I had been away just over three weeks but was encouraged to note that the millet by the roadside was not yet ready for harvesting.

As I sat enjoying the view and benign warmth after the coolness of N'gaoundere, wafts of drumming blew in from the mountains. Once again, I felt rather like the archetypal white man in one of those sternly wholesome films the British made in the '40s, listening to the natives far out in the hills and wondering whether this signified the massacre we had all feared. In fact I could recognize the sound of the deep death-drum. Someone was being buried, a rich man. With the echoes from the mountains, it was difficult to tell where the sound was coming from. I asked the cook, Ruben, whether he knew. He told me the sound came from Mango; in fact it came from my own village which was where I had placed it. My sense of duty beckoned me forth; hitherto I had not witnessed a major male burial. I bade my friends farewell and headed out to Kongle by the light of a borrowed torch.

Since reading Malinowski's fanatical tirades against anthropology from the mission veranda, such spots have assumed great attractions for me and I always found them pleasant and profitable places from which to contemplate Africa. The main road to town passed just in front, behind lay the mountains lit up by the moon. It was a splendid place for being both nosey and idle.

As I walked into the village I met my assistant who welcomed me warmly and asked for an advance on his wages. The death was indeed that of a rich man in the most distant part of Kongle, a compound where I had good contacts through a man named Mayo. Mayo was an old friend of Zuuldibo's father and was treated by the administration as chief of Kongle in defiance of the wishes of the people and the rules of inheritance. Zuuldibo's father had hit on the notion that if the administration could levy taxation, then so could he. He had raised a special tax for himself and been most aggrieved when told that this was not permitted. There had developed a great feud between the sous-préfet and the people of Kongle, and Mayo, who had always had the more tedious aspects of chiefship foisted on to him, was regarded as the agent of the government. Strangely, Mayo and Zuuldibo remained the best of friends and Mayo was a universally popular figure. I thought him quite the nicest Dowayo I ever met. He was generous, helpful, high-spirited and had put himself out to assist me on numerous occasions. I was pleased to note that Matthieu had just returned from Mayo's village and had made notes on the proceedings.

We set out at dawn the next morning for the 'place of death'. Mayo insisted on bringing out a deckchair, covered, I noted, with burial cloth, and setting it up right beside the body where it considerably impeded the activities of the participants.

The body had already been wrapped once with the skin of a steer slaughtered for this purpose by his brothers. Round and round the village ran women in leaves of mourning, banging empty calabashes together and wailing. To one side of the special enclosure for male dead sat the widows, staring stonily ahead of them. Foolishly, I sought to greet them; they are not allowed to speak or move. The men considered this a great joke and giggled and sniggered as they wrapped the cadaver. Other kinsmen, especially affines, were bringing in material to wrap the body, skins, cloth and bandages. The dead man's son-in-law arrived, bringing his wife. He has to stand her in the cattle-park and fling his offerings at her belly, indicating the link between himself and the family of the dead. Wife-givers to the family of the dead fling their offerings in the faces of his kinsmen. This is normally a gesture of insult and accurately indicates the relations of respect and inferiority a man shows towards his wife's parents and their superiority with regard to him.

'They have gone off to defecate in the bush.'

There was a great deal of joking going on between the men. Later, I was to learn that these were men circumcised at the same time as the deceased. They have a lifelong obligation to insult each other jokingly and make free with each others' property. Suddenly there was a torrential downpour and everyone melted away. 'Where have they gone?'

At the time, I naïvely assumed that this was merely an interval in the ceremony where those who had been occupied here since early morning would break off by common consent and relieve themselves in the bush before continuing. Only later would I find that it was an integral part of the ceremony -- an oblique reference to the reality of circumcision between brothers, an admission that the anus is not sealed. Matthieu, Mayo and I retired to a hut until the rain blew over and Mayo told me of what the men do at the crossroads in the early morning after a death. It was typical of Mayo that he would volunteer information of this kind whereas it had to be dragged out of most men.

Mayo found this whole episode quite hilarious and literally fell about laughing. It was only polite to do likewise but my mind was elsewhere trying to 'make sense' of this information. Dowayo festivals always made me feel punch-drunk, overwhelmed by the suggestiveness yet lack of definition of their symbolism. I felt the whole time that there was a large chunk missing, some major and obvious fact that no one had bothered to tell me so that I was simply holding the whole thing upside down and looking at it all wrong. I already suspected what it was -- circumcision -- but no one was quite ready to talk about that yet. I would have to piece it together very slowly over the next months. In fact, this whole episode is simply an abbreviated version of what happens when a boy is circumcised, and derives its structure from that, as do all festivals in Dowayoland. All life crises, all major calendrical festivals are depicted in terms of circumcision. This is why circumcision dress keeps cropping up in the most unlikely places, the dead woman's water-jar, the wrapping given a corpse.

The men go out to the crossroads. The clowns and sorcerers are there too. The brothers of circumcision are there. Two face each other, sitting down. They put grass over their heads. One says, 'Give me your cunt.' The other replies, 'You may have my cunt.' One copulates with the other. They do it with a stick. A man sets fire to the grass. They shout. They join the other men. It is finished.

