Having covered my back with the authorities, all that was needed to become a going concern again was to regain control of Matthieu, my erstwhile assistant. I knew from letters I had received in England, long rambling disquisitions in which problems of bride-price played a large role, that he was seeking to enter the customs service. This, he had confided, was an assured means of enrichment, but he feared greatly being posted to a remote border area away from other members of his tribe, among "savage bushmen", who would have appalling customs and eat vile food. Were there even Christians in the far north of the country? He was unsure.

Enquiries among the gilded youth of Dowayoland, the strollers up and down the town's one street, the loungers at the Adamoua bar, revealed that he had waited many months for the result of his entrance examination and then given way to the sin of despair and returned to his village. I determined to seek him out.

Once again, the mission came to my aid, sparing me a long trek out towards the river in the hope of a lift on a passing truck. I was equipped with a fine van, hired at cost, and vowed to set off at dawn the next day, pleasurably anticipating the empty solitude of the bush.

There is, however, a strange intelligence service that observes such enterprises. As I emerged from the house the next day in the first cold light of dawn, there stood a group of people, luggage heaped at their feet, who knew precisely where I was headed and were resolved to accompany me there, if not farther. One rapidly comes to accept the presence of such a band of companions as inevitable. It would have been an almost uncanny experience -- a sudden hush in a crowded room -- had they not materialized. Refusal was, of course, impossible. We embarked without formality in a furious jostling and shouting. It required great firmness to establish that I must have sufficient space to reach gear-lever and brakes, this space being only grudgingly granted. I announced formally where I was bound. They nodded agreement. Of course. This was understood. Let us leave at once. Bundles of yams, clothes and furious chickens, their feet tied together to make a carrying handle, were adjusted and we set off. The journey was uneventful. There was only one fight caused by the chickens of one woman pecking the child of another. One passenger sought to stop us as we headed for the country so that he could drag forth from concealment a wife and six large bundles of indeterminate material. This ploy was denounced with rage by all the others and so the man abandoned his wife and continued with us alone. Peanuts were passed around and enjoyed with much lip-smacking and joking about their purgative effect on women.

I pointed to the rustling mass. "When was that boy cut?" Immediately, there was an explosion of shocked titters, denials that there had been anything in the bush at all. The women averted their eyes or covered their faces with their hands. The jostled chickens screeched. A child wailed. I knew well that -- infuriatingly -- these matters could not be discussed in front of women but it took great self-control to choke back frustrated questions. This, after all, was why I had come all this way. Did it mean that I had missed the ritual by several months, that it was already finished?

Suddenly, I saw a sight that made me slam on the brakes and shout with excitement. There, disappearing at speed into the scrub, was a bizarre, bulky figure. At first sight, it was approximately conical and about six feet tall. A tall cone of wickerwork, covered with leaves and creeper, possessed of two arms and feet, it swayed perilously as it rushed into the bush. I knew from descriptions that this was no mirage, monster or friendly English Green Man. It was a boy, circumcised some months previously, and moving around shielded from the gaze of women by this head-to-foot covering.

We drove on, myself plunged in gloom until the turn-off that led to Matthieu's village. Was not this the path? I enquired. There came a silent chorus of shaken heads. Surely the man the patron sought was several miles farther on? It would be wise anyway to continue to the Catholic mission that was only another five miles. There, proper enquiries could be made. All these bush villages looked the same. It was not to be expected that I would be able to tell one from another. A chorus of nods.

Unfortunately for my passengers, this was the moment that Matthieu's mother chose to emerge from the tall grass. As we spoke, magically they melted away. Yes, her son was at home. She would take me to the fields.

Matthieu was crouched over his hoe, blade slashing away at the roots of a recalcitrant weed, like some heavily symbolic tableau representing African toil. Gone was the green glossy suit. Sweat coursed down his face -- considerably thinner than when he had been in my employ -- and in his throat rumbled a hoeing song. Dowayos accompany most rhythmic activities with song, turning dull, repetitive work into a sort of dance. His father, a wizened old man of piratical aspect, spotted me first, tapped Matthieu on the shoulder and pointed towards me. Matthieu dropped his hoe and ran -- arms outstretched -- across the field as if in parody of the opening scene of The Sound of Music.

"I have come back."

"You are working?"

"You have come back?"

"I am working. I am here for three months only. Will you come with me?"

"I will come."

