces would drop and they would look puzzled. My assistant would step in and say -- to my own ear -- exactly what I had just said. Their faces would light up. "Aaagh. I understand" (pause). "But how is it he does not speak our tongue? He has been among us for two weeks."

The Dowayos have such a low view of their own tongue, their own chiefs refusing to use this crude, unsubtle instrument, little better than animal cries, that they cannot understand how anyone could fail to learn it. Consequently they make poor linguistic informants. The temptation to use the trade language, Fulani, was enormous. I had learnt a little of this in London where all manner of learning aids, dictionaries and manuals are available. There is a strong tradition, however, that information "doesn't count" unless gleaned in the native tongue and it was certainly true that I had found all sorts of distortions in the data collected in Fulani, which carves up the area of unclean occupations "blacksmith, undertaker, barber, circumciser, healer" in a very different way from Dowayo. According to all the information I had received, these were all undertaken by the same person whereas "priests" were set apart. In fact, in Dowayo, it is the blacksmith who is the most separate and the other tasks are distributed according to quite different criteria. There is also the consideration that Dowayos do not normally talk Fulani among themselves. There was, admittedly, one man in my village who refused to talk anything else even to his friends, but this was a standard joke of the kind Dowayos get themselves bogged down in. He would complain loudly when labouring with other Dowayos in the fields. How was it that he, a noble Fulani, was obliged to labour with savage pagans? He would elaborately recount the manifold faults of this race of dogs amid growing hysteria until there came a point at which people would begin to fall about with laughter and gasp for breath. It was considered highly amusing that I always insisted on talking to him in my own poor Fulani, and sometimes we would conduct a sort of double-act.

On one occasion, I trekked up into the mountains to the outermost confines of Dowayoland. Many of the children had never seen a white man before and began to scream with terror until comforted by their elders who explained that this was the white chief from Kongle. We all laughed good-naturedly at their fright and smoked together. Normally I do not smoke, but found it useful to be able to do so to share tobacco and so create a social bond between us. As I left, one of the girls burst into tears and I heard her snivel, "I wanted to see him take his skin off." I made a mental note to ask about it later; normally, such expressions turned out to be the result of a misinterpreted tone or an unknown homonym. When asked about it, however, my assistant showed acute embarrassment. I went into a jollying-along routine I had had to develop for precisely this sort of situation and gave him all my attention; Dowayos are frequently mocked by surrounding tribes for their "savagery" and will clam up at the least sign that they are not being taken seriously. Reluctantly, he confessed that Dowayos believed that all white men who lived for extended periods in Dowayoland were reincarnated spirits of Dowayo sorcerers. Underneath the white skins we had managed to cover ourselves with, we were black. When I went to bed at night, I had been seen to take off my white skin and hang it up. When I went to the mission with the other white men, we drew the curtains at night, locked the door and took our white skins off. Of course, he declared somewhat sniffily, he did not believe this, looking me up and down as if afraid that I would revert to my black colour on the spot. The belief explained Westerners' obsession with privacy.

Extended use of the trade language would have had numerous disadvantages. I could certainly have conducted interviews in it, but never real conversations. Dowayos speak a bastardized form of Fulani with all the irregular forms ironed out. The sense of the words is often changed by accommodation to Dowayo concepts. Moreover, it is only by being capable of following their own tongue that it is possible to grasp those asides that may be intended for other ears.

It also explained the annoyance sometimes manifested by Dowayos at my linguistic failings after months among them; they were regarded as pathetic attempts to disguise my essentially Dowayo nature. It was common knowledge that I was capable of understanding anything I really wanted to. Why did I insist on pretending the language was new to me? It was only after nearly a year in Dowayoland that I heard Dowayos refer to me as "our" white man and felt a surge of pride. I felt sure that my attempts to master the language, incomplete and undervalued as they were, played a large role in my "being accepted".

Like most anthropologists in this situation, I sought refuge in collecting facts. The prevalence of factual data in anthropological monographs stems, I am sure, not from the inherent value or interest of the facts but from an attitude of "when in doubt, collect facts", This is, in a sense, an understandable approach. The fieldworker cannot know in advance what is going to prove important and what is not. Once one has recorded data in the notebook there is a strong disinclination to leave it out of the monograph; it is remembered in terms of miles walked in the sun, or hours spent trying to pin people down. Moreover, selection presupposes a coherent view of what one is trying to do and most anthropological monographs are written by someone whose aims are limited to "writing an anthropological monograph" and no more.