Matthieu and I stayed far into the night recording songs and collecting gossip of all kinds; the tapes would provide employment for some time to come.

There was a shout outside. While we had been inside, the men had returned and tied a red hat to the body, just like the circumcision candidate wears. The corpse was jostled and threatened with circumcision. Sometimes a naked boy is required to lean back against the body and a red thread is cut away from his penis simulating circumcision.

We had hardly returned to the village and set about our first meal of the day when we heard that there was to be another skull-festival nearby, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the next day. Nothing would happen at the burial for perhaps two days while the body was 'lying in state', so that could be left simmering while we went over to the other big event.

While we were eating Matthieu had assumed a sly expression that I had come to know and fear. He was always so long working round to something that it was a blessed relief when he came to the point. At last he came out with it. While I was away he had spent his time visiting relatives but also in sorting out the contents of my hut. He had come across an old suit dumped in the bottom of a suitcase. This I had brought with me on the advice of a colleague: 'You'll need at least one suit.' I never discovered why. I had carried the thing around with me for months awaiting an occasion to put it on, and had finally relegated my colleague's tip to a long list of 'crazy and useless advice for fieldworkers'. Matthieu, however, had other ideas. He requested earnestly that I wear the suit to the skull festival. It would impress people, he claimed. I refused point-blank. He sulked. Well then, there was another matter. I should have a cook. It was not right that I cook myself; moreover, on occasions such as today it would have been a fine thing to return and find food awaiting. He had a 'brother'; he would bring him. For the sake of peace and quiet I agreed to talk to him, but had secretly not the slightest intention of saddling myself with a domestic establishment.

In keeping with Dowayo notions of time, the festival was not at the stage it should have been; this had the advantage of enabling me to see parts the Dowayos had kept quiet about. This, in all fairness, was not their fault. I had asked to see the 'throwing on the skulls', my understanding being that this was the name for the whole ceremony. It was the name but also, unfortunately, the technical term for just that part where excrement and blood were thrown on the skulls. Thus when I asked to see 'throwing on the skulls' that was precisely what I had got. Meanwhile all sorts of provocative acts were being performed by other people I did not know were involved at all. The men, for example, performed a narcissistic dance with mirrors. Brothers of circumcision were required to climb on the roofs of the huts of the dead and rub their anuses against the roof ridge. Women performed all sorts of strange acts with penis yams that quite baffled me until I discovered that they were a mere adaptation of what boys do after they have been circumcised. In other words, the widows of the dead are treated as if they have just been circumcised after taking their final leave of their dead husbands. The common feature is that they are now totally reincorporated into normal life after a period of exclusion from it. Their husbands, who undergo the skull-ceremony, are treated as if they have just been circumcised. The common feature here is that they may now be placed in the skull-house where the circumcision ritual itself has its final climax.

Next day I was roused by Matthieu even before dawn. He was all smiles. He had a surprise for me. The cook he had mentioned, his brother, he had sought him out. He had made breakfast. This consisted of intestines burnt black in copious quantities of cooking oil. I hated the way Dowayos swamped everything in oil. The cook was presented to me to receive my congratulations. He was a youth of about fifteen who had the peculiarity of having six fingers on both hands. This quite distracted and interested me. I would have to find out about notions concerning cripples and deformity. The youth attributed his success at cooking to the contact he had had with Whites in Garoua. Had he perhaps been a cook there? No, a dustman. I felt tired; this was a problem I would have to come back to when I was feeling stronger. I would talk to him again this evening.

Very little of this was clear to me at the time, of course. I was far too busy just writing it down to be able to even speculate what it was that I was noting with such industry. I often simply fired questions at random in the hope of hitting something to ask further questions about. The problem of working in the area of symbolism lies in the difficulty of defining what is data for symbolic interpretation. One is seeking to describe what sort of a world the Dowayos live in, how they structure it and interpret it. Since most of the data will be unconscious, this cannot simply be approached by asking about it. A Dowayo, when faced with the question, 'What sort of a world do you live in?' is rather less able to answer than we ourselves would be. The question is simply too vague. One has to piece it all together bit by bit. Possibly a linguistic usage will be significant, a belief or the structure of a ritual. One then seeks to incorporate it all into some sort of scheme.

