Moreover, mail is so slow that the first two months all I received was letters from the bank in Garoua with outrageously inaccurate statements of my account. By some sleight of hand I now had three accounts, one in Yaounde, one in Garoua, and another, quite mysteriously, in a town I had never even visited.

The one break in the weekly routine was my Friday afternoon visit to town. Its justification was that I had to collect my mail which arrived from Garoua every Friday. This was a blatant falsehood: the mail only arrived in theory on Friday. The Fulani chief of Poli held the contract to deliver the post in his truck but when he did so, or whether he did so at all, depended entirely on personal whim. Should he decide that he wanted to spend a few days in the city, he would do so and the mail would not arrive for another week. It was a matter of supreme indifference to him that none of the schoolteachers or other functionaries received their pay, that drugs for the hospital would be held up, that the entire town would be inconvenienced.

Hence Friday afternoons began with the cheerful filtering of water for my trip, which I insisted on undertaking on foot, firstly because petrol was impossible to obtain in Poli and so had to be carefully husbanded, secondly because otherwise I had to take the entire village. In the rainy season there was a copious flow of water so I contented myself with simply filtering it for drinking purposes. In the dry season all waterholes become stinking stagnant pools and it is necessary to boil it or add chlorine. My water bottle became a great joke among the Dowayos who were amazed that I could make a litre last most of the day, but they accepted this as a peculiarity of the white man. In fact, they have their own system of water prohibitions of which mine was but a logical extension. Blacksmiths, for example, cannot draw water with other Dowayos; they must be offered water by others. Ordinary Dowayos cannot drink mountain Dowayo water unless offered it by the owners. Rainchiefs cannot drink rainwater. It is part of a system of regulated exchange that governs the passage of women, food, water between the three groups. Since I did not exchange food or women with other groups, it was appropriate that I should have my own restrictions on water. Other Dowayos would never touch my water unless I literally put it in their hands, believing that a disease would result from uninvited drinking.

An important feature of "collecting the mail" was that it provided me with a break from my assistant. I had never in my life spent so much time in the uninterrupted company of one person and had begun to feel like one married against his will to a most unsuitable partner.

The walk of some nine kilometres on a rocky road was generally an enjoyable relief from sloshing around the muddy fields. After a couple of months of this, my feet and ankles were rich in all manner of noxious fungi that blandly ignored any of the remedies I had brought with me. Trousers had a life of about a month in the rains. After that they literally rotted away from the bottoms. Wearing shorts was the obvious solution but these made my assistant instantly sullen on the grounds that men of standing did not wear them; moreover, they offered no protection from thorns, razor grass or stinging reeds with which the bush was dotted.

Once in town, I would install myself in the bar with all the other inveterate mail watchers. Sometimes there was beer to help pass the time as we sat and waited for the sound of the mail truck. Sometimes I would visit the market, a miserable group of old men and women selling a handful of peppers or strings of beads. I cannot believe that this was an economically viable occupation and was surely undertaken solely to relieve boredom. At the other end of town was a butcher who, two days a week, had meat. Since the big men of the town had reserved the major part for themselves in advance, all that was available for others was feet and intestines that were divided up with an axe. The quantity that one got for a fixed price varied capriciously since no scales were used. In and out of all this wandered the various functionaries, locals in various degrees of vagabondage, gendarmes holding hands and everywhere -- children.

Through my Friday mail run, I became acquainted with a number of the teachers in particular. One notable figure was Alphonse. Alphonse was a huge Southerner who had been posted as primary school teacher out in the bush beyond the River Faro. This part of Cameroon is so remote that it is virtually part of Nigeria. Nigerian money and goods are found rather than Cameroonian and a good deal of smuggling goes on. There Alphonse lived in total isolation among the Tchamba. A friend who visited him reported that his hut was minute and his only possessions were one pair of shorts and two sandals of different colour. There was no beer. At the beginning of the dry season a small cloud of dust would appear on the horizon on the road from Tchamba. Gradually, a small dot would become visible. It would be Alphonse walking, stumbling, crawling towards Poli, crying "Beer! Beer!" He would install himself in the bar and proceed to spend his accumulated salary on beer. It is a strong argument for the existence of a beneficent deity that he never arrived during one of the lengthy spells when there was no beer. By about four in the afternoon, Alphonse would have reached the stage where he wanted to dance.

His chief ally and fellow hell-raiser was another Southerner, Augustin. Augustin had defected from the life of a chartered accountant in the capital and become a teacher of French. He was another rugged individualist in a state that treasured fawning conformity, the only man I knew who refused to buy a membership card for the single political party. A feud had begun between himself and the local sous-préfet; both were notorious for their uxoriousness. It was confidently predicted among the local functionaries that one day he would "disappear" either through some political offence or because of his activities among the wives of the Poli Fulanis. Under the influence of drink he roared round the town on a large motorbike to the great terror of young and old alike, frequently falling off, but never suffering more than superficial damage. An atmosphere of imminent disaster surrounded Augustin; wherever he went there was trouble. On one occasion when he visited me in my village he blatantly engaged in fornication with a local married woman. Dowayos expect married women to indulge in adultery and regard the seduction of each others' wives as an amusing sport. Augustin, however, had copulated with her in the husband's own hut, a serious affront. The husband soon found out, and with the logic of group responsibility, decided that I must pay him compensation. I discussed this with the Chief and other "legal advisers" and politely refused. The husband appeared outside my hut with his brothers. He would seize Augustin the next time he came to see me. Worse still, he would beat on his motorbike with sticks. It seemed politic at this point to warn Augustin not to come out to the village for a while. True to his nature, he appeared the next day; he even parked his motorbike in front of the wronged husband's house. I was seriously concerned that there might be violence or that my relationship with the Dowayos would be jeopardized.

He was a large man, gentle if unopposed, but prodigious in his furies. The tapster, often the truant pupil of one of the local teachers, would be dispatched to fetch his radio. As soon as the music started, Alphonse began to heave, like some great phenomenon of nature. Oblivious to the world, he shuffled, emitting low moans, drawing great draughts from his bottle, hips swaying, groin gyrating, head drooping. This would continue for hours until he reached a more advanced stage where everyone else had to dance as well lest he take offence. It was a matter of some concern whether the mail would arrive before Alphonse attained the point of social dancing. Alphonse was no respecter of persons and the bar would often contain nervously circling tax inspectors and gendarmes all dancing under his imperial sway, as he sighed and smiled happily in one corner.