Like rising sons the world over, Matthieu interrupted all my attempts to talk to his father. "I will tell him I am leaving. It is of no importance."

Matthieu had built himself a dwelling that was a replica of my own, a square hut only slightly larger than traditional huts but a clear sign that association with me had to some extent removed him from his own culture.

We retired to Matthieu's new hut. When the Dowayos had built me a new hut, they had insisted that it should not be round -- like their own habitations -- but square like the school, police post and prison. For a White Man to live in a round hut would be most improper.

We talked of the news. As ever, Matthieu's world centred on the price of women. His plans to marry a twelve-year-old girl had fallen through because her family had been too demanding. Knowing that Matthieu had worked for me, they had immediately assumed that he must be rich. He looked sorrowfully at me as if in reproach. I groaned inwardly, knowing that the request for a contribution to the bride-price could not be long coming, that I would be unable to provide the huge sum demanded but would end up paying something, leaving me feeling both impoverished and guilty. Finally, we got around to the subject of circumcision. It was always a touchy subject with Matthieu. Being a modern-minded Christian, he had had the operation performed with an anaesthetic at the hospital instead of suffering the rigours of traditional genital mutilation. For this, he would be mocked all his life by other Dowayos who would accuse him of cowardice. He would, moreover, be isolated in many crises of life, not possessing a group of "brothers of circumcision" who had been cut with him and would perform for him the most important ritual duties.

We embarked the passengers, the bicycle, the yams and the chickens, but I set my face firmly against a goat. The owner departed in a huff.

He denied all knowledge of what was afoot in the mountain villages but would make enquiries and rejoin me in three days' time. In the meantime, perhaps I could give him an advance on his salary…?

Back at the road, another group of Dowayos headed for town had mysteriously assembled, including Gaston, from the village where I had lived, his bicycle magnificently garlanded with wrapping paper and plastic flowers. Was this a new bicycle? He looked embarrassed. No, patron. But there was someone at the mission who did have a new bicycle and he had sold the wrapping paper to Gaston to embellish his own machine so that people would think that that was new too.

Gaston spoke French so we were able to speak about circumcision -- none of the women understanding the language. Stealing furtive glances around us and conversing in whispers, we discussed the boy I had seen earlier. It seemed there was no need for me to worry. He was not Dowayo. He was Pape from a neighbouring tribe with similar customs. They circumcised at a slightly different time. It was a mystery why he should be so far to the east. Surely no one would feed him round here. It was outrageous that he should wander around here, endangering the fertility of Dowayo women, not that of Pape maids. If he were caught, the men would beat him. Gaston blushed with anger.

At the bar in Poli, the schoolteachers had already settled in for the day. As usual, they were involved in financial wrangling. This time, however, it was not the totally unpredictable deductions made by the tax authorities from their salaries that were at issue, but the proper bribe to pay for importing a motorbike illegally from Nigeria. I lent an ear. This might be of interest to Matthieu.

A present would be necessary. I would need some beer.

Gaston had heard that the ceremony was indeed to be held over by the rain-chief's mountain but did not know when. He would enquire. A cousin of his was a circumciser and would surely attend any such event, since many boys would be involved. I dropped him off, together with the embellished bicycle, at the turn-off to Kongle, asking him to tell Zuuldibo, the chief, that I would visit him the next day.

There were rumours all over town about a consignment that had come in. Apparently, someone had happened upon a broken-down truck over the other side of the Faro, loaded down with tyres and motorbikes. He had been lucky to escape with his life, having been pursued by the smugglers. The next day when he had nervously crept back along the same stretch, there was no sign of the truck. Even the tyre tracks had been effaced. But the consignment had arrived -- no one knew how -- in Poli. The police were enquiring into which trucks had been out towards the river recently. They looked significantly at me and at the truck I was driving.

A man, a Pape farmer judging by appearances, shuffled in and bought a beer. He looked at me knowingly, rather after the manner in which drunken Glaswegians are wont to eye those they are about to hit, and approached me making writing motions. In surprisingly good French, he asked politely if I could lend him a pen and paper. The pedagogic urge is a long time dying even in one who has worked in universities. Ballpoint pens are very hard to come by in Dowayoland. They cannot even be bought in town. One is obliged to go some sixty-odd miles to get one. A sure way to cause a near riot is to drop a pen anywhere near a school for it will be pounced on by a hundred eager children. I was, therefore, happy to help the man out. He settled himself at a table and wrote out a long letter with painful slowness, carving each character into the page between great bouts of pen-sucking and rolling of eyes towards the ceiling. The schoolmasters sniggered at the clumsiness of his horny fingers. Meanwhile, I opened negotiations for some beer to take to Zuuldibo.