For example, I have already explained that blacksmiths are set apart from the rest of Dowayos and that this separateness finds its expression in rules enforcing separate cultivation, eating, sex, drawing of water. An anthropologist would suspect that other forms of communication would also stress the separateness of blacksmiths; there might well be beliefs about language, for instance. I found that blacksmiths were supposed to speak with a particular accent, different from other Dowayos; their sexual isolation might be stressed by beliefs about incest or homosexuality. The last I found a particularly awkward area. My opportunity to broach the subject came on the occasion of the castration of a bull whose testes were being eaten by parasitic worms. I was interested to note that, had several cattle been due for castration, this would have been performed in the circumcision grove where boys are cut, another example of the identification of cattle and men. As all the cattle were driven in so that the diseased one could be caught, two yearlings tried to mount each other. I pointed this out, hoping that similar practices would be imputed to some group, with luck, blacksmiths. The further I went in my questioning, the more awkward and embarrassing it became. The truth seems to be that homosexual practices are largely unknown in West Africa except where white men have spread the word. Dowayos were incredulous that such things were possible. Such behaviour in animals was always interpreted as 'They are fighting over women'. Males will have much more physical contact than is normal in our own culture but it carries no sexual overtones: friends walk hand in hand; often young men will sleep entwined together but this is not thought to involve sexuality. Dowayos who had not seen me for some time would often sit in my lap and stroke my hair, amused at my embarrassment at such public behaviour. So my hopes that smiths might have a reputation for homosexuality were unfounded -- but they did eat dogs and monkeys; most Dowayos will refuse both. An anthropologist would explain that this is because both are too close to humans. Eating them, therefore, is the culinary equivalence of incest or homosexuality.

Besides the other interests of this festival, it provided me with another opportunity to speak to the Old Man of Kpan, since this event was happening in his own back garden. As usual, he was surrounded by a considerable retinue, someone holding a red umbrella over his head, and sated with beer. He was eager to compare dentures and, finding his own to be a vastly more sophisticated device, was moved to invite me to visit him in a month's time. He would send me word.

And so one picks one's way through the morass of data by a process of constant error and revision. On this particular day, however, I confess to being more preoccupied with the problem of my cook and how to disembarrass myself of his dubious services. Fortunately an excellent solution finally occurred to me; I would employ him as one of the people to build my projected new house. Feelings would be spared all round. He would doubtless be better at throwing mud than cooking food.

The rainy season was now officially over and it would not rain again for five or six months, a matter of great comfort to me since I have always hated rain. On the way back from the skulls, however, there was a remarkable storm. It began with a faint moaning sound in the mountains that grew to a dull roar. Looking up at the sky, we could see huge clouds building and swirling round the peaks. It was obvious we should not reach the village before its full force hit us. The wind raced across the plain, tearing at the grass and ripping leaves from the trees. It was clear to Matthieu that this was no ordinary storm but a personal demonstration by the rainchief of his power. I must confess that had I not been a totally prejudiced Westerner I should have been inclined to agree with him, for the storm was quite remarkable. The rain lashed us so that we were saturated from head to foot in seconds and shivering from the cold. The buffeting of the wind was so violent that it tore the buttons off our shirts and we were obliged to call a halt at a log bridge. This consisted of a split tree trunk covered with moss that spanned a gorge some forty feet deep. It was simply impossible to teeter across this in the wind and so we sat down to wait, Matthieu terrified that the Old Man would send lightning to kill us. I told him that white men cannot be struck by lightning so he should stick to me and no harm could come of it. He believed this at once. West Africa has apparently the highest incidence in the world of people being struck by lightning. I remember sitting there thinking that, since almost every vehicle has a motorjo, a man whose task it is to tie down baggage and climb on the roof to let goods down for passengers, the expression 'my postilion has been struck by lightning' is probably more useful here than anywhere else on Earth.

Finally, the fury died down and we regained the village. The story of the storm rapidly did the rounds and I spent the evening chatting quite openly about rainchiefs; overnight it had become an acceptable subject of conversation.

Some of the Dowayos had already begun to harvest, although it was rather early, and it was clearly time for me to become ubiquitous in the fields. For the harvest a threshing floor must be constructed. This consists of a shallow depression scooped in the earth and plastered with mud, cattle excrement and sticky plants to form a firm base. It must be protected against witchcraft with spiky remedies: thistles, barbs of millet stems or bamboo, even porcupine quills are used. Here the heads of the cut millet are normally allowed to dry for several days before being beaten with sticks to dislodge the grain. This is very hard work and hated by Dowayos. The husk is fiercely irritating to the skin and even the toughened hides of Dowayos come up in huge weals. They sit around alternately beating and drinking, scratching with an unrestrained enjoyment that brooks no modesty. I became especially interested in the threshing floor. Everywhere such places are the focus of symbolic elaboration and there is a complex of prohibitions attaching to them in Dowayoland. I already knew that there was a special class of 'true cultivators' who had to take special precautions. I had already arranged to visit one of these for his harvest in some two weeks time and would find out then about his special place in the cultural system. I had made a point of getting on good terms with the local women, knowing that they would be a good source on such matters, being prone to having their sexuality disrupted by breaches of taboos, and had learned that a pregnant woman should never go inside a threshing floor. This was not what I had expected. Elsewhere in Dowayoland human sexuality and plant fertility are held to affect each other beneficially. For example, the first time that a girl menstruates she is shut up for three days in the grinding hut where millet is made into flour. Only those linked by marriage can accept germinated millet. Blacksmiths, with whom sexual relations are forbidden, should not enter a woman's field if millet is growing there. In other words, a series of parallels is established by the culture between various stages of the millet cycle and the sexual processes of women. In accordance with this, I would have expected childbirth and threshing to be paired off as well. It would have fitted my model very well if a cure for difficult childbirth had been to sit the woman in the threshing circle. I puzzled about this for a long time. I even borrowed Jon's office for a day while he was away to sit down with my notes and try to find out what was wrong. If this was incorrect, I might well have to scrap everything I had worked out thus far concerning the 'cultural map' of the Dowayos.