The husband, in fact, appeared with his brothers. Augustin produced beer he had brought from town. We all drank in silence. Several more beers were produced and Zuuldibo, with his incredible drink-scenting abilities, materialized at once. My assistant hovered nervously in the background. I distributed tobacco. Suddenly the husband, who had sat brooding in the sort of smouldering silence one associates with drunken Glaswegians, began to sing a thin, tuneless song. Immediately all the other men joined in with gusto. The husband left. It is the anthropologist's role to be the earnest drone who goes round afterwards asking to have the joke explained to him, so I began asking about what I had witnessed. The words of the song were, "Oh who would copulate with a bitter vagina?" sung in mockery of women. It seemed that the husband, lulled by the beer, had decided that all-male solidarity was more important than the fidelity of a mere wife. The matter was never alluded to again. Moreover, Zuuldibo and Augustin became the firmest of friends and shared many drinking bouts together.

Often both Alphonse and Augustin would be at the bar awaiting their salaries with all the pointless anxiety of expectant fathers. There were always huge disputes about the calculation of income tax. I noted with interest that Cameroonian schoolteachers received almost the same salary in Poli as I did in London. They also received free air tickets for internal travel which they mostly sold on the black market, unless the functionaries cheated them out of them. Actually getting one's hands on the mail was a nostalgic return to the jostling bureaucracy. It was necessary to queue endlessly while all manner of details were noted minutely in school exercise books with much careful ruling of lines and precision rubber stamping. Identity papers were examined at great length. A skilled clerk could make the delivering up of a single letter last ten minutes.

Then would come the post-mortem. Those with no mail would retire to the bar to grieve. Those with mail would normally end up at the same place to celebrate. Since it was dark before seven, I almost invariably ended up trudging back to Kongle in the dark. In England one forgets how dark nights can be since we are seldom far away from some form of lighting; in Dowayoland they were pitch black and everyone carried a torch as an absolute necessity. Dowayos refuse to go beyond the boundary fence at night; darkness terrifies them. People huddle together in the smoky glow of campfires until the light returns. Outside are wild beasts, sorcery, the giant "Pimento-head" who rains blows on unwary travellers and strikes them dumb.

They were truly amazed that I would roam the bush in the dark, regarding it as an act of foolhardy bravery. That I would do so alone was the act of a madman. In fact I never felt safer than in the deserted bush at night. The air would cool to the temperature of an English summer's night, generally the rain would ease off though lightning flickered silently over the high mountains. The constellations were new and splendid. Often the moon would rise later and make the scene as light as day. There were no really dangerous large predators in the area; the chief risk was treading on snakes. There was a peace and tranquillity that were far removed from the turmoil of a village and a blessed relief from trying to make sense of the Dowayos, from being stared at and pointed at, shouted at and interrogated. One's essential privacy, the first casualty of African life, was magically restored. I always arrived back from my nocturnal treks refreshed.

Very occasionally I would meet people, often rushing headlong in groups to escape from the terrors of the night, visitors having incautiously tarried in mountain villages, men returning from festivals. Sometimes they simply turned tail and bolted at the mere sight of me. The next day, there would be much amusement as they told their tale of meeting Pimento-head but having escaped from his clutches; everyone was careful to avoid the conclusion that the considerable increase in the frequency of Pimento-head sightings was largely due to my efforts. They considered that the fear of the giant was a healthy preventative of "wandering about" in women. "Wandering about" implied adulterous liaisons. There were even herbal charms that turned into Pimento-head that the men placed at the crossroads for this purpose. It did no harm to give the women a fright.

Dowayos are sexually active from a relatively early age. Since Dowayos do not know how old they are one has to estimate such things, but they seem to begin their explorations about the age of eight. Sexual activity is not discouraged. A boy will be allowed to spend the night with a girl of his choice in her hut, though the mother will be expected to keep an eye on things and wanton promiscuity is not approved. Sexual relations take a turn for the worse at puberty. Premarital pregnancy carries no stigma, indeed it is taken as a welcome sign that a girl is fertile, but menstruation carries the risk of imbecility if a male comes into contact with it. A further complication is circumcision. This can happen at any age from ten to about twenty, all local boys being cut at the same time. A man may marry before he is circumcised and even have children; it is not unknown for a father to be circumcised alongside his son, though this is rare. But uncircumcised males carry a taint of femininity. They are accused of emitting the stench of women, the result of their dirty foreskins; they cannot participate in all male events; they are buried with women. Worst of all they cannot swear on their knives. The strongest oath in Dowayoland is "Dang mi gere", "behold my knife". The reference is to the knife of circumcision, a powerful object that has the power to slay witches and would certainly kill a woman. If a man uses this oath to a woman, he is very angry and she is risking a beating. Uncircumcised males who use it are mocked mercilessly and beaten if they persist; it was considered hilarious whenever I did it.

Gradually, as I pieced together the relations between rainchiefs, ordinary Dowayos and blacksmiths, I also formed a picture of the relations between men and women. For the physical details I relied on what close contacts, my assistant, men from the village, could be lured into revealing at the swimming place. This was lavishly supplemented by Augustin's own considerable fieldwork among pagan women. Once I had suggested one or two themes to bear in mind, he proved a rich source of information on sexual mores. He was able to confirm the odd mixture of wantonness and prudery in sexual matters exhibited by Dowayos.

The Dowayo form of circumcision is very severe, the entire penis being peeled for its whole length. Nowadays some boys undergo the operation at the hospital but this is considered scandalous by conservative Dowayos on the grounds that not enough is removed and the boy is not isolated completely from women for up to nine months. The operation converts the imperfect being of natural birth, via a process of death and rebirth, into a wholly male person. It was made clear to me, on payment of six bottles of beer to the circumciser, that I was "honorary circumcised". I considered it a cheap price for exemption.

Women are not supposed to know about circumcision. They are told that it involves an operation to seal the anus with a piece of cattle-hide. This necessitates all manner of fictions. In the dry season all vegetation shrivels up in the arid heat and there is very little cover. Dowayoland is full of males walking around staring airily into space, desperately containing themselves until the coast is clear so that they can dive behind a rock to relieve themselves. In fact, women know full well what goes on, but must not publicly admit so. I considered it one of the marks of my anomalous status as a largely asexual being that women would admit this to me. It was a long time before anyone bothered to tell me about this division of knowledge. I had merely assumed that women knew about circumcision but that it was shocking to talk about it before them.

It has been pointed out that women are strangely absent from anthropologists" descriptions. They are supposed to be difficult, ill-informed sources of knowledge. In my own case, I found them extremely helpful -- after an unfortunate start.

There are all sorts of subjects relating to "men's secrets" that must not be mentioned before women -- ceremonies, songs, objects. In practice, it usually turned out that women knew a lot about what happened but had often not perceived the full picture. While they knew that the penis was involved in circumcision, they did not know that the whole ritual that boys go through during this operation is virtually identical with that undergone by the widows of the dead at the festivals held some years after the deaths of rich men. Thus it was unlikely that they knew that the whole skull festival was modelled on the boys' ritual at circumcision. The complete model of the culture was available to men only, as I discovered later.

