The next morning, bright and early, I set out for the village where I had lived for some eighteen months. To either side of the road, people were cultivating in the fields and ran out to greet me. It was only with great difficulty that I avoided offers of millet beer, rotted manioc and smoked meat. By the time I reached the village, my pockets were full of eggs, bestowed upon me by Dowayos. I walked gingerly, knowing that many of them would be rotten.

Old women limped up, leaning on sticks, pinched my arms and laughed at how fat I had become. "And you told us you had no wives…" they clucked roguishly, hoes tucked over their shoulders. Men came up, eyeing me hopefully for beer, ears having detected in my bag the clink of bottle against bottle.

By the time I got to the village, I was exhausted by questions, handshaking, and the minute and unashamed discussion of my person. Around the huts lay a deep silence broken only by the scratching of chickens and the humming of bees. Children peered at me round a tree and ran away giggling when I spoke to them.

I crossed the public circle and noted with surprise that the ground bore signs that the cattle had been driven into the stone enclosure at night, not simply allowed to wander promiscuously in the bush. I mentally bet that the new sous-préfet lay behind this habit since the Dowayos had always declared such a practice to be too onerous to be workable.

It was a moot point whether or not I had the right to enter the chief's compound uninvited. I did, after all, have a hut in there. Deciding to err rather on the side of politeness than familiarity, I stood at the gatehouse clapping loudly -- the normal practice in much of Africa where there are no doors to knock on. There was no answer. Flies buzzed, goats belched, somewhere in the distance a woman was singing a grinding song accompanied by the dull rasp of stone on stone. Slipping somewhat from the standards of high formality, I called out asking whether anyone was there. Still there was no answer. Giving up all claims to decent behaviour, I pushed through the gate.

I decided to inspect my own hut, pulling back the woven-mat door and plunging into the gloomy, airless interior, assailed by a smell of goat droppings and stale flatulence. From the darkness came a rhythmic snoring -- Zuuldibo.

He awoke with a start, greeted me and launched into a great description of the zeal and dedication with which he had guarded my hut in my absence. It was also, he confided, a good place to hide from the tax inspector. He had certainly made himself very much at home. The walls were covered with pictures torn from magazines depicting voluptuous ladies and large American cars. A spear lay in one corner. In the thatch were tucked little twists of cloth that doubtless contained ritually important objects such as cockerels' eggs and leopards' whiskers. Zuuldibo looked expectantly at my bag, doubtless able to detect the beer in it. I got out the two bottles. In a flash, he had whipped off the tops with the bottle-opener he carried always about his neck and sucked down a mouthful of foam with relish.

The huts were all closed up, barricaded with grass mats against the incursion of dissolute goats, inquisitive little boys and -- doubtless -- errant anthropologists. Zuuldibo, the chief, had bought himself a fine new door made of a sheet of corrugated aluminium beaten flat. It sported a brand-new Taiwanese padlock. It was locked. Few places can look as desolate as an African village without people. Mentally, I typed my report to relevant grant-giving bodies: "The researcher visited the Dowayo people of North Cameroon to investigate their circumcision ceremony, but unfortunately they were out."

He was, he declared, glad that I had come because there were various matters that were causing him anxiety. First, there was the problem of my assistant Matthieu.

Matthieu, it seemed, had been engaging in that traditional Dowayo game -- debt manipulation. In my time at the village, I had come to act very much as a banker to Zuuldibo who, like most Dowayos, was always pressed by claims for cash from relatives, taxmen, party officials, and so on. He would turn up at my hut, face averted with embarrassment -- to request me to lend him some small sum which would greatly ease his present difficulties. He would always hint at vast expectations. Since, at that time, I was living in one of the huts in his compound for which no charge was made, I was always glad to help out. Zuuldibo, for his part, would always punctiliously pay back at least half before he borrowed the same sum again. I suspect that this was a familiar traditional technique for muddying the accounts. So, by slow degrees. Zuuldibo had built up a considerable debt whose precise status was left indeterminate. Was it a loan, rent -- a gift? When I had returned to England, knowing that such a debt was hopelessly uncollectable, I had simply made the best of it by making a present of the whole sum to Zuuldibo in exchange for all his kindnesses to me.

This, of course, was the act of a mere beginner in Dowayo social relations. I realize now that I should simply have let the debt ride, alluding to it occasionally to keep it fresh, as the mark of our relationship. There was something inherently insulting in my zeal to clear the matter up. Rather like completely paying one's bill at the village shop, it implied a determination to close the account and so terminate the relationship.

Matthieu, however, had been made of sterner stuff and hated to see a good debt go to waste. He had determined to collect on my behalf and had badgered Zuuldibo mercilessly. Whether this had been a matter of principle or an act of personal entrepreneurship was never established. I soothed Zuuldibo, promising that I would sort out the problem with Matthieu. I did not require payment.

It seemed an opportune moment to mention the circumcision. Zuuldibo nodded. Yes, the ceremony was to happen over towards the old rain-chief's village. The boys had already been decorated in animal horns and skins and had begun to tour the area dancing at the compounds of relatives. This, finally, was a firm and definite sign that a commitment had been made to carry out the ritual and relief flooded through me. It looked as if there would soon be work to do.

Dowayo circumcision is a protected process. As in many other parts of the world, the boy is depicted as being reborn with a new name and must be taught all the attributes of culture like a small child. It begins with the decoration of the boys by the husbands of their sisters. They roam the countryside dancing and being given food at any homestead. Once the heavy rains start, the boys can be cut. The operation is designed to be terrifying. The boys are stripped naked at the crossroads and led to the riverside grove where the cutting is to be performed. On the way they are leapt upon by the circumcisers who are growling like hunting leopards and threatening them with knives. The operation is very severe, the penis being peeled for its entire length. Several different circumcisers may each cut part of the foreskin off. The boy is not supposed to cry out but old men who told me about the festival admitted that many did. It did not really matter as long as the women thought they were brave. At the swimming-place, one sees the result of such operations. If the operation is performed young, the penis sometimes assumes an almost spherical form that must in part be responsible for the very low birthrate of the Dowayos. Since all were cut with the same knife and the risk of infection is very great, mortality was considerable. Boys who died from the operation were said to have been eaten by leopards. From the correspondence of French colonial officers, it is clear that they were distressed by the number of youths who were said to have been eaten by leopards -- although these were virtually extinct in the area. Dowayos, as a result, rapidly gained a reputation for engaging in lurid cannibalistic rites.

The boys who are circumcised must be secluded in the bush for some nine months -- the same period they spend in the womb. They must avoid women. Only at the end of this period could they wander about in the wicker and leaf covering such as those I had seen. Even now they were obliged to lay down leaves to form a "bridge" whenever they crossed over a path and to take up the polluted leaves afterwards. For freshly circumcised boys are very dangerous. They can make a pregnant woman miscarry and a young wife infertile. They must not talk to a woman directly but have little flutes with which they imitate the tone patterns of words so that they can "talk" with music.

Only after the nine-month period may they return to the village, where they are fed, dressed and shown the hearths. Later they are taken to the house where the skulls of the male ancestors are kept and see them for the first time. They are now true men and may swear oaths on their knives. (Children who do so are beaten.) It was always odd to hear men calling out the shortened version of the oath to show great rage. It comes out as "Dang me!" Whenever I used the oath, this was felt to be highly comical.

One might wonder why circumcision is so widespread in the world and why anthropologists are apparently so obsessed with it. It might be thought that deformation of the genitals will be so painful and unpleasant that these are the last things that people would want to mutilate. When one reads of some of the customary practices relating to the sexual organs it is hard to resist the view that such mutilations are inflicted because they are painful. Holes may be bored in the penis. It may be regularly slashed with glass to clean it. It may be sliced open to unfold like a flower when erect. Testes may be crushed or hacked off. Nothing it seems is excluded.

Anthropologists have continued to be fascinated by such practices as part of their awareness of the sheer "otherness" of alien peoples. If such practices can be "explained" and related to our own ways of living then that "otherness" has been removed and we feel we have got down to some more universal notion of what it means to be human. It would seem that if anthropological theories can cope with the sex customs, they can cope with anything.

In my own researches with the Dowayos, although male circumcision was central to their culture, I found that they would quite happily combine several such approaches at the same time. They certainly did regard circumcision as the male equivalent of menstruation. A man will, for the rest of his life, be obliged to joke with men with whom he was cut -- his "brothers of circumcision" -- while a woman has to joke with the girls who began menstruating in the same year as herself -- her "sisters of menstruation".

One common "explanation" of the widespread removal of the foreskin is that it is regarded as in some way a female element that has no place on true men.

On the other hand, the Dowayos clearly regarded the foreskin as in some way female, complaining that uncut boys were wet, smelly, "like women". The Dowayos are not greatly given to involved explanations of their customs. Normally they simply explain that they do things "because the ancestors told us to". But here they had a ready explanation forming an interesting parallel to the local American missionaries who also circumcised their young boys and explained with great sincerity that this was done as scientifically essential for health and well-being, the foreskin being a proved source of infection and uncleanness. While the Dowayos and the Americans were equally convinced of the necessity of genital mutilation of their young, the Dowayos disapproved of the American way of going about things -- firstly in that they hardly cut anything off their children and secondly that they did not keep them away from women immediately after cutting and so created a public-health danger.

Similar explanations have been devised to cope with the passion for excising the female clitoris -- this being viewed as a residual penis that has no place on women. Culture has here been required to straighten the seams of an imperfect nature.

But if circumcision is regarded as being just one way of straightening the seams of biology, there is an absent element. I have already mentioned the possibility of female circumcision. This is much publicized these days, being presented as part of a wicked plot by males to dominate females and enslave them, and therefore a subject of hot debate. The much more common mutilation of males goes unremarked.

We withdrew to the bush with great whispering and giggling. There, to the accompaniment of diagrams. I tried to explain the basic possibilities to a fascinated but sceptical audience. They shook their heads and pointed to the marks in the dust, amazed at the perversity of other peoples. "But does it not hurt?" they asked, as if unaware of the agonies inflicted on boys by their own practices. "Does it really stop women wandering about and committing adultery?" Little alternative remains in such situations to a shrug and a standard formula such as, "I do not know. I have not seen."

Dowayos, however, do not mutilate female genitals. It is true that at the end of my second visit, I received a bizarre deputation of old men who had heard of such a practice and asked me to explain it to them. Once again the problem of ethics rears its head. Should the ethnographer allow himself to become involved in teaching about practices that many would regard with horror? To accept such constraints would make most of anthropology beyond the pale since most of its subject matter inspires dread in polite drawing-rooms.

Thus, the mutilation of women was at least a theoretical possibility for Dowayos. But one problem remains. In females, breasts are functional and necessary to feed the young. In males they are not. Why, therefore, do men not cut off their nipples as an intrusive female element rather than remove their foreskins? I know of no documented example anywhere in the world. Imagine, therefore, my excitement when Matthieu remarked casually that the Ninga -- a neighbouring people -- were odd in that their men had no nipples. I sought to confirm this statement by questioning other Dowayo men. It took some effort to work the conversation round to the topic, but they agreed that this was indeed the case. An expedition in search of the missing mastectomy was clearly in order.