I decided to have a word with my favourite female informant, Mariyo, the Chief's third wife. We had become good friends after my drugs had cured the Chief's younger brother; I was interested in her for several reasons. She lived just behind my own hut and I could not help but notice the incessant streams of farts, coughs and deafening eructations that issued from that area after dark. I felt great sympathy for her as one whose guts were as little suited to Dowayoland as my own. One day I mentioned this to Matthieu who gave out a loud scream of laughter and ran off to share my latest folly with Mariyo. About a minute later, a loud scream of laughter came from her hut, and thereafter I could chart the progress of the story round the village as hysteria hit one hut after another. Finally Matthieu returned, weeping and weakened by laughter. He led me to Mariyo's compound and pointed to a small hut directly behind my own. Inside lived the goats. Being unversed in the lore of goats, I had been unaware of their human-sound detonations. After this, Mariyo and I were stuck with a joking relationship where we could only communicate by pulling each others' legs. Dowayos have many such relations, both with specific classes of kinsmen and with sympathetic individuals. At times they are enormously diverting, at others vastly tedious, since they take no account of mood.

I had gleaned the information regarding pregnant women and threshing floors from other female informants, so I was curious what Mariyo would tell me. I worked round to it gradually. How was a threshing floor made? What happened there? Was there anything one most not do on a threshing floor? Was there anyone who must not enter there? Once again, she replied that pregnant women must not enter, 'At least,' she added, 'not until the child is fully formed and ready to be born.' This put the matter in quite a different light. She went on to explain that if a pregnant woman appeared on the threshing floor she would give birth too soon. So my pairing of stages of millet and female fertility was saved. It is impossible to explain to a layman the deep satisfaction that comes from such a simple piece of information as this. It serves as a vindication of years of teaching of platitudes, months of disease, loneliness and boredom, hours of asking foolish questions. In anthropology, moments of validation are few and this one came as a needed morale restorative.

As the result of our joking sessions, Mariyo was a very relaxed informant and accepted my stern separation of joking from 'asking about things'. She was the only Dowayo I ever met who seemed to have some inkling of what I was after. On one occasion I asked her about the special star-shaped haircuts that female kin wear at a dead woman's jar ceremony. Did they wear them on any other occasion? She answered in the negative, as any Dowayo would but, unlike the others, added, 'Sometimes the men do,' and went on to give me a list of occasions when men cut their hair in this fashion. Since most female rites can only be understood as derived from male rites, this gave me the clue to their interpretation and opened up a whole new line of inquiry that paired designs on the human body with decorations on pots and native ideas of conception that allow the woman to be viewed as a more or less flawed vessel.

But, as usual in Africa, doing a methodical job could not long be allowed to disrupt a dozen minor concerns and I was forced to take a day off to wage war on the various forms of animal life that had invaded my hut. Lizards I could live with. They ran about in the roof, darting from beam to beam. Their only inconvenience was their habit of defecating on one's head. Goats were a constant curse one had learned to take precautions against. I had a standing feud with one old billy-goat who loved nothing better than to creep into my compound at two o'clock in the morning and jump up and down on my cooking pots. Chasing him away secured relief only for an hour or so; after that he would come sneaking back and perform an encore, kicking my gas cylinder with his back hooves. The worst thing about him was his stench. Dowayo goats stink so badly that it is possible, when trekking in the bush, to tell whether a male goat has been along the same track in the last ten minutes by smell alone. I finally defeated him by subborning the affections of the Chief's dog, Burse, who was hopelessly addicted to chocolate. Giving him one square every evening ensured that he spent the night outside my hut and chased all goats away. Thereafter he introduced his wife and children into the family business and proved a considerable drain on supplies. Dowayos were vastly amused to see my retinue of dogs who would follow me for miles in the bush and sometimes nicknamed me 'the great hunter'.

Termites were a constant threat to all paper. They had a cunning habit of invading books from the inside and devouring them so that externally they appeared perfect while consisting of the merest wafer-thin shell. A short bout of chemical warfare routed them.

Mice were more infuriating. They stonily ignored my food. Like all other life-forms in Dowayoland they were addicted to millet; the only thing I had that they liked was plastic. They devoured the hose for the water-filter in a single night. They made concerted attacks on my camera. What I hated worst about them was their clumsiness as they crashed and thudded from one piece of equipment to another. Their fate was sealed one appalling night when I woke up in the darkness to feel a quivering form on my chest. I lay there immobile, convinced it was a deadly green mamba curled up directly over my heart. I tried to estimate its dimensions. Should I lie there and hope it would go away? Alas, I am a very untidy sleeper and feared that I might well fall asleep and turn over onto it with fatal consequences. I decided that my best move was to count to three and leap up, throwing it off. I counted, uttered a loud yell and flung myself sideways, leaving a goodly part of my knee on the raised edge of the bed. With an unerring dexterity that quite impressed me at the time, I snatched up my torch and shone it on my attacker. There, transfixed in the beam, trembled the smallest mouse I have ever seen. I felt quite ashamed until, in the morning, I discovered it had tried to eat my dentures. That hardened my heart and I made a tour of the village collecting mouse-traps. In a single night I killed ten mice which the children ate.