As usual the problem was one of language. I wanted to talk to an old woman about changes in Dowayo behaviour over the years, and thought it wise to ask her husband for permission beforehand. "But what do you want to talk to her about?" he asked. "I want to find out about marriage," I said. "I want to talk about customs, about adultery, about…" There was a gasp of horror and disbelief from both husband and assistant. I swiftly ran a mental check on the tones I had used but could find nothing wrong. I went into a huddle with Matthieu. The problem lay in a Dowayo idiom. In Dowayo, one does not "perform" a custom, one "speaks" it. Likewise, one does not "commit" adultery, one "speaks" it. I had therefore announced my intention of performing rituals with the man's wife and committing adultery with her.

Once that misunderstanding had been cleared up, I found her a most useful informant. Whereas men regarded themselves as the repositories of the ultimate secrets of the universe and had to be cajoled into sharing them with me, women knew that any information available to them was unimportant and could quite happily be repeated to an outsider. They often opened up new fields of inquiry for me by alluding in passing to some belief or ceremony I had never heard of, that the men would have been reluctant to mention.

Male and female lives remain largely separate. A man may have a large number of wives but he spends his time with his male friends and she spends her time with co-wives or female neighbours. The pattern is broadly similar to that in the North of England. A woman prepares food for her husband and children but he eats separately from her, possibly with an elder son. They cultivate separately. She grows her food, he his, although he may help with certain of the harder parts of the agricultural cycle. They meet for sexual purposes in his hut in accordance with a rota worked out in advance between the wives. There is little familiarity or affection by Western standards. Dowayos told me with wonder about an American missionary in Dowayoland whose wife would run from the house to greet him when he returned from a trip. They cackled with amazed amusement at Dowayos having to ask the missionary's wife for lifts instead of the husband, and at the way he never seemed to beat her.

It should not be assumed from this that Dowayo wives are poor, browbeaten shrinking violets. They give as good as they get, and stick up for themselves with a will. Their ultimate sanction is simply to walk out and return to their parents' village. The husband knows that in these circumstances he will have great difficulty in gaining the return of the cattle he has paid for the woman. He may well end up with neither woman nor cattle. For this reason, he will delay the actual transfer of cattle as long as possible. Wives desert their husbands not infrequently and the system of cattle transfer in Dowayoland is every bit as much subject to delay as the most efficient Cameroonian bank. The frequency of marital breakdown and the failure of many husbands to ever finish payments for wives can enrage the ethnographic inquirer as he finds the same woman being entered two or three times in his calculations. Thus a woman may leave her husband for another and each man will placidly inform the anthropologist that she is his wife. The first husband is quite willing to say how much he paid for the woman but omits to mention that the cattle of brideprice were never delivered. The second husband indicates the price he paid for the woman but forgets to say that he paid this to her wronged first husband, not to her parents. By now, the first husband may well have used the cattle to repay other debts in women -- long overdue. The parents of the erring wife now go to the second husband to try to make him pay up the cattle that the first never delivered, threatening to take the woman away. He ripostes by mentioning an unliquidated debt three generations back where one of his female relatives was not paid for. A hopelessly convoluted lawsuit ensues.

Dowayos never justify their choice of a wife in terms of beauty, but rather with references to her being obedient and good-natured. A woman must never see a penis after circumcision or she would become ill. A man should never see a vagina or he would lose all sexual desire. Hence the sexual act is a rather furtive affair conducted in total darkness, with neither party naked. The woman does not remove the bunch of leaves she wears fore and aft. In former times, men wore a loin-cloth that would be unfastened to allow removal of the gourd penis-sheath that was required for the circumcised. Nowadays shorts are the fashion and only old men or those engaged in ritual activity wear sheaths. As a joke, women make with their cheeks the plopping sound of a male privy member being removed from a sheath; this sound also serves as a coy euphemism for the sexual act itself. Women always expect to receive reward for sexual services even within marriage, a fact that has led to uncharitable comparisons between their conception of marriage and prostitution by mission preachers; there is always a strong sense of keeping of accounts even between husband and wife. Such information was built up piecemeal; my research into the festivals that stand apart from everyday life was quite different.

At death a Dowayo body is wrapped in burial cloth made from local cotton and the skins of cattle that are slaughtered for the occasion. It is buried in a crouching position. Some two weeks later, the head is removed via a weak spot left in the wrapping for this purpose. It is examined for witchcraft and placed in a pot in a tree. Thereafter male and female (or uncircumcised) skulls are treated differently. Male skulls are placed out in the bush behind the hut where the skulls find their final rest. Female skulls are placed behind a hut in the village where the woman was born: on marriage a woman moves to her husband's village; at death she moves back.

By sheer good fortune I had appeared in Dowayoland in a year following a good millet harvest (Dowayo years run from one millet harvest in early November to the next); many had taken advantage of this abundance to organize skull festivals for their dead.

After several years the spirits of the dead may begin to plague their living kinsmen, visiting them in dreams, causing illness, disdaining to enter the wombs of women so that children can be born and the spirit reincarnated. This is the sign that it is high time to organize a skull festival. Normally, a rich man will begin by soliciting the support of his kinsmen and offering them beer. If two beer parties pass without dissent, the affair is arranged. Dowayos become very fractious when in drink and it is unusual for a really drunken occasion to pass without dispute, requiring positive effort on the part of all present. The fact that two parties are not marred by fighting can be held to indicate a singular sense of common purpose.

The timing of events in Dowayoland is a nightmare to anyone seeking to plan more than ten minutes in the future. Time is measured in months, weeks and days. The older Dowayos have only the vaguest notion of what makes up a week; it seems that the notion is to be viewed as a cultural borrowing like names for the months. Old people reckon in days from the present; there is complicated terminology for points in the past and future such as "the day before the day before yesterday". With such a system, it is virtually impossible to fix precisely a day when something is going to happen. Added to this is the fact that Dowayos are firmly independent and resent bitterly anyone trying to organize them. They do things in their own good time. This took me a long while to get used to; I hated wasting time, resented losing it and expected return for spending it. I felt that I must hold the world record for hearing "It is not the right time for that", whenever I sought to pin down Dowayos to show me a particular thing at a particular time. Arrangements to meet at a fixed time or place never worked. People were astonished that I should be offended when they turned up a day or even a week late, or when I walked ten miles to find they were not at home. Time was simply not something that could be allocated. Other more material things fell into the same category. Tobacco, for example, admitted no firm drawing of lines between mine and thine. I was initially disconcerted by my assistant helping himself to my tobacco stock without so much as a by-your-leave, though he would never dream of touching my water. Tobacco, like time, is an area where the degree of flexibility permitted by the culture is grossly at variance with our own. It is not permissible to retain possession of tobacco; friends have the right to go through your pockets and take it. Whenever I paid informants with a bag of tobacco, they would swiftly hide it about their person with blatant disregard for the rules of modesty and scuttle off home desperately worried lest they encounter anyone en route to their hiding place.