But all this is with the benefit of hindsight. In those first three weeks all I knew was that I had undertaken to learn an impossible language, that there were no Dowayos in the village, that it was pouring with rain, and that I felt weak and terribly lonely.

So off I went every day, armed with my tobacco and notebooks and paced out the fields, calculated the yields, counted the goats in a flurry of irrelevant activity. This at least had the virtue of making my weird and inexplicable ways familiar to the Dowayos and I began to know them by name.

Much nonsense has been written, by people who should know better, about the anthropologist "being accepted". It is sometimes suggested that an alien people will somehow come to view the visitor of distinct race and culture as in every way similar to the locals. This is, alas, unlikely. The best one can probably hope for is to be viewed as a harmless idiot who brings certain advantages to this village. He is a source of money and creates employment. A turning-point in my own relations came after some three months, when the Chief intimated to me that he would like to regain possession of his hut. The matter was discussed at length and I agreed that the best solution was for me to have my own hut built. This cost me the princely sum of £14 and enabled me to employ the circumciser's son who vouched for my bona fides with his father, the chief's brother, who taught me about hunting, and the nephew of the local healer, who put me in touch with his uncle. My car served naturally as village ambulance and taxi. The women could always borrow salt or onions from me. The village dogs knew I was a soft touch and would congregate before my hut, much to the rage of my assistant. The potters and blacksmiths had never done so much business. My presence lent huge status to the Chief. He always made sure I knew about all the festivals so I could give him a lift to them. I acted as bank for those with no money but great expectations. I was expected to be a buying agency for those who needed parts for their bicycles or lamps. I was a source of medicine for the sick.

My rather wobbly control of the language was also a grave danger. Obscenity is never very far away in Dowayo. A shift of tone changes the interrogative particle, attached to a sentence to convert it into a question, into the lewdest word in the language, something like "cunt". I would, therefore, baffle and amuse Dowayos by greeting them, "Is the sky clear for you, cunt?" But my problems were not exclusively with interrogative vaginas; similar problems haunted eating and copulation. One day I was summoned to the Chief's hut to be introduced to a rainmaker. This was a most valuable contact that I had nagged the Chief about for weeks. We chatted politely, very much sounding each other out. I was not supposed to know he was the rainmaker; I was the one being interviewed. I think he was much impressed by my respectful demeanour. We agreed that I would visit him. I was anxious to leave since I had acquired some meat for the first time in a month and left it in my assistant's care. I rose and shook hands politely, "Excuse me," I said, "I am cooking some meat." At least that was what I had intended to say; owing to tonal error I declared to an astonished audience, "Excuse me. I am copulating with the blacksmith."

True, I had disadvantages. I attracted outsiders to the village, which was bad. I would fatigue my hosts with foolish questions and refuse to understand their answers. There was the danger that I would repeat things I had heard and seen. I was a constant source of social embarrassment. On one occasion, for example, I asked a man whether he had to refrain from sexual intercourse before going hunting. This was perfectly all right in itself, but his sister was within earshot. Both he and she shot off in opposite directions emitting loud wailing noises. Seconds before, I had been sitting in the hut chatting to three men. In a flash, the hut was empty except for my assistant who was groaning and holding his head in his hands. The huge indecency I had committed was the subject of horrified whispers for weeks afterwards.

The people in my village rapidly became versed in translating what I said into what I meant. How far my command of the language actually progressed and how far I managed to teach them my own particular pijin was difficult to say.

I remained convinced, however, that my chief value for the Dowayos was simply that of a curiosity. It is untrue that boredom is a complaint exclusively endemic to civilization. Village life in Africa is very dull indeed, not just to a Westerner accustomed to a wealth of daily-changing stimuli, but to villagers themselves. Every small event or scandal is lovingly rehashed and raked over, every novelty sought out, any change of routine greeted as a relief from monotony. I was liked because I had entertainment value. No one could ever be sure what I would do next. Perhaps I would go off to the city and bring back some new wonder or story. Perhaps someone would come and visit me. Perhaps I might go into Poli and find there was beer. Perhaps I would come up with some new foolishness. I was a constant source of conversation.

I therefore tried to be afoot at first light to greet people before they left. "Greeting people" is a great African tradition. It consists of being visited by people you do not know who then stay for hours and defeat all attempts at conversation. It is rude to make a hasty departure and so one goes over the same subjects again and again -- the fields, the cattle, the weather. This has certain advantages for the neophyte: the vocabulary is small, the constructions simple and he is often able to surprise people with whole sentences he has learned off by heart.