The great problem is bottles. There is a great shortage of bottles, many being abstracted from the system and diverted to purposes quite foreign to those for which they were designed. Dowayos convert them into musical instruments, lamps and hide-scrapers. They use them to contain honey, water and herbal remedies, among other things. There is a vigorous trade in empty bottles. The result is that beer-sellers are reluctant to let fresh bottles out of their grasp unless they receive an equivalent number of empty ones. This doubtless has the worthy effect of preventing a man going to the bad by doubling his beer intake overnight. It works quite well once you have the empty bottles to trade with. Acquiring the first empty bottles is, however, the flaw in the system. It is virtually impossible. I am tempted to recommend that bodies conducting research in former French West Africa should keep a central supply and issue two to each fieldworker. It would enormously improve the efficiency of their workers. This time I was lucky in that I had borrowed two bottles from Jon. My misfortune was that they were not of exactly the same type as those I wished to carry away with me.

As I was about to leave, the somnolent scribe seized me and pushed into my hand the screed he had so painfully composed, together with the pen I had lent him. I read it with difficulty.

Like many other such problems it was treated rather as a series of hats to be tried on in a mirror, a source of diverting theoretical stances to be slowly savoured, rather than as an impediment to progress to be resolved as quickly as possible. The schoolteachers joined in. Some berated the barman for his unwillingness to part with the bottles. Others applauded his determination to refer the whole matter to the owner who would surely return before nightfall. The Pape farmer laboured on. Finally, one of the teachers tired of this intellectual flirtation. He would sell me two of his own empty bottles. This bold lateral move was applauded like the winning gambit of a chess-master. It had taken half an hour and cost me half as much again as anyone else, but I managed to buy and carry away two bottles! I prepared to bear them off in triumph.

The letter was written in French, couched in terms appropriate to a high-level ambassadorial exchange of the seventeenth century. It began with the florid phrase, "I address myself, dear Sir, to your high benevolence." In short, which it was not, it was a request for a loan. It appeared that "my brother", the French missionary, had departed for the city and tarried there a day longer than expected. This man, his gardener, had therefore not been paid on time and I should immediately make good his loss, or as the letter put it, "disburse non-receipted money".

The ethnography of communication is a matter of some interest to anthropologists, for every culture has rules about what may and may not be said and a way of matching styles to content and context. It was interesting that a loan could not be asked for verbally but only in writing, a fact I had noted before when members of Jon's congregation would hand him similar letters.

In West Africa, great stress is laid on verbal felicity. The man who can speak publicly with force and style is likely to rise in society, as is the man who can write elegant or grammatical English or French. The form of this letter had been taken from one of the many books in Africa that offer advice on how to deal with sophisticated correspondence. As in any country where there are many languages, great social mobility and a good deal of demi-literacy, many people are unsure of what is correct or incorrect usage. Books, therefore, often offer whole letters that can be adapted for all occasions by just changing one or two words, rather like the way bad students learn whole essays by heart that they will doggedly apply to the most inappropriate circumstances in an examination. Unfortunately, the people who compile such works in Africa are far from proficient in either language or social sense and can do more harm than good.

One suggested letter runs: "I am Jaguar Jones of Roseland. I am the queen of roses, generally respected in this land as a quiet lady, but your performance has boiled my brain caused me unsteady and less working."

In the present case, it seemed scant reward for such application and industry simply to refuse an advance. At great length, I explained that the missionary was indeed not my brother, that we were from different villages, different peoples. We did not even speak the same language. Anyway, I could not simply go about giving money to people I had never even seen before.

The young are particularly a prey to scribal insecurity and a whole sub-industry provides love letters for all occasions. These are passed around between college students with a rapidity and fervour reserved in our own schools for works of dire pornography.

They contain such useful advice (from a Nigerian example) as: "The address should be on top of the right-hand side of your pad, and you should remember that love is sweet as blue, and as such one should try to write with blue writing pad because blue always shows a deep love."

The scribe reeled back in outrage. His probity, he felt, had been called into question.

"Am I not an honest man?" he questioned. "I gave you back your pen, didn't I?"