I had heard through Zuuldibo that such a festival was to be held in a village some fifteen miles away and conducted a preliminary foray to establish the truth of it.

This outing was my first visit to the valley known as the Valley of Borassa Palms on account of the numerous examples of this species that flourish only here. On old maps the road is still shown as running through the valley, but it has now fallen into considerable disrepair. Nevertheless, by careful driving it was possible to penetrate several kilometres into the brooding valley with its great vista of the mountains that mark the border with Nigeria. The villages here were much closer to the traditional mountain Dowayo type than in my own area. It was also impossible to understand a word anyone said, the tones being somewhat different, having been exaggerated into huge swoops and leaps. After a couple of hours on the road with Matthieu and Zuuldibo sailing on ahead, we arrived at the compound of the Chief of the area. The huts were so close together, for defensive purposes, that one had to get down on hands and knees to wriggle between them. The entrance huts were so low that we all had to get on our bellies and crawl to get in at all. In Kongle, the average height for a man is about five feet six or less. Here, there were husky six-footers, who must have found these arrangements a considerable inconvenience.

We were received with great ceremony by the Chief, an astonishing old pirate with one eye and decorative scars cut deep all over his face. There was beer about and Zuuldibo began attacking it with a vengeance. I began to fear that we would spend all day here. It was confirmed that the skull festival would occur; the exact date remained a little hazy. It was not until we were doing the "day after the day after…" business that I realized the Chief was drunk. Zuuldibo was making great strides to catch him up. He spoke Dowayo, the other Fulani. One of his sons joined us and spoke French. After some time it became clear that he had no idea who I was, having taken me for the Dutch linguist some thirty years my senior who had lived in his village for years and only recently left. It seems all white men looked the same to him. He would be delighted to have me attend whenever the ceremony happened. He would send me word. I knew from experience that he would not, but thanked him heartily and managed to lure Zuuldibo away by making my water bottle available to carry enough beer to see him through the journey.

It was by now late afternoon on a very hot day and the skin was coming off my face in handfuls. Dowayos observed this closely, doubtless hoping that my true black nature would soon start showing through. Even aged Dowayos trip along at about twice the European walking speed, leaping from rock to rock like goats and I began to regret the lack of water. My entourage bore with me kindly, being amazed that any white man should be able to walk at all. They all had inflated notions of our helplessness, susceptibility to illness or discomfort which were explained by the fact that we had "supple skin". It is a fact that the skin on the feet and elbows of Africans is inch-thick, horny hide that enables them to walk over sharp rocks or even glass, barefoot, without risk. Finally we reached the car and set off, giving a lift to a passing woman. Scarce had we travelled a mile before she vomited, in typical fashion, all over me. While I was in Dowayoland, many people and dogs availed themselves of the opportunity to vomit over me. In the wet season there was no problem; you pulled up at a river and jumped in fully clothed, to wash it off.

Back at the village, I was pleasantly surprised at my assistant's native wit. Seeing the way things were going in the drunken Chief's compound, he had slipped away and sought out a young lady of his acquaintance, who would be engaged in preparing the beer for the festival. From its state of fermentation, he inferred that it would be ready in two days and sour in four. This fixed the date. This initiative coinciding with pay day, we were both somewhat surprised when I gave him a small bonus. The incident marked a turning point in our relations and he became suddenly assiduous in ferreting out information and festivals. As he left, he pointed out that the trip had been unnecessary, since one would be able to tell by the number of people passing through the village when the ceremony would be held. Moreover, there was no need to ask permission to attend. Festivals were public affairs; the greater the number of outsiders, the greater the success.

The day of the festival dawned bright and sunny. I woke to the normal sounds of Dowayos standing outside my hut saying to Matthieu, "Is he still in bed?" "Hasn't he got up yet?" It was a quarter to six. This was the first opportunity to test my equipment -- cameras and tape-recorder -- in the field. I had shown Matthieu how to operate the recorder and we had agreed that he would be in charge of that while I concentrated on photographs and notes. This pleased him greatly and he strutted around pushing people out of his way and making sure that everyone was aware of his onerous responsibilities. One of the bridges had washed away in the interim and another five kilometres were added to the journey on foot. Particularly unpleasant was the crossing of a raging torrent, slipping on the wet rocks and trying to hold equipment over our heads. Matthieu, being a plains Dowayo, fared about as badly as I did, while our escort, a montagnard of about fifty, shepherded us carefully across, clinging to the rocks with his bare feet.

Bands of people were teeming over the bush on small paths, all converging on the festival. The women had relinquished their customary leaves for strips of cloth, a sure sign that this was a public occasion. By law, Dowayos have to wear clothes and it is forbidden to take photographs of bare female breasts. If strictly observed, this would make photography impossible and so, like most others, I disregarded this regulation, uncomfortably aware that it might cause trouble if the gendarmes had turned up. When we reached the village we were overwhelmed by the number of strangers to be greeted. A swarm of grinning children followed us, giggling and wrestling in the mud, doddering old men shook hands with us, obliging youths offered to let me listen to their radios so I would not be deprived of constant Nigerian music. Patiently, I tried to explain that what I really wanted was Dowayo music. The old men were pleased, the younger baffled.

An enormous crowd had gathered in the cattle park, ankle deep in mud. Zuuldibo was already installed on a grass mat, resplendent in sunglasses and a sword. We drank beer and he tried to explain what was going on.

Dowayo explanations always ended up in a circle I came to know well. "Why do you do this?" I would ask.

"Because it is good."

"Why is it good?"

There were always numerous problems with Dowayo "explanations". Firstly, they missed out the essential piece of information that made things comprehensible. No one told me that this village was where the Master of the Earth, the man who controlled the fertility of all plants, lived, and that consequently various parts of the ceremony would be different from elsewhere. This is fair enough; some things are too obvious to mention. If we were explaining to a Dowayo how to drive a car, we should tell him all sorts of things about gears and road signs before mentioning that one tried not to hit other cars.

(Slyly) "Why did the ancestors tell you to?"

"Because it is good."

I could never find a way round "the ancestors" with whom all explanation began and ended.

"Because the ancestors told us to."

Dowayos baffled me at first by the way in which they used their categories prescriptively. "Who organized this festival?" I would ask.

"I can't see anyone with porcupine quills in his hair."

"No, he's not wearing them."

"The man with the porcupine quills in his hair."

Things were always described as they should be, not as they were.