Having now invented all sorts of pointless activities in which to spend my time, I felt the need of a routine. It was essential to rise early. At this time of the year, most of the people slept in small shelters in the fields to guard against the ravages of cattle. In theory Dowayos are supposed to return their herds of cattle to the village corral at night, but they seldom bother. Traditionally, guarding and herding are done by small boys but nowadays these must be sent to school. The result is that cattle are allowed to wander about the fields and inflict great damage on the crops. A woman knows that if her field is ravaged this will be taken as proof of her adultery and her husband will beat her into the bargain; women are therefore especially vigilant guardians. With the risk to their food for the next year, few return to the village at all for weeks on end, and those that do are away very early.

Once "greeting" had been accomplished to the satisfaction of all, I would start on breakfast. Food was a major problem in Dowayoland. I had a colleague who had worked in the southern jungle zone of Cameroon and told me great tales of the culinary delights that awaited me. Bananas would grow round my door, avocados fell from the trees as you walked along, meat was plentiful. Unfortunately, I was closer to the desert than the jungle. The Dowayos showered all their love upon millet. They could not eat anything else for fear of falling ill. They talked about millet; they paid debts in millet; they made beer from millet. Should one offer them rice or yams, they would eat them but regret bitterly that they were not as good as millet. With this, they ate a sour, glutinous vegetable sauce made from the leaves of wild plants. As an occasional diet this was all very well, but Dowayos ate it twice a day, morning and evening, every single day. Boiled millet is rather like polyfilla. They regretted that they could not sell me any.

Land is free in Dowayoland. A man may take as much as he likes and build his house wherever he chooses. This does not, however, lead to an agricultural surplus. A man cultivates as little as possible. Clearing the ground and harvesting are hard enough. Worst of all is the hoeing that is necessary half-way through the growing season. To relieve the tedium of this, great beer parties are given and the workers remain as long as there is beer to drink, then they wander off to another party taking their host with them. In this way, solitary work is punctuated by bouts of social drunkenness. Although millet fetches a good price in the cities, the Dowayos are not attracted to sell there. The market is controlled by Fulani traders who expect to make one or two hundred per cent profit on anything they touch. Since they also control transport, the remuneration a Dowayo cultivator would receive is very small indeed. Dowayos tend to grow enough for themselves and kinship obligations if there is a festival in the air. Otherwise margins are fairly tight and if the rains are less abundant than expected just before harvest, there may be famine. Trying to buy anything in Dowayoland is very much swimming against the current; the French deliberately introduced taxation, although unprofitable, to compel the Dowayos to use money. Even now, however, they prefer to barter and build up debts that can all be discharged in the slaughter of cattle than to deal in money. Had they given me millet, I should have had to pay back in meat or millet bought in the city.

Although they have cattle, the Dowayos do not milk them or breed them for food. They are dwarf cattle, without humps, unlike the Fulani cattle, and give almost no milk. Dowayos also claim that they are "very fierce" although I saw no evidence of this. Ideally they should be killed only for festivals. At the death of a rich man who has, say, forty cattle, ten or more should be killed and the meat given to kinsmen. Nowadays the central government tries to prevent what it regards as waste of resources, but the custom persists.

Other festivals involve killing cattle for the dead, and cattle must be paid to buy wives. Hence their wanton destruction for meat or money will be resisted by young men who have their eye on marriage prospects. Whenever I was given meat, especially by the Chief of Kongle, there was a rapid alternation between dearth and plenty. He would always insist on giving me a whole leg, which was far more than I could ever eat before it went rotten. So I would have a series of sub-letters of the Chief's hospitality to whom I could make over meat in return for eggs. Not that eggs were much of a blessing. Dowayos do not normally eat eggs; they regard the idea as mildly disgusting. "Don't you know where they come from?" they would ask. Eggs are not something to be eaten but rather to be hatched into chickens. So it was that they would very kindly bring me eggs that they had kept for a couple of weeks in the hot sun, so I could indulge my sick fancy. Floating them like witches did not always suffice to screen out the bad ones; once eggs have got beyond a certain stage of putrescence they begin to sink in water like fresh ones. Many is the time that my hopes of eating eggs were dashed as I broke them, one by one, and smelt the thick stench rising from their bluish-green interiors.

