Dinner the evening was a lively affair. Pastor Brown had espoused the cause of the water project and called a conference. His latest innovation was solar power. Quite reasonably, he had decided that it was a scandalous waste of resources to haul gas and paraffin into the heart of Africa simply to burn them. Investigation of the mail-order catalogues that he favoured had provided, after suitable delay, a huge sheet of solar panels that he installed on the roof of his house. By the simple expedient of exposing these to blinding sunlight throughout the day, he was able to entice a single bulb to glow for several hours of the night. Immediately he cut off all other forms of energy, which reduced his family to scuttling about with torches while the Great Bulb glowed in the living-room. Here we sat to eat, blinking like hedgehogs in the beam of a car's headlights. To supply the Great Bulb, large holes had been knocked in the ceiling. This was unfortunate as the roof space was inhabited to bursting with bats whose faces bore a curious sneering expression. Attracted by the Great Bulb, they swooped and circled, casting huge shadows on the walls. Blinded by the Great Bulb, they regularly thudded into obstructions or threatened to become entangled in the diners' hair. One of the endemic cats had decided to exploit the situation with some impromptu leaps and dives, bringing down bats that she carried to a corner and devoured with horrendous crunching and slurping noises. Occasionally, Pastor Brown would be driven to the point of incoherent rage by this flying vermin and fire off a couple of rounds from the air-rifle he kept by his chair, screaming in Fulani as he did so. The guests, the cat, other members of the family would fling themselves to the floor as pieces of bat and plasterboard descended into the food.

Community projects such as this always seem eminently sensible. To refuse to cooperate with them seems selfish and unfeeling. Often, however, they are fraught with difficulties, both practical and moral. Motives are never quite clear.

The local Catholic missionary and the doctor were also present, together with a young man from the Peace Corps. Ecumenical goodwill reigned. Everyone commented politely on the Great Bulb and studiously ignored the bats.

With the blessing of the sous-préfet, it was decided that the town should have, as mentioned earlier, a clean water supply. This was, indeed, an urgent necessity. Most fatalities in the area were due to water-borne diseases. There was little point in the doctor devoting time and drugs to the treatment of bilharzia and other parasites for as soon as people went near the river, which all used for washing, drinking and dumping sewage in, they were reinfected. Various possibilities were discussed. A series of wells was proposed. This would have been ruinously expensive. Wells, moreover, are easily polluted. It was finally decided that the only way was to take the water from one of the perpetual rivers in the hills inhabited by the Dowayos. This was where I came in.

The doctor hoped quite reasonably to eradicate at a stroke the major component of his case-load. Most of the endemic fatal diseases either derived from impure water sources or else these sources so debilitated local inhabitants that otherwise mild infections proved fatal. He had despaired of treating villagers who promptly became reinfected when they returned to their homes. Pure water was the only way to break the cycle.

The man from the Peace Corps quite clearly needed a large project with a budget, thereby justifying his own existence and endearing himself to his superiors. As a source of money and employment, he would also have power.

The missionaries certainly had the material improvement of the locals at heart but were doubtless aware that by controlling the water they would be breaking the power of the rain-chief and so eroding pagan beliefs.

As an anthropologist, I was most uncomfortable of all. Although anthropology studies people, it does so at a certain remove, less as individuals than as representatives of some collective culture. Studying the way a people behaves and seeking to direct that behaviour are, in theory, two different things, though no anthropologist leaves his people unchanged. While not wishing endemic diseases on anyone, I was doubtful whether the project would be pursued except at the expense of the Dowayos. Taking the water from the hills to give to the town would be seen by Dowayos as the stealing of their water to give to Fulani invaders. Normally, water from these mountains could not be drunk even by Dowayos except with the express permission of the rain-chief since it belonged to him. It was vital to the irrigation of the hills and for the support of the dwarf cattle that were the joy of the Dowayos. I knew enough of the local situation to expect that the Dowayos would be required to furnish most of the labour. They would be far from willing to give this except on their own terms. The sous-préfet too was a determined man who would brook no opposition in what was clearly a project for the great general good. If the Dowayos would not work willingly, they would be forced to work. I foresaw a great deal of unhappiness and trouble for what I had come to regard in an inevitably paternalistic way as 'my' people. It was true that certain nods were made in favour of safeguarding rights of access to Dowayos, but it was difficult to know how much store was to be set on these.

Everyone in the house, except myself and the bats, seemed to have had a good time and left in the rosy glow of direct altruism in action. I was more than a little depressed as I trudged back to the village on my own. As an anthropologist, I did not want the rain-chief undermined. He was an old pirate, but I liked him. More than that, he was interesting.

I never knew the end of the project, whether it came to fruition or not‚