It was also important to realize that the same person might be active at a festival in several different capacities. At this particular event one of the clowns, who alone may handle the skulls, was also younger brother of the dead man for whom the whole thing had been organized. He would therefore alternate between being a clown and being an organizer and it was far from clear to an outsider where one began and the other ended. He was also doing many of the jobs normally performed by a skull-house sorcerer on the grounds of the extraordinary infirmity of the latter. So he was one man but occupied three separate positions in the cultural system.

Then, again, Dowayos are addicted to joking. I always made a point of noting what special leaves various participants were wearing at festivals since it seemed reasonable that their special costumes might be important. I was constantly deceived by "jokers", males circumcised at the same time as a man or females who began to menstruate at the same time as a woman. They would turn up in a bizarre collection of weird leaves and disrupt matters generally. It was important to identify them at the start lest their particular absurdities be considered part of the standard practice they were subverting.

That first day, apart from the clowns, there was much to see. The clowns were extravagant, their faces painted half white, half black. They wore rubbish or old rags and spoke in a high-pitched scream partly in Fulani, partly in Dowayo, shouting out obscenities and nonsense. "The cunt of the beer!" they screamed. The crowd roared with pleasure. They exposed themselves, produced ear-shattering farts by what mechanism I know not. They attempted to copulate with each other. They were delighted with me. They "took photographs" through a broken bowl, "wrote notes" on banana leaves. I managed to give as good as I got; when they asked for money, I solemnly handed them a bottle-top.

All this, naturally, was way above any level of analysis of which I was capable at that time. I merely sat on a wet rock, watched, asked idiot questions and took photographs of the parts that seemed interesting.

Just outside the village were the skulls of the dead, male and female segregated. Goats, cattle and sheep had been slain in large numbers and their excrement flung on the skulls. The organizers lopped the heads off chickens and spattered their blood on the deceased. The clowns immediately began to fight for possession of the carcasses, stamping around in the mess of mud, blood and excrement. The heat was intense, the crowd enormous. It was considered amusing by the clowns to seek to splash those present with as much blood and filth as possible. The stench was terrible, and several Dowayos began to vomit, thereby adding to the miasma. I removed myself out of range. A torrential downpour began, and Zuuldibo and I huddled miserably under a tree, holding palm-leaves over our heads.

There was a murmuring in the crowd and it became clear that a little old man was the centre of interest. He was small and wiry, mouth set in a firm rictus, the result, as I later discovered, of a second-hand set of false teeth. To see him remove these was apparently one of the wonders of Dowayoland. He sat bolt upright under a red umbrella, looking to the right and the left with an expression of benign omniscience. No one would tell me who he was. "An old man known for his goodness," Zuuldibo explained. "I don't know," said Matthieu, looking furtive. The old man was brought a large jar of beer which he tasted and then disappeared into the bush. There was tension in the air. No one spoke. After some ten minutes the old man reappeared. The rain began to ease off. A general sigh of relief was obvious even to me. I had no idea what was afoot but knew better than to press for an explanation; perhaps Zuuldibo would be more forthcoming in private.

There now followed one of those considerable longueurs that characterized all organized Dowayo activity. I found myself able to drop into "fieldwork gear", a state almost of suspended animation where one is able to wait for hours without impatience, frustration or expectation of anything better. After a long time it became clear that nothing further could happen today. Some relatives, it seemed, had misunderstood the date of the festival and not turned up. Perhaps they would come tomorrow. There began a fervent arranging of accommodation. Matthieu went away to arrange my own lodging. Zuuldibo announced he would sleep under a tree as long as there was beer.

A short trek through the bush, across two rivers and through stinging reeds, brought me to my own rest in the hut of an ingratiating man, who expelled his son so that he himself would have a roof for the night. Upon my inquiry, the man gave me to understand that his son would receive the sexual favours of a Dowayo maid that night and so not be the worse for it.

Away in the main village, there was drumming and singing and the rhythmic rise and fall lulled me to sleep, curled up under my own wet clothes. A scratching at the door roused me; I had momentary fears of another Coo-ee lady, but it was only Matthieu bringing me hot water in a seething calabash. "It's boiled for five minute, patron, safe to drink." I had concealed a mixture of instant milk and coffee about my person, with copious sugar for any Dowayo who might want it. We split the coffee between us, Matthieu adding six spoons of sugar to his own. Rousing myself to a sense of duty, I asked about various of the articles in the roof and received enlightenment. "The old man, today, is the Old Man of Kpan, head of all the rainmakers. Zuuldibo will introduce you tomorrow." He left and I heard a Dowayo say loudly, "Is your patron asleep already?"

The hut was the most squalid I'd yet seen. A box in the corner contained a selection of rotting chicken carcasses, an indication presumably that the man had offered their blood to the ancestors that day. In the roof beams were various artefacts for use at later stages of the festival: the flutes played when a man has been slain, the horse tails and burial cloth that are used to ornament the skulls before a man dances with them. The floor was covered with filth. The bed, when I settled into it, proved to contain several half-gnawed hunks of meat and bones, remnants of sacrificed cattle.

The first man I saw the next day was Augustin, out for a break from the rigours of Poli. Like all good urban Africans, he would never entertain the thought of walking anywhere. He had managed to bring his motorbike all the way, had arrived late and spent the night with yet another obliging Dowayo woman who turned out to be a wayward wife of the Old Man of Kpan. It appeared that this was her native village and she had returned for the festival. Her brother had shown Augustin the door in no uncertain terms with dire threats that if the rainchief found out about this they would all be struck by lightning. My mental dossier on him, opened only the day before, was filling up fast.

The events of the day drove him from my mind. A Dowayo skull festival is a bit like a Russian circus, with four different things happening at once. After a final bout of excrement-throwing, the clowns began to clean the skulls. Meanwhile, girls originating from the village had been returned by their husbands and decorated as Fulani warriors. They danced on a hill, waving spears to the accompaniment of "talking" flutes that speak by imitating the tones of the language. This is yet another aspect of the Dowayo tongue I never mastered. The flutes encouraged them to display the wealth of their husbands, who harried them mercilessly to put on a good show, tricking them out in sunglasses, borrowed watches, radios and other consumer goods, in addition to their robes. Some men pinned money to their heads.

In the distance, yet another group appeared carrying a strange bundle and waving knives. Later, I found out that these were the circumcised carrying the bow of the man whose festival this was and singing circumcision songs. Suddenly, a group of boys rushed out screaming at them. I thought I was witnessing a genuine spontaneous brawl but from the enjoyment of spectators it became clear that this was a standard element. "The uncircumcised," explained a helpful man beside me. "Always, thus." I could not resist asking why. He stared at me as if I was a fool. "The ancestors told us to." He moved away.