Faced with the impossibility of eating off the land, I decided to keep my own chickens. This, also, was not a success. Some I bought, some were given to me. Dowayo chickens, on the whole, are scrawny, wretched things; eating them is rather like eating an Airfix model of a Tiger Moth. They responded to treatment, however. I fed them on rice and oatmeal, which Dowayos who never feed them at all found a huge extravagance. One day, they began to lay. I had fantasies of being able to eat an egg every day. As I sat in my hut, gloating over my first day's haul, my assistant appeared in the doorway, an expression of bland self-satisfaction on his face. "Patron," he exclaimed, "I just noticed the chickens were laying eggs so I killed them before they lost all their strength!"

After this, I tended to restrict myself to a breakfast of oatmeal and tinned milk which I bought in the mission shop. Tea is a major crop in Cameroon but it was normally impossible to buy it in Poli. There was, however, Nigerian tea, presumably smuggled over the border.

After breakfast would come my "clinic". There is a great deal of disease in Dowayoland and I was something less than ecstatic about having it accumulate around my hut. However, even with my limited knowledge and medical resources, it would have been inhuman to turn the sick away as my assistant did initially. In accordance with African notions of status, he regarded me as someone who had to be carefully screened from contact with the common herd. It was all right for me to speak to chiefs or magicians but I should not waste my time with foolish commoners or women. He was frankly horrified when I talked to children. He posted himself strategically in front of my compound and would leap out on anyone who sought to approach me directly, interposing himself like a secretary in the ante-chamber of some great man. Whenever I sought to give anyone a cigarette, he would insist that it pass from my hand to his before it could be given to a Dowayo. In the end we had words about it and he desisted in his attentions but always managed to convey that excessive contact with ordinary people diminished his own exalted rank.

My assistant would normally eat with me since he claimed it was impossible to eat the food of these savage mountain Dowayos. After some months I noticed he had become hugely fat and discovered that he was in fact dining with both the Chief and myself.

The news soon got around that I was willing to hand out "roots", as the Dowayos called remedies, for malaria and had good medicines. I was somewhat taken aback when an old woman turned up very angry and complained that I had given her malaria. A huge argument developed that I was quite unable to follow at this stage, and she was driven away with much mockery. It was only after months of work with healers and sorcerers that I understood what the trouble had been. Dowayos divide disease into a number of classes. There are "epidemics", infectious diseases that white men have remedies against, things like malaria or leprosy. There is witchcraft of the head or from plants. There are the symptoms that are caused by the spirits of the dead. Lastly, there are pollution diseases that come from contact with forbidden things and people. The cure for the last is regulated contact with the forbidden thing or person that has caused the disease. Having heard that I had a cure for malaria, the old woman had imagined it was a pollution disease and the cure in my hut was also the cause of the disease. To keep such a powerful and dangerous thing in the middle of a village would, indeed, be grounds for complaint.

Infected wounds and sores would always be brought to me and I would put on anti-biotic and a dressing, knowing full well the futility of this since Dowayos always keep wounds open and remove a dressing as soon as they are out of sight. There were one or two cases of malaria, on which I now considered myself to be an expert, and I would hand out quinine, my assistant making sure I got the numerals right when I explained dosage.

I had with me a small, portable tape recorder that I nearly always carried with me; when talking to people in the fields I would sometimes record conversations. Dowayos loved to hear their own voices, but were not hugely impressed; they'd seen tape recorders before. Dowayo dandies affected radio-cassette players and most had encountered them at one time or another. What really had them murmuring "wonder", "magic" was my writing. Except for a few of the children, Dowayos are illiterate. Even the children write in French and, before the linguists did research on the Dowayo tongue, it would never have occurred to anyone to write in Dowayo. When I made notes in a mish-mash of French and English with important Dowayo phrases copied in phonetic transcription, they would delightedly watch me for hours, taking turns to look over my shoulder. When after a couple of weeks I was able to read back to a man what he had said at our last meeting, he was stupefied. Gradually, I built up a library of taped conversations, my notes on them, and the interpretations I had received subsequently. I was able to pick one at random and go through it, word by word, with my assistant, making him justify translations he had given me, elaborate on certain terms or beliefs and explain the difference between close synonyms. Once this became a standard procedure, our level of linguistic competence rose enormously. He became much more careful; I began to learn much faster. Instead of just foisting me off with an approximation, he would mark down points of difficulty for us to go over later and abandoned the stance of omniscience he had adopted initially.

