He led me through the courtyard, across the public square and we plunged into the long grass in a quarter of the village I had not visited before.

Suddenly, there before me stood two extremely shy‚ blushing youths in their circumcision outfits. They wore two long robes, one blue, one white. Buffalo horns were bound round their necks with the thick, coarse cloth that is used to wrap corpses and buy women. On their backs, they wore leopard skins stretched over wooden frames. Here there had been some element of compromise with the modern world. Leopards are now extinct in the area and the Nigerian mountains are the only current source of illegal imports of such skins at ruinous cost. One enterprising local trader has plugged the gap by importing a cotton fabric with leopard-skin markings on it. It was this that was sported by one of the youths, in place of the real skin. Knowing the Dowayos' difficulties in this area, I had brought with me a supply of leopard-skin Fablon with which English dandies are wont to ornament the insides of their cars. When I showed it to Zuuldibo, it went down very well, its stiffness and washability being deemed major advances over the natural product.

Matthieu arrived outside my hut the next day. He was smiling and in good heart like an old soldier called back to the ranks after years of enforced idleness. He looked bashfully at his feet. "Patron, I have someone outside for you."

This seemed a good opportunity to try it out in the field. I sent Matthieu back to get some while the boys danced and I photographed them. It was only after some time that their musical accompanist turned up with his drum and we went through the whole thing again with the Fablon splendidly in place, the boys bending low and shaking furiously as they stamped the bells on their feet.

In accordance with Dowayo norms of hospitality, I gave one of them a small present and offered some beer. All the while, I was uncomfortably aware that in decorating either of them I had accepted new social obligations, becoming the boy's "husband" -- a relationship that lasts for life and would involve me in dressing and feeding him at the end of circumcision. In return, he would turn up to dance at my funeral.

Zuuldibo, with his uncanny beer-scenting abilities, immediately appeared and watched the boys drinking rather as a dog hovers around a child with an ice-cream. His hat was a trifle askew. It was clear that he had come hot from a beer-drinking party in the fields. Having finally caught my circumcision candidates, fine specimens of about fourteen, I was loth to release them too easily and interrogated them mercilessly about their parentage, what preparations had already been made, who would be organizing the ceremony and other details. Soon they were yawning pitiably, leaning against each other and demanding sleep. Zuuldibo, moreover, had decided that this was the best time to address the problem of the roof of my hut. He was not to be put off.

There was a good deal of sniggering as we called each other "wife" and "husband" respectively.

This is a frequent ploy to stop haggling, shame often driving the buyer to offer far more than he would otherwise be prepared to pay. Zuuldibo was obviously in his cups or he would clearly see that he was leaving himself open to the most straightforward debt-bandying. Zuuldibo owed me money. I would owe Zuuldibo money. When he asked for payment for the roof, I could simply annul his debt and leave him to face the workers. It was an attractive idea but I knew I could never do it. My own notions of responsibility and shame would prevent it. I would feel guilt every time I saw the men and they looked disappointed.

The roof, he observed, spreading himself easily on the ground and breaking wind -- a friendly mark that we were in all-male company and could discourse freely -- had been a very fine roof. He himself had supervised the thatching of it because I was his friend. I could not resist interjecting that it had leaked badly from the start but Zuuldibo waved this remark aside. The boys dozed. We were obviously to suffer a prepared speech. The roof, Zuuldibo asserted, had been remarkably fine and much admired. It had been fitting for a man of wealth such as myself. But now it was leaking. Zuuldibo suffered when he was inside guarding the hut. He was glad to suffer for me, his friend, without payment, but I would need a new roof. How much would it cost? It was‚ he felt, unseemly to discuss such matters. Zuuldibo would take upon himself the execution of necessary works. He would ensure it was well done. I would give him what I felt was proper reward for the heavy sufferings of the workers.

Zuuldibo waxed ebullient. Beer was called for, a small furtive boy being sent to secure supplies from wife number two. He leaned back under a tree and warmed to his theme. He had, it seemed, also been giving thought to his own status. It was assumed, naturally, that he would be accompanying me to all festivals concerned with circumcision. The difficulty lay in his umbrella.

I agreed that Zuuldibo and I could discuss the price later, knowing, of course, that the work would never be done before I left but that I would still have to pay for it.

The English notion of the thatcher deriving rural satisfaction from the leisurely toil of skilled hands bears little relationship to the task of covering an African roof. The grass used emits huge quantities of suffocating pollen, causing appalling rashes and choking fits. After a day's work, thatchers would often be found gasping for breath, broiling in the hot sun. The associations of the job are closer to those of coal-mining than weaving.

The anthropologist is a great nuisance in any village, constantly harassing innocent people with trying questions. He draws heavily upon reserves of patience and goodwill. It is unreasonable for him to refuse to make some small contribution to the community in which he lives. Thatching is, moreover, a very unpleasant job whose discomforts had been only marginally overstated by Zuuldibo.