What had really provoked me to a declaration of all-out war was the discovery that scorpions were nesting in one corner of the hut where I kept my spare pair of shoes. Having picked these up in all innocence, I was appalled when a large, snapping scorpion rushed out and made straight for me. Shrieking in most unmanly fashion, I retreated through the door where stood a Dowayo waif of about six who looked at me quizzically. Stress had somewhat disrupted my lexicon and I could not find the word for 'scorpion'. There are hot beasts within!' I cried in an Old Testament voice. The child peered inside and with an expression of profound disdain stamped the scorpions to death with his bare feet. (For the benefit of others, let me point out that scorpions are rarely fatal but their sting can cause severe pain. It is treated by immersing the area in cold water and taking anti-histamine tablets that are issued as standard for hay fever.)

Far worse than these, however, were cicadas. Ten million cicadas scattered around the hills of Dowayoland produce that pleasant hum that is the hallmark of evening in tropic climes. A single cicada trapped in your hut is a recipe for insanity. They have a curious ability to secrete themselves into small crevices. It is strangely difficult to get a directional fix on their sound. In light they are completely silent. In darkness, they produce the most piercingly strident rasping screech. The only way to detect them was to saturate the area with the contents of a can of insecticide that optimistically displayed images of choking cockroaches, gasping flies, mosquitoes going into tailspins, etc. This was just enough to make them break cover and career woozily over the floor where they could be dispatched with about ten blows from a heavy object. After several sleepless nights the violence and rage required for such a proceeding comes quite naturally.

Dowayos were always surprised that I found snakes and scorpions as horrifying as I did but had actually been known to avoid running down that most horrible of birds, the owl. On one occasion I had been seen to pick up a chameleon, whose bite is held to be deadly, after some children had been tormenting it, and place it on a tree. This was an act of great folly. My most useful madness was that I was prepared to handle the claws of the ant-eater. Dowayos would not touch these since if they did so their penises would permanently acquire their drooping shape. The claws could be used to kill a man by embedding them in the fruit of the baobab tree and calling out the name of the intended victim; when the fruit drops, he will die. Dowayos who had killed an ant-eater would publicly summon me and present me with the claws as an earnest of their peaceful intentions to fellow villagers. I would then have to carry them up into the hills and bury them away from frequented places. My role as a cosmological pollution control officer was much appreciated.

I gathered from travellers that the millet of my 'true cultivator' was not yet ready for harvesting, so I was able to settle back and watch the latest distraction -- an election in Kongle. The sous-préfet had summoned all the villagers at a certain place and time so that he could talk to them about it and the outstanding problem of the chiefship. In fact he never turned up, leaving them all sitting under a tree for two days before they drifted back to the fields. Several days later there appeared a goumier in the village. These unpleasant people are ex-soldiers used by the central government to ensure obedience in recalcitrant villages where gendarmes cannot keep an eye on things. They take up residence for long periods, living off their hosts, and bully them into doing whatever is demanded of them. In areas where people are ignorant of their rights, or know perhaps how little store to set by them, they exert a considerable tyranny. This particular individual was to ensure that polling booths were prepared for the elections. Hitherto Dowayos had shown themselves very unimpressed by national politics; their enthusiasm was to be stimulated.

'They would not come.'

All Dowayos, male and female, were to report on the appointed day and vote. It is the Chief's responsibility to ensure a good turn-out and Mayo humbly accepted this as his lot while Zuuldibo sat in the shade calling out instructions to those doing the work. I sat with him and we had a long discussion on the finer points of adultery. 'Take Mariyo,' he said. 'People always tried to say she was sleeping with my younger brother, but you saw how upset she was when he was ill. That showed there was nothing between them.' For Dowayos sex and affection were so separate that one disproved the other. I nodded wisely in agreement; there was no point in trying to explain that there was another way of looking at it.

At the polling booths democracy was in full swing. One man was being upbraided for not bringing all his wives.

'You should have beaten them.'

I asked several Dowayos what issue they were voting for. They stared at me blankly. You took your identity card, they explained, and gave it to the official over there who stamped it and your vote was marked. Yes, but what were they voting for? More blank stares. They had already explained, you took your card… Not one of them knew what the election was for. No negative votes were accepted. At the end of the day's proceedings it was felt that not enough votes had been recorded, so everyone was made to vote again. I happened to be in a cinema the week the results were announced with something over ninety-nine per cent of voters choosing the single candidate put up by the only party. I took it as a healthy sign that the audience, safely anonymous in the darkness, hooted with derision.