In another part of the village were the widows of the men whose festival this was. They were decked in long leaf skirts with conical hats of the same vegetation on their heads, dancing in long lines like chorus girls. At the time I could only record as much information as possible, leaving any attempt at intelligent analysis to another time. Matthieu flitted from one group to another, recording as much of the material as he could, shoving his way to the front of every crowd in a way that I could never have done.

Something was going on at the skulls and I dashed back, while Matthieu kept his eye on the battle between the two groups. The skulls of the men were being wrapped, with the argument that inevitably accompanied co-operative endeavour in Dowayoland, in what even I could recognize as the dress of a circumcision candidate. The skulls of women were ignominiously dumped on one side and forgotten. All women and children were chased away. The skulls of the men were jostled and the flutes I had seen in my roof were blown. "They are threatening the dead with circumcision," Zuuldibo explained enigmatically. A man hefted them on his head and a strange, haunting melody was struck up with odd, booming gongs, drums and deep flutes. Long trains of burial cloth were strung out from the bundle and supported by swaying men, so that it resembled nothing so much as a great spider. Others put on the bloody skins of the cattle slaughtered for the occasion, the heads resting against their own, a strip of raw flesh gripped in their teeth, and circled the skulls with an odd stamping motion, bowing and swerving. All was stink, noise and motion. At the entrance to the village, the widows danced and beckoned in the dead who moved slowly round the central tree before being placed where the skulls of slaughtered cattle are exhibited over a gateway. A man leapt up beside them, the organizer of the festival, and shouted: "It is thanks to me that these men were circumcised. If it were not for the white man, I would have killed a man."

The occasion now degenerated into a mere beer-drinking and general dance and we decided to head back to Kongle. On the way, Zuuldibo made a detour and led us out to an isolated compound on the slopes of the mountains. Inside sat the Old Man of Kpan. We went through elaborate greetings. I was clutched to his heart and he went into an ecstasy of sighing, moaning and clucking like a maiden aunt over a favourite nephew. More warm beer was prepared and we sat around in the gathering gloom talking, the Old Man occasionally breaking off in mid-phrase to gasp out his delight at my presence. He understood that I was interested in the customs of the Dowayos. He had lived a long time and seen much. He would help me. I should come to his house in a short while. He would send for me. This was his busy season -- he looked knowing; I tried to look knowing back. I would be the second white man to visit his valley. "Was the first French or German?" I asked, trying to fix the period. "No, no, a white man like yourself." I handed round some cola nuts I had with me and we took our leave, picking our way through the granite boulders and waterlogged paths down to the main track. Thick mist was beginning to build up in the valley bottoms and the night was going to be very cold indeed. We were all shivering by the time we reached the car, and looking forward to fleeing to the comforts of Kongle. Weather is essentially local in West Africa; rainfall in one spot may be twice as hard a few miles away. Kongle was always ten degrees warmer than this end of Dowayoland at night; round the other side of the mountain was hotter still.

At the time, of course, I took this to be an allusion to myself, imagining that all manner of obscene happenings had been suppressed on my account alone. My first reaction was one of disappointment. "Don't mind me," I would have shouted, "that's what I came for!" Subsequent inquiry revealed that in the old days a man had indeed been slain for such festivals and his skull pounded to pieces with a rock, but that the central government -- French, German and Cameroonian -- had put a stop to this.

As soon as the car came in sight, it was clear that something was very wrong. It appeared to be at a strange angle. In the whole time I was in Dowayoland the only time anyone ever stole from me was at the mission, and so I had acquired the habit of leaving everything unlocked when away from civilizing influences. Perhaps someone had released the brake and moved it?

A moment's inspection revealed all. I had parked on the edge of a ravine, the road in front leading down to the washed-out bridge. The torrential downpour of the previous day had softened the edge sufficiently for the weight of the car to cause it to crumble. It was now perched with the wheels of one side over a sixty-foot drop, so perfectly balanced that it swayed slightly to the touch. It was a situation where brute physical force was required, and everyone was still at the festival. There was nothing else for it. Clutching notebooks, camera and recorder, we all turned around and trudged dispiritedly back. It was a miserable end to a good day. Zuuldibo further depressed us by insisting on making statements such as "It is man's place to suffer." These had clearly been acquired from local Muslims as one of the comforts of their religion. He had a seemingly inexhaustible stock of such platitudes. "Man proposes, God disposes," he intoned as we wallowed in the icy river. "No man may know the future," he declaimed, crawling on all fours up to the village.

We then searched for the local chief. If there is one thing less profitable than trying to fix the time of a meeting with Dowayos, it is trying to find a person or place. The Chief was variously reported, with complete confidence, to be in his hut, in Poli, ill, drunk -- everything but dead and in France. I never established to my satisfaction whether this reflected a basic epistemological difference between us -- unlike notions of "knowledge", "truth", "evidence" -- or whether they were simply telling lies. Were they telling me what they thought I would wish to hear? Did they hold that firmly believed error was better than doubt? Was it simply a cultural rule that you tried to confuse outsiders as much as possible? I inclined towards the last view.

Finally he was located and went into loud lamentations over our misfortune. Nothing could be done at night, he explained, because of the dangers of the dark, but tomorrow morning he himself would organize the affair. "It is a man's place to suffer," I said. Zuuldibo giggled.

Matthieu and I shared a hut in the middle of a banana plantation, feeding off the produce, in the bitter cold. The hut was provided with the remains of a fire and a sleeping dog who ignored us. I realize now that it must have been someone's cooking hut, but why it was out there in isolation remains a mystery. Moreover, no sane Dowayo would ever allow a dog to lie inside a hut by the fire. Matthieu, indeed, reacted in true Dowayo fashion and began looking for a log to beat the dog on the head. When he found one I pre-empted him by putting it on the fire. We spent the night lying on the beaten dirt floor in our wet clothes. I had the better of it since the dog adopted my feet as its resting place, but it will not be remembered as my most cheery night in Dowayoland. The cold was intense, Matthieu snored, the dog had a cough. I tried to calculate the odds of the car I had not yet paid for toppling over the cliff, comforting myself with thoughts of all the good material I had collected that day, even if I did have no idea what it was all about. Shortly before dawn I fell asleep, head on my camera case, notebooks under my hand -- rather like a medieval apprentice sleeping with the tools of his trade.