The rest of the morning would be spent on language learning. My assistant greatly enjoyed the role of teacher and took great delight in drilling me in verb forms until I could stand no more. He was rather less taken with a practice I adopted after the first couple of weeks.

After some weeks the weather became much hotter, the rain came in sporadic downpours and I instituted the afternoon swim. Water is very dangerous in Dowayoland. A number of parasitic diseases are endemic, the worst being bilharzia. Many Dowayos suffer from it; it produces severe intestinal bleeding, leading to nausea, weakness and, finally, death. The life-expectancy in Dowayoland is so low anyway that many perish before it gets to this stage. I had been told many different things, at different times, by different people. According to some authorities, one foot injudiciously placed in a stream confers lifelong bilharzia; according to others, it is necessary to immerse oneself for hours in polluted water before infection is possible. A passing French geographer told me that the water was perfectly safe after the first heavy rains. These, it seemed, washed downstream the watersnails that carry the parasite. Thus, provided one avoided stagnant or slow-flowing water in the dry season, the risk was minimal. Since I had been tortured by the sight of Dowayos joyfully splashing in the cool streams while I laboured past bathed in sweat, I was greatly tempted to take the plunge; it was in any case impossible to travel far in Dowayoland without wading waist-deep across raging torrents. I therefore decided to accept the geographer's diagnosis and go to the men's bathing place, a deep pool in the granite rocks at the bottom of a waterfall, forbidden to women on the grounds that boys were circumcised here.

Lunch would be some form of hard-tack, perhaps chocolate, peanut butter, rice. Then my assistant would go off for a siesta during the hottest part of the day and I would retire to my rock-like bed for an hour's letter-writing, sleep or desperate calculation of my financial straits.

Matthieu and I came here most days unless engaged elsewhere and it was in this all-male environment that the Dowayos first began to talk to me about their religion and beliefs. Since it was abundantly clear that they had all been circumcised after the Dowayo fashion and I had not, conversation turned spontaneously around this topic with which Dowayo culture has more than a passing obsession.

This place was delightful, set at the foot of the mountains from which the water gushed, cold and clean. The pool itself was shaded by trees and floored with sand. At various levels around the stream were ledges in the rock face on which one could lie in all possible variations of heat or cool.

On the occasion of my first appearance at the swimming place, there were one or two young men on their way back from the fields who had stopped to wash. My anatomy was clearly the subject of florid speculation. On the following days there were twenty or thirty men who spontaneously appeared to see the great novelty of a white man with no clothes on. Thereafter, my value as an attraction tailed off rapidly and numbers returned to normal. I felt mildly insulted.

The bathing over, we would make a turn through the fields, trying to track down any beer parties being held that day. Here, beneath a woven shade, we would find anything up to twenty men and women intermittently hoeing and drinking. Millet beer has been described by an eminent French colonial official as having the consistency of pea soup and the taste of paraffin. The description is accurate. Dowayos take nothing else at midday and become remarkably drunk on its very low alcoholic content. This was a constant source of wonder to me. I had made an early policy decision to drink native beer despite the undoubted horrors of the process of fabrication. On my very first visit to a Dowayo beer party, this was put severely to the test. "Will you have beer?" I was asked. "Beer is furrowed," I replied, having got the tones wrong. "He said 'Yes'," my assistant explained to them in a tired voice. They were amazed. No white man, at this time, had ever been known to touch beer. Seizing a calabash, they proceeded to wash it out in deference to my exotic sensibilities. This they did by offering it to a dog to lick out. Dowayo dogs are not beautiful at the best of times; this one was particularly loathsome, emaciated, open wounds on its ears where flies feasted, huge distended ticks hanging from its belly. It licked the calabash with relish. It was refilled and passed to me. Everyone regarded me, beaming expectantly. There was nothing to be done; I drained it and gasped out my enjoyment. Several more calabashes followed. They were astonished that I was not drunk. It is virtually impossible for a Westerner to get drunk on millet beer; he simply cannot hold the required amount. Dowayos, however, rapidly become falling-down drunk on factory-made beer. It is not uncommon for them to make a bottle last three days, during which time they claim to be constantly inebriated.

The Chief, Zuuldibo, was always hovering on these occasions; he never missed a beer-party, though he steadfastly refused to undertake agricultural labour in payment. The simplest way of finding one was to send out Matthieu to find Zuuldibo. Since Zuuldibo's dog had taken to following me in the hope of bounty, we made a rather bizarre procession. My first successful speech in Dowayo was: "Matthieu follows the Chief. I follow Matthieu. The dog follows me." This was held to be wit of the highest order and much repeated.