It was the same at the schools. They are all weighed down with an incredible bureaucratic apparatus for strictly determining which pupils shall be expelled, which promoted and which obliged to take a year again. The amount of time spent in the abstruse calculation of 'averages' with arcane formulae is at least equal to that spent in the classroom. And at the end of this, the headmaster arbitrarily decides that the marks look too low and adds twenty across the board, or he accepts bribes from a parent and simply changes marks, or the government decides that it has no need of so many students and invalidates its own examinations. At times it becomes bad farce. It is impossible not to smile at the sight of question papers being guarded by gendarmes with sub-machine guns when the envelope they are in has been opened by a man who sold the contents to the highest bidder several days before.

But in the village everyone took the voting very seriously indeed, in accordance with regulations. Identity cards were meticulously checked, care was taken to place the stamps exactly in the space provided on the card, the percentage of villagers voting was calculated with precision, the registers were transferred from one official to another with much signing of receipts. No one seemed to see any contradiction between such painstaking observation of minutiae and the blatant disregard of the principles of democracy.

After this interlude it was time to go off to my 'true cultivator' for the harvest. This involved a trek of some twenty miles and the temperatures were climbing daily. It was a matter of some importance to decide whether to walk the distance at night when it was cooler, or hope for a lift if one set out in full daylight. In the end I opted for the latter course and was lucky enough to run into one of the French Catholic priests commuting between two mission stations. He kindly embarked us and we had a most agreeable trip as he told me his theory of Dowayo culture. It homed in on sexual repression. Everything was 'about' sex. The wooden forks set up when a man is killed are, on one side a penis, on the other a vagina; the stress on circumcision represents a deeper uncertainty about castration; the lies about circumcision involving sealing of the rectum are a sure sign that the Dowayos, as a race, are anally obsessive. But he had not only read his manuals of psychology; he had also read anthropology. On examination, this remark meant that he had read a little on the Dogon, a most articulate and self-analytical tribe of Mali. He shook his head sadly over the Dowayos. After all the years he had spent among them they had still not told him their myths or about the primal egg. Having learned that the Dogon were not exactly like the French, he could not cope with the idea that the Dowayos were not exactly like the Dogon.

Our destination was a desolate village at the foot of the harsh granite mountains. It seemed a miracle that anything could grow in the thin, baked soil. The difference in temperature between here and what I had come to view as 'my' end of Dowayoland was considerable and both Matthieu and I were glad to slump in the shade while our host was being sought.

It was hard not to accept that part at least of the persuasiveness of an omnipresent lurking sexuality had nothing to do with the demands of sexual continence in an African cultural climate. Perhaps reliance on the Bible prepares one for the belief that all truth is to be found in a single book. Certainly cultural relativism comes especially hard to those with a clear faith, be they missionaries, self-satisfied settlers or the German volunteer who confided to me the encapsulated verity of his three years in Cameroon: 'If the natives can't eat it, fuck it, or sell it to a vite man, zey aren't interested.'

He revealed himself as a short, wizened little man dressed in rags. He was very drunk indeed, although it was only ten in the morning. We went through the normal greetings; mats were brought to sit on. As I had feared, food was to be prepared. I could quite easily handle the odd Dowayo repast of yams, peanuts, even millet; unfortunately, when I turned up at a strange village, there was a social imperative to offer me meat as a sign of respect. Since no one was about to go out and slaughter a steer for the mere joy of impressing me, this normally meant smoked meat which had been suspended in the intermittent smoke above the cooking fire for an indefinite period. Once a sauce was added it released a stench that had a powerful emetic effect. Fortunately, it is impolite to watch strangers eat and so I would retire to a hut with Matthieu to dine. This enabled me to renounce all claims to the proffered food without giving offence, Matthieu eating for two of us while I crouched in a corner and tried to think of other things.

While this feast was being concocted, I began to talk to my host about inconsequential matters, asking, for example, for information on subjects I already knew about. As I had feared, the answers I received were evasive and liberally mixed with half-truths. Moreover, it seemed that there was some doubt as to whether or not the harvest was imminent. Perhaps he would be able to arrange it for tomorrow, perhaps not. Ideally, in the course of fieldwork one would have no truck with such informants but restrict one's activities to those of a polite, kindly and generous disposition who found that answering the relentless and pointless questions of an anthropological inquirer was an amusing and rewarding pursuit. Alas, such people are rare. Most people have other things to do, are easily bored, become annoyed at the inanity of their interlocutor or are concerned more to present themselves in a favourable light than to be strictly honest. For these, the best tactic is quite simply bribery. A small amount of money converts the anthropological quest into a worthwhile activity and opens doors that would otherwise remain closed. On this occasion, as on others, it worked. A small present ensured that the harvesting would be organized with minimum delay and that I should witness the whole operation from start to finish; he would go off and organize it now. As he waddled away, one of his wives arrived with an enormous dish of smoked meat.

Work continued throughout the day and I sat out in the fields watching and trying desperately to talk to the workers. They and I were mutually almost incomprehensible, sad proof of how localized my knowledge of the language was. There were long, awkward silences, not improved by the Dowayo habit, when confronted by a silent stranger, of crying, 'Say something!' This quite infallibly drives all thoughts of conversation from the mind.