Matthieu roused me at first light. The phlegmatic dog slept on. After a relatively short spell of dithering, we set off with four stalwart men towards the car. A Peugeot 404 is a very heavy car and I could not really see that four men would do much good; I had been thinking more in terms of twelve. From student debauches, I seemed to recall that it took four to move a Mini. Zuuldibo entertained us with a tale of a man suffering from diarrhoea with whom he had shared that night. Dowayo has all manner of extraordinary sounds to describe motion or smell. Zuuldibo rang the changes on all of them, so that everyone was in high spirits by the time we reached the car. Without waiting for instructions the men crawled round to the side over the ravine and, clinging with bare toes to a ledge, simply lifted the car with insulting ease and pushed it back on firm ground. Their obvious lack of effort suggested that two might have done it. Zuuldibo was ecstatic, clapping his hands and slapping his thighs. He let off another stream of tongue-trills, clicks and nasalizations to celebrate. I was embarrassed, realizing that I ought to be handing out change as a token of thanks. Alas, I had none on me and so passed out a few paltry cigarettes. The men were visibly crestfallen but made no complaint. After this I always made sure that I went on location with water, a tin of meat, small change and anti-malarial pills for a week; I had taken none for two days and began to fear the worst. I could already feel a fever developing and was anxious to get back to my kit with all speed.

A day's rest re-established our morale. The only lasting damage seemed to be my feet. Strange blotches of blood had appeared around the nails of my big toes accompanied by intense itching. I had jiggers. These are unpleasant burrowing parasites that lay eggs in the living flesh until the whole foot is rotten with them. Old Africa hands will tell you to place yourself firmly in the care of the locals who have ways of digging them out with a safety-pin without bursting the egg-sacs. Alas, Dowayos have no safety-pins and lack experience with these creatures. Having to fall back on my own resources I dug them out with a penknife, taking liberal quantities of flesh with them, to avoid eggs, and washed the wounds with alcohol and antibiotic. This drastic but necessary proceeding somewhat reduced my mobility for a while, but that was relatively unimportant. At last I had material to work on and began by elucidating the notes I had made at the festival. Each page of notes would keep me occupied for several days, checking what it was that I had seen, how it compared with the festival in my own village, what other cultural knowledge it implied. For example, the man who carried the skulls at the dance was not just anyone, he had to be in a duuse relationship with the dead man. To understand what this word implied, I had to sort out all the kinship terms. Trying to do this even roughly with French equivalents is quite impossible, but the mistakes Dowayos make when speaking French are very helpful. For example, they cannot distinguish between nephew and uncle, or between grandfather and grandson. This suggested that the same terms would be used for them in Dowayo, and indeed this proved to be the case. The terminology is strongly reciprocal. If I call a man by one term, he calls me by the same term. But it took me a long time to work it all out. In the end, I collected together my last three bottles of beer -- since Poli had run out, the last beer for two hundred miles -- and borrowed the schoolhouse with its blackboard. The men lounging at the crossroads were only too glad to come and talk to this benevolent madman in return for the beer. They rapidly picked up the principles of kinship charts and we had a most informative session. Much has been written about primitive peoples" ability or inability to deal with hypothetical questions. I was never sure whether my difficulties with them were purely linguistic or whether much more was involved. "If you had a sister," I would start, "and she married a man, what would you call…"

"He can live anywhere."

"My son calls him grandfather."

"How do you know he is your duuse?"

"I haven't got a sister."

After a number of frustrated attempts at this, Matthieu intervened. "No, no patron. Like this. A man has a sister. Another man takes her. She is his wife. The man calls her husband, how?" He would get an answer. I adopted this style and had no more trouble -- until we got to the term duuse. "Who is your duuse?" I tried.

In Dowayoland all old men are called grandfather by young men. The usage meant nothing but an age difference. I had spent most of an afternoon sorting that one out the previous day. I tried another line. "Is your duuse one of your own family or a relative through marriage?" "Own family," said one. Through marriage," said another. "He is like a grandfather."

"No, but if you had a sister…"

"What does your son call him?"

Pause. "He will call him grandfather."

"Where does he live?"

"As children we are told. We joke with him."

"If he is your duuse, what does your father call him?"

"Do you call him grandfather?"

"But I haven't got a sister. I have four brothers."

Light began to dawn.

"We joke with him."

"Yes."

I tried another tack. "How many duuse do you have?"

It occurred to me that the word might refer to other aspects of the world than biological kinship, that it might be a term of an entirely different type. I tried everything, residence, skull-house affiliation, exchange relationships, and still did not feel I knew what the term meant. I adopted another ploy of getting people to introduce me to their duuse and we would sit down and painfully trace the relation between them. Finally, I built up a picture of what it was. A duuse was someone to whom I was linked by a common relative of great-grandfather generation or beyond with at least one female linkage in between. In other words, it was someone such as my mother's grandfather, for whom no other term existed, who belonged to a different skull-house than myself and was on the very fringes where it was impossible to trace clear kinship links. This explained why, even when I got two duuse together, they would often give me different accounts of the links between them. A man, then, would have a great number of potential duuse out of which he would select a small group with whom to joke and engage in ritual activity.

"I cannot know."

Similar problems arose over the most trivial things: the feathers a man wore on different occasions, the leaves used for special rituals, the animals that might or might not be killed. All of these were potentially important for understanding what sort of a cultural world the Dowayos lived in. For example, the leopard occupies a place of great significance in their world, although there have been no leopards in Dowayoland for thirty years. Leopards are slayers of men and cattle and are equated with this aspect of Man. Circumcisers, as shedders of human blood, are required to grunt like leopards hunting, while the boys they cut dress as young leopards. If one kills a leopard, one is required to undergo the same ritual as one who has killed a man. Man-killers are referred to as "leopards" and allowed to wear leopard-claws on their hats. When talking about their burial rites, the Dowayos made great play with the fact that the leopard, like themselves, puts the skulls of the dead in trees, a reference to its habit of dragging its prey into a tree to eat it. Powerful and dangerous men such as the rainmakers are believed to be able to turn into leopards. All these diverse attitudes come together and "make sense" if one looks at them as a way of thinking about the wild and violent part of man's nature.

But even such a simple and -- to an anthropologist -- obvious area of research took weeks of sustained effort to sort out. People were reluctant to talk about rainchiefs and leopards. I only found out by chatting to a boy I bumped into while walking into town on one of my Friday mail runs. Rain trapped us under a tree and the conversation turned quite naturally to rainmakers. He pointed out to me a mountain with a permanent cloud over it. "That's where one of them lives," he said. "Domboulko. Even in the dry season there's always water there. But the best is my father at Kpan. When he dies, I shall buy the secret of rain after he becomes a leopard." I pricked up my ears and began to mine this vein of pure gold as the youth chatted on quite unconcernedly about precisely the things that interested me most. By the time we reached Poli, I knew about the importance of special mountains and caves, the existence of stones to make rain, the power of the rainmaker to kill with lightning (and the fact that he had false teeth). Once I knew about these things, it was no problem to check on them with people from my village. But that piece of the picture concerning leopards and rainchiefs had only come my way through sheer luck. If I had not been on that particular road at that particular time I might never have heard it, or only much later.