After a session in the fields, I would always try to be at the crossroads about nightfall as people returning to the various areas of Kongle passed by. A couple of felled trees had been brought here as seats and the men sat and gossiped and swatted mosquitoes until it was time to eat. A meal of oatmeal or instant mashed potato (very expensive but real potatoes rotted in days) with a can of soup finished off the day and I would retire to write up notes, record questions to ask the next day and read anything I could lay my hands on.

It was months before I felt I had made any progress in the language at all and I was quietly convinced that I would return having learned and understood nothing. The worst thing was that Dowayos seldom if ever seemed to do anything, have any beliefs or engage in symbolic activity. They just existed.

So the first few weeks passed and I began to feel my way into village life. As the Dowayos began to drift back to the villages the edge was taken off my loneliness, but I was still subject to huge bouts of depression when trapped in my tiny hut by the rain. My health had not fully recovered from the attack of malaria. This was partly due to the monotony of my diet that often led me to skip meals or just to force as much down as I could by regarding food as essential fuel.

My one real luxury was a gas light I had bought in N'gaoundere. Although I had to drive 150 miles to change the cylinder, this only had to be faced every couple of months and I had a spare. It meant I could work after dark, a huge boon since night falls before seven o'clock all the year round. I was much visited by Dowayos wanting to see this wonder and had great difficulty explaining that it was not electricity.

The position of a fieldworker's assistant is a difficult one. He is expected by the locals to take their part in any clash of loyalties with his employer; in an African society the life of a man who incurs the wrath of his kinsmen can be made very uncomfortable indeed. At the same time, his employer expects him to act as his agent in dealing with local people and tipping him off on strategies and contacts. For an ethnographer, anxious for the truth, working through the medium of the convoluted loyalties of a partly literate schoolboy is a frustrating business; it is aggravated by the fact that each party may have quite different notions of what is expected of him. Most Dowayos, extrapolating from their experience of missionaries, expect white men to be fanatical Christians. They were very surprised, therefore, when my assistant went to prayer meetings on Sundays while I did not. I had to make a point of bumping into the Christians on their way back and spending time with them just to show that my absence was not from feelings of superiority on my part.

My frustration at not being able to follow more than a fraction of what was said around me began to focus on my hapless assistant. It seemed to me that he told me nothing but incorrect verb forms; I began to doubt whether half the time he understood what I was saying, even whether he was able to speak the dialect of mountain Dowayos at all. I had seen him, on occasion, exchange furtive looks with other men when certain topics were raised and I scented conspiracy.

To begin with I was distressed to find that I couldn't extract more than ten words from Dowayos at a stretch. When I asked them to describe something to me, a ceremony, or an animal, they would produce one or two sentences and then stop. I would have to ask further questions to get more information. This was very unsatisfactory as I was directing their answers rather more than sound field method would have prescribed. One day, after about two months of fairly fruitless endeavour, the reason struck me. Quite simply, Dowayos have totally different rules about how to divide up the parts of a conversation. Whereas in the West we learn not to interrupt when somebody else is talking, this does not hold in much of Africa. One must talk to people physically present as if on the telephone, where frequent interjections and verbal response must be given if only to assure the other party that one is still there and paying attention. When listening to someone talking, a Dowayo stares gravely at the floor, rocks backwards and forwards and murmurs, "Yes", "It is so", "Good", every five seconds or so. Failure to do so leads to the speaker rapidly drying up. As soon as I adopted this expedient, my interviews were quite transformed.

But the main problem lay not so much in my assistant's fidelity and honesty as in his age. Age brings status in Africa; the Dowayo way of showing respect is to address someone as "old man". Thus venerable Dowayo Nestors would call me "old man" or "grandfather". It was scandalous that a mere child of seventeen should be present at the conversations of such learned elders as ourselves. He may have been fairly invisible to me, but to the Dowayos he stuck out like a sore thumb. In later days, he would be peremptorily dismissed by aged Dowayos before we got down to serious matters, and I would consult him later with any linguistic problems that had come up. Fortunately, he had some obscure kinship with the people of the principal rainchief and this sufficed to excuse his presence in the early days, otherwise I -- like others who had worked among the Dowayos -- would have returned huffily convinced of the pig-headed stubbornness of that race.