The men and women laboured all day, perspiration running in rivulets down their faces and chests as they stooped and slashed, the millet keeling over with a dry rustle, the multi-coloured heads toppling the ten or eleven feet to the ground. Occasionally they would break off to gulp water or smoke a cigarette with me, none being in the least annoyed at my tranquil watch, but rather concerned lest the shift in position of the sun might not trouble me and make me unpleasantly hot. There was much speculation about the size of the harvest. It might be thought that since the evidence lay before them an accurate assessment could be easily made of the yield; nothing could be further from the truth. They spoke as if the actual moment of harvest lay far in the future, as if no accurate data was available on which an opinion might be based. The way the crop fell betokened good or ill, the way the heads reached up to a man's ankle bone foretold this or that. There was great fear that witchcraft might rob them of the crop until the very last moment or deprive it of its 'goodness' so that a man might eat heartily of it yet still be hungry. To prevent such interference, the field and threshing floor where nature's foison lay heaped up were heavily protected with spines and spikes to injure marauding witchcraft. Strangely, it was not taken as an omen that two of the workers trod on bamboo-spike remedies and injured themselves. Several brothers of the 'true cultivator' were busy about a fire and muttering to each other, as I inferred, arcane secrets of magic. I sent Matthieu up to offer tobacco and find out the subject of their conversation. They were wondering what remedy I put on my hair to make it straight and fair. Did women like such hair? Why did we not leave ourselves alone and look natural, the way God had made us, with black, frizzy hair?

Scarce had the last morsel of pungent flesh been swallowed than we heard the sound of slashing machetes; the millet was being cut. Matthieu whispered to me the secret of our host's eagerness to please. The poll-tax was due for payment. He would be able to use my present to discharge it and so be able to avoid sharing it with any relatives in need.

With some ten or fifteen workers, all brothers or sons of the organizer, the work was completed in one day and all adjourned to rest and eat. Following the noise of singing, I wandered off a couple of miles towards the mountains to watch the funeral of a woman whose body, wrapped in hides and cloth, was being carried from her husband's village to that of her father for burial. This journey would be via a path over the mountain and this, added to the Dowayos' natural fear of the dark, made them eager to leave before sundown. Having been assured that no more would happen in the fields until daylight, I allowed Matthieu to go off with them in accordance with his kinship obligations. In a magnificent red sunset, with my stomach, unfed all day, rumbling ominously, we watched the party set off in a cloud of dust, singing and capering, the body hefted on an improvised stretcher. It was dark in the valley as they climbed the hill in sunlight and disappeared. From the fields came a sudden burst of singing. Something was going on.

I never established whether my exclusion from the scene was the result of guile or misunderstanding, or what role Matthieu played in the affair. It proved to be one of those matters where the more questions one asked the fewer answers one got. As I discovered from other harvests I attended, nothing of note preceded my arrival. The men had all gathered at the threshing floor, excluding women and children. Various vegetal remedies had been placed on the pile of millet heads and all were singing a circumcision song that women must not hear. No one seemed concerned either way at my presence. The beating of the millet began. The men, some stripped naked and wearing only penis sheaths, began a slow dance as they threshed. A stick was raised with the right hand over the head, seized with the left hand and brought down on the millet. All took a step sideways and the action was repeated. Hour after hour it continued, a steady chanting followed by a dull thud as the sticks hit the millet in unison. The moon came up and rose high and still the rhythmic beating continued, millet husks flying up and adhering to the streaming bodies. Even at this time of night the heat was suffocating and radiated from the earth itself.

The next thing I knew, it was dawn. The men were still working and chanting, sustained by copious beer. I was sprawled on a rock, to the great detriment of my buttocks, and leaning against a thorn tree. The general feeling of gross crapula was rather like the hangover from a night Channel crossing. I had clearly been woken by a large goat that was pensively devouring my field notes, having already eaten the autobiography of a U-boat captain with which I had been passing the time. Luckily I had acquired the Dowayo habit of hanging my possessions on trees and a quick check revealed that the only other damage was a half-eaten shoelace. Having peremptorily dismissed the goat, I rejoined the men who were now moving on to the next stage of the operation and winnowing the result of their threshing. From the sorts of jokes being bandied about, it was clear that some of them were not merely relatives but men who had been circumcised together. 'There's no wind!' cried one of the men. 'How shall we winnow? We must all fart.' He poured the grain from above his head into a basket and the chaff was blown away. The remark provoked mass hysteria, and even I was affected. The winnowing continued apace. A chicken's head was cut off over the grain and cooked wild yams called 'scorpions' food' were thrown on the heap from all directions. My host, in festive garb, was fetched from the village and piled up the grain in a basket. To this he attached a red Fulani hat and fled at great speed towards the village. When the first grain was dumped in the tall, tubular granary the crop was finally safe; witchcraft could not hurt it now.

The beating to death is re-enacted on several occasions, most notably during the circumcision of boys. A little play is performed, whereby the old woman is depicted moaning and complaining as she walks along the road where Dowayos lie in wait for her. She passes between them twice, on the third occasion they leap up and strike the ground with sticks, cutting off the leaves she is wearing. A pile of stones is set up on which are suspended the basket and red hat of the woman. The circumcision song is sung. Women and children may not be present.