As it was, even with the most striking animals such as leopards, I had problems with informants. Popularly, Africans are supposed to be seamed with native wisdom and the folklore of plants and creatures. They are expert in identifying them from spore, scent, marks on trees. They engage in meticulous analysis of which plant a certain leaf, fruit or bark belongs to. It is their singular misfortune to be constantly interpreted by Westerners who have various axes to grind. In the days of the bland assumption of Western cultural superiority, it was intuitively obvious to all that Africans were wrong about most things and simply not too bright. It was therefore not surprising that their minds never rose higher than their bellies. The anthropologist was inevitably cast in the role of the refuter of this view of primitive man, seeking to show that there was a sense or logic in his ways and possibly a wisdom in his mind that escaped the Western observer. In these days of the New Romanticism, the ethical anthropologist is surprised to find himself suddenly on the other wing. Primitive man is used by Westerners nowadays as surely as he was by Rousseau or Montaigne to prove a point about their own society and castigate those aspects of it they find unattractive. Contemporary "thinkers" pay as little heed to fact or balanced judgement as their forebears. An example that particularly struck me even before Dowayoland was at an exhibition of Red Indian artefacts. A wooden canoe was displayed. "Wooden canoes," we were informed, "operate in harmony with the environment and are non-polluting." Beside it was a picture of its process of construction with Indians burning down large tracts of forest to obtain the correct timber and discarding most of the wood to rot. The "Noble Savage" has risen from the grave, and is alive and well and living in N. W.1 as well as some anthropology departments.

The basic truth about Dowayos is that they knew less about the animals of the African bush than I did. As trackers they could tell motorbike tracks from human footprints but that was about the pinnacle of their achievement. They believed, like most Africans, that chameleons were poisonous. They assured me that cobras were harmless. They did not know that caterpillars turn into butterflies. They could not tell one bird from another or be relied upon to identify trees accurately. Many of the plants did not have names though they used them quite often, and reference involved lengthy explanations: "That plant you use to get the bark you make the dye from." Much of the game in Dowayoland has been exhausted by trapping. As far as "living in harmony with nature" is concerned, the Dowayos are non-starters. They reproached me often for not bringing a machine gun from the land of the white men to enable them to finally eradicate the pathetic clusters of antelope that still persist in their country. When Dowayos began cultivating cotton for the government monopoly, amounts of pesticide were made available to them. Dowayos immediately adopted it for fishing purposes. They would fling it into the streams to be able to recover the poisoned fish that floated to the surface. This poison rapidly displaced the tree-bark they had traditionally used to suffocate fish. "It's wonderful," they explained. "You throw it in and it kills everything, small fish, big fish, for miles downstream."

Every year they start vast bushfires, quite deliberately, to speed the growth of new grass. The resulting conflagrations involve vast slaughter of young animals and considerable risk to human life and limb.

All these factors were involved in the simple problem of talking to Dowayos about leopards. The linguistic difficulties alone were considerable. The Dowayos have a perfectly adequate word for leopard, naamyo. For "lion", however, they use the compound "old-female-leopard". For lesser wildcats such as the civet cat or serval, they use the compound "sons-of-leopard". The name for elephant is dangerously close, differing only by tone from "lion". To make matters worse, the first French-speaking Dowayo I asked about the terminology made a genuine mistake and gave me the word naamyo as meaning "lion". The problem of knowing, when I used the compound "old-female-leopard", whether we were talking about lions, aged leopards of the female sex, or both at the same time, became acute. In the end I managed to lay my hands on some postcards depicting African fauna. I had at least a lion and a leopard and showed them to people to see if they could spot the difference. Alas, they could not. The reason lay not in their classifications of animals but rather in the fact that they could not identify photographs. It is a fact that we tend to forget in the West that people have to learn to be able to see photographs. We are exposed to them from birth so that, for us, there is no difficulty in identifying faces or objects from all sorts of angles, in differing light and even with distorting lenses. Dowayos have no such tradition of visual art; theirs is limited to bands of geometric designs. Nowadays, of course, Dowayo children experience images through schoolbooks or identity cards; by law, all Dowayos must carry an identity card with their photograph on it. This was always a mystery to me since many who have identity cards have never been to the city, and there is no photographer in Poli. Inspection of the cards shows that often pictures of one Dowayo served for several different people. Presumably the officials are not much better at recognizing photographs than Dowayos. When I was collecting vocabulary of several obvious areas such as names of the parts of the body, I drew an outline of a man and a woman with somewhat hazy pudenda so that they could point to areas that bore a single name. This drawing was considered a major wonder and for months afterwards men would come to my hut to ask to see it. (They were particularly anxious about whether I had depicted the penis in its full circumcised glory -- in which case they would have asked me not to show it to women.) The point was that men could not tell the difference between the male and the female outlines. I put this down simply to my bad drawing, until I tried using photographs of lions and leopards. Old men would stare at the cards, which were perfectly clear, turn them in all manner of directions, and then say something like "I do not know this man." Children could identify the animals but were totally ignorant of their ritual importance. In the end I made a trip to Garoua. There, in the market, is a stall bearing the splendid title "Syndicate of traditional healers". Here are to be found many weird and wonderful things, parts of plants, leopards' claws, bats' eyes, hyenas' anuses. I bought some leopard's claws, the foot of a civet cat and a lion's tail. With these I was able to establish which animal we were talking about.

This was no isolated phenomenon. The most straightforward questions about birds, monkeys, or whatever were fraught with the most appalling complexities that seemed to bear precious little resemblance to bland statements about The Dowayos believe that…" that one reads in standard monographs. What the Dowayos believed was a matter that it was hard to establish by the obvious means of simply asking them. At every stage all sorts of interpretations were involved if one was to be fair to their thought.

It seemed natural to ask whether this had happened only once or whether this was the origin of all servals and civet cats. Some said one thing, some another. Some maintained that this was the origin of all civet cats but that servals were born only from servals. Others claimed that servals were born thus but civet cats were the offspring of civet cats alone.

That did not end the problem, however. The Dowayos "explained" the relations between these animals with a story: "A leopard took a lion as wife. They lived in a cave in the mountains and had three children. One day the leopard roared. Two children were afraid and ran away. They became the serval and civet cat. The one who stayed became a leopard. It is finished."

So, life continued for a while. My one festival provided fuel for a many a day's research. The fieldworker can never hope to maintain a good rate of work for very long. In my time in Africa, I estimated that I perhaps spent one per cent of my time doing what I had actually gone for. The rest of the time was spent on logistics, being ill, being sociable, arranging things, getting from place to place, and above all, waiting. I had defied the local gods with my intemperate urge to do something. I would soon be cut down to size.