Zuuldibo was aware that an immaculate umbrella is a rare thing but a raddled one a mere comic prop. His umbrella had never been one of the finest. Its fabric was ripped and stained by a hundred chance misfortunes that seemed to be largely associated with beer. Bare ribs poked spokily forth like orphans' arms. The stem was bent.

Traditionally, the chiefs of West Africa are shaded by red umbrellas. Sometimes, these become regalia of great artistic elaboration and are much ornamented and embellished with rare vehemence. Zuuldibo had settled for a much less complex expedient and bought a red lady's umbrella made in Hong Kong. In illustration of his point, he drew it forth from beneath his robes, opened it and assumed an expression of extreme idiocy, tongue lolling out of his mouth, eyes wild. Everyone laughed. I could see what he meant.

Zuuldibo needed a new umbrella otherwise how could he be seen at festivals? I agreed to look for one at the first opportunity. Zuuldibo leaned forth eagerly. The chief of Marko had an umbrella with a… there followed a lengthy interlude of linguistic discussion in which we finally pinned down the Dowayo word for "tassel". Could he have one too? I would try. If at all possible, if God wished it‚ he would have his tassel. Zuuldibo beamed. My "wife" left, promising to send word when the ceremony would take place. The beer arrived, accompanied by two of Zuuldibo's brothers.

The problem lies in the fact that the Dowayos have no notion of our institution of "toasting". All they have is an institution of cursing. When wronged beyond human bearing, a man may curse another by calling out his name, sipping beer and spitting the contents of his mouth on to the earth. It is then expected that the victim will weaken and die, especially if he is in a relation of dependence to the man who has cursed him -- for example, if he is his son.

Being punctilious in matters of etiquette, Zuuldibo poured a healthy draught of the turgid, bubbling liquid into a calabash and took a single matronly sip to show that nothing detrimental to the well-being of his guests was intended. He then proffered it to me. Possibly I was infected by his own courtliness. Whatever the reason, instead of simply draining the cup as would have been expected‚ I held it up and proclaimed Zuuldibo's name in a toast. Immediately, a deep and shocked silence descended upon the gathering. The boys stopped talking. Zuuldibo's smile froze upon his face. The very flies seemed hushed from their buzzing. I knew, as everyone knows who works in an alien culture, that I had made a serious mistake.

"We do this in my village," I explained, "to show that we wish the man we name long life and many wives and children. It is a custom of my people."

I smiled in what I hoped desperately was a disarming fashion and tried to explain. There was a sudden relaxing of tension. Our roles were immediately, ridiculously, reversed -- Zuuldibo the ethnographer, me the confused and hopeless informant.

Zuuldibo and the others sat, watching horrified, waiting for me to spit. What wrong could have led to such a vile act on my part?

"But this means that the other men there -- that you do not name -- you wish them to die, their wives to have no children?"

"No. It's not quite like that. We just show it is our wish -- that we are friends."

He frowned. "But how can your words make a man live long?"

"No. You don't understand." An inspiration. "It's like the opposite of cursing. It means good things."

"Ahh."

It was the famed "comparative method" of anthropology in action, an enlightening example of a way in which we both had half a picture that was meaningless until put together. I was also discomfortingly aware of how Zuuldibo had forced my thoughts into paths that were not their own. Until I discussed it with him, I had no clear thoughts at all about toasting, about why we did it, what we expected its effects to be. It was very disconcerting.

The boys rose and pattered away lightly down the path, being soon swallowed up by the tall grass, the jangling bells around their ankles coming back in waves. Abruptly a new sound took over. It was a motorbike, a suzukiyo in Dowayo. The arrival of a motorbike in the village is not an everyday occurrence and we all rushed down to the cactus hedge around the village to see who it was. The sound died away as the machine descended into a dip. Then, astride a wildly bucking machine, there appeared a gendarme with an automatic carbine slung over his back. Zuuldibo and I looked at each other in unspoken recognition of the fact that he had come for one of us. Swiftly, he folded his comic umbrella and slipped away, knees bent like Groucho Marx lest his head appear above the hedge. It seemed I stood alone. People fled in all directions, rather as if a visit by Attila the Hun had been announced. There followed a pause while the gendarme parked his bike and threatened various forms of physical dismemberment to the crowd of children if they touched his machine. He appeared somewhat diffidently in the gateway, dropped his carbine and shook hands with me. To my relief I recognized him as one of the pleasant idlers from the police post. As we entered my hut, I had a moment's dread of finding Zuuldibo there but it was empty.

"I think he had to go off."

I offered him a beer -- the very last of my stock -- and tried to find out more. It was useless; he did not know any more but was delighted to take off his boots, ease his feet and question me about the Dowayos rather like a good British bobby informing himself about his "patch". Today everyone was an anthropologist. Being a southerner, he engaged in a good deal of headshaking about "primitive ways" and insisted I write down an account of his own circumcision in the forests of that area. He laid great stress upon the fact that at marriage his wife had been obliged to pay him one franc -- "for the pain of circumcision he had suffered that he might give her joy".

"Er, what does it mean?"

He pulled out a letter, embossed with stamps and numerals. Inside was a flimsy piece of paper bearing the word "Convocation". It was a complete mystery to me.

"Oh, they must be in the fields."

"Well, it's you I'm here for anyway. But the captain says we must always greet the local chief before we enter the village."

"Is the chief here?"

He smiled beatifically. It was clearly going to be one of those days. Fieldwork seems to consist of long periods that are impossible to reconstruct afterwards because nothing happened, alternating with days of intense activity when one rides a roller-coaster of good fortune and disaster.

"You have to go to the prefect's office in Garoua at once. I expect it means you're being deported."

The gendarme gave me a pitying look.

"Where is everyone?" he asked in French.

We left to much twitching of grass mats, eyes peering out from behind them like those of genteel ladies keeping watch behind net curtains. Outside the town‚ I was dropped off.

Having finally found a desperately keen informant, albeit one from entirely the wrong area, it was dispiriting to have to work the conversation round to more mundane matters. The convocation?

My visit was quite astonishingly uncomplicated. The sous-préfet was at home, free and willing to see me. He waved me inside and listened to my story. My passport was inspected. After a swift perusal, he stabbed it with his finger. "Here is the trouble. They gave you a provisional visa in the capital, not a temporary one." There indeed was the visa, a head with an insulting caricature of the profile of an African woman. Inevitably, I thought of Precocious and his hideous ivory pendants. Beside it, were stamped the doom-laden words "valid for three weeks, non-renewable". With a deft hand, the sous-préfet simply deleted the non-renewable clause and stamped it. "You had better go to Garoua," he urged. "I will write you a note to the prefect."

The message had come over the radio this morning and the captain had sent him out to find me. He looked coy and regarded his feet with rapt attention. He could, of course, always tell the captain I had been away in the bush so that he had been forced to leave a note on my door. This would give me time to see the sous-préfet before the police got hold of me. He would even give me a lift into town on the back of his motorbike if I would promise to jump off and hide if anyone came the other way.

So, far from being shipped off in chains as I had imagined, I ended up being chauffeur-driven. Such violent alternations of fortune work powerfully upon the mind. Anthropologists are perhaps distinguished by possessing a supplementary gear into which they can drop in the face of frustration and disaster. It is a state almost of suspended animation, devoid of emotion, in which the most fearful misfortunes or accretions of minor irritations simply wash over the fieldworker in a way that would astonish friends and relations at home who may know the person concerned as energetic and incisive.

I stammered out suitable thanks. "Do not mention it. Another thing. My car has to go to the city tomorrow morning. If you like, there is no reason why you cannot sit in it."

As I sped by in a sea of equanimity, policemen at the roadside saluted me. I was spared the usual document checks. Inevitably in such situations one remembers childhood stories of the complacent speeding to their doom carrying the warrants for their own execution. By the time we reached the city, however, I had all but perfected the magisterial wave of huge condescension bestowed upon those who witnessed my passage. I had begun to feel that maybe I had got the hang of African bureaucracies.

I withdrew and loitered with studied innocence outside the door then slipped behind the building.

Here, furtively, we kept our tryst. The upshot of it all was that I ended up buying a 200-franc stamp for 400 francs. As I left, he asked again, "Is he really married to your sister?" I looked wide-eyed with wonder. "Of course."

The prefect's office struck back in relatively muted fashion. The note from the sous-préfet aroused a certain amount of suspicion. It was handled with great circumspection as if it might turn out to be important evidence against me. "What is your connection with the sous-préfet?" asked one hostile official. "He married my sister." The official nodded sagaciously. Soon my passport sported a new visa in defiance of the non-renewable clause. The official smiled. "There is one problem. You need a 200-franc fiscal stamp." He shrugged. "We have none. There are no 200-franc fiscal stamps in the city." He leaned forward. "If you meet me behind the building in ten minutes. I may be able to help. Otherwise you can wait in Garoua till we get some." His exaggerated use of mouth and eyebrows suggested this would not be a wise move.

It was time to sort out accommodation for the night and I made, as usual, for a small hotel that consisted of a clutch of cement huts, but with running water. It sat next to the brand-new, self-consciously grand Novotel, across from the city too. At all hours of the day and night, air-conditioned buses carried up loads of French and German tourists in Yves Saint Laurent safari suits.