I cannot say at what point I began to analyse the data and see how it all held together, but little by little it began to fall into place. I was sure that what I had witnessed could only be understood with reference to circumcision. I had heard enough about the ceremony to realize that the whole threshing process was conducted in the form of a story called The beating to death of the old Fulani woman.

An old Fulani woman had a son. He was ill. He had run in the silkoh grass and cut himself. His penis swelled up and was full of pus. She took a knife and cut so the child was cured. The penis became beautiful. She cut her second son. One day she went for a walk through a Dowayo village and the Dowayos saw it was good. They took circumcision and beat her to death. That was how it started because Dowayos did not know circumcision. They forbade women to see it. But Fulani women can see it. It is finished.

The 'scorpions' food' pointed to other links. I had heard of fertility cults conducted by, among others, the rainchiefs. Before any of the crops could be brought to the village for the first time every year, certain rites must be carried out or scorpions would invade the huts and attack people. No one had hitherto mentioned to me that the scorpions that had moved into my hut were taken as a sign that I had foolishly broken this regulation in bringing supplies from outside. Throwing 'scorpions' food' on the crops leads the scorpions astray. They remain in the bush, just as throwing the exerement of the mountain porcupine at the skull ceremony would keep the dangerous ancestors clear of the village. Only much later would I learn that 'scorpions' food' was also attached to people, a girl the first time she menstruated, a boy after circumcision. It was this that later confirmed that young people on the verge of adulthood are treated like plants about to be harvested. Do-wayos try to arrange that circumcision shall end with the entry of the boys to the village at the same time as the new crops are brought home. There is a common model for both.

The next day we tramped back towards Kongle, the only incident on this long and very dull march being that I contrived to lose my footing while crossing a river and plunged headfirst into a deep pool, totally saturating all the films I had shot of the harvest and ruining them. This depressed me more than a little. From the material point of view, the expedition had not been a notable success; I had returned without notes or film. Still, these are, or should be, merely a means towards ideas and I had at least acquired several of those.

I spent another night at the village to make quite sure that nothing else was afoot and pick up my wayward assistant who returned after dark, truly penitent. To make amends for his absence he showed me, in great secrecy, a magic stone that made pregnant women miscarry. For a successful birth they were obliged to come and offer money to the owner of the stone. His family derived a steady income from this powerful rock, but not as much as the people down the road who had one that caused dysentery. The existence of these stones was kept from the missionaries; apparently, they were held responsible for an attempt by a past French sous-préfet to destroy them. Dowayos were convinced that his real aim was to collect them all for himself and so become rich.

It seemed that after fourteen years in Poli he was to be replaced. By the time I reached Kongle, everyone was agog with the news. There was an atmosphere of carnival and men had gathered to drink recklessly to celebrate the departure of a man they had long regarded as an enemy. It was a golden opportunity to gather gossip; there were many eager to tell me of past wrongs. Messengers were being dispatched at intervals to town to bring back the latest news. Zuuldibo volunteered to help the old sous-préfet move out. Why, he would even carry his furniture on his back to the crossroads. The sous-préfet, I was informed, on hearing of his posting elsewhere, had come to the Dowayos and asked for magical help to have the order changed. They had smiled sweetly and told him regretfully that all their plants had died so that they could not help him. Another man came from the town. He had spoken to the sous-préfet's servants through the bedroom window. His employer had made it clear that this aged retainer would receive no farewell present. The sous-préfet had made the man, who had hardly a shirt on his back, burn all the old clothes he would not be taking with him. This aroused great outrage. I foresaw that I should have to satisfy certain expectations when my own turn came to leave.

As a treat we called in at the mission and stayed a couple of days until mail-day. After walking around unwashed for several days, sleeping on the ground and eating skimpily, it was marvellous to sleep on a real bed, having had a shower, a proper meal -- and most of all, a conversation. There was even news, a concept almost entirely alien to a seemingly timeless Dowayoland. The sous-préfet was leaving.

In Poli everyone was drunk (Zuuldibo looked envious). No one knew anything more. The sous-préfet had been seen packing. Gaston himself had gone to the market to see if he could pick up any information; it was full of prisoners from the jail. Poli was such an inaccessible hole that there was no possibility of their escaping, so the gaolers let them out so they could go fishing or drinking. Two of these men had been attacking a Dowayo girl when Gaston had wheeled his bicycle innocently onto the scene. 'Now you're for it!' she had shrieked, 'Here comes my husband!' At this, the two desperadoes had loosed her and set about poor Gaston; the woman made her escape, laughing. Everyone else found the story hilarious too. Gaston collapsed with mirth at his own suffering. The evening ended in uproar. Only Zuuldibo was vexed; the prisoners had stolen his beer.

The stream of visitors continued, each adding his pearl of knowledge to the common pile. Lastly came Gaston, whom the Chief had dispatched on his bicycle for beer and news. He looked somewhat the worse for wear. Dowayos love to tell a story and Gaston held the stage. Everyone settled back round the fire from which I had contrived to get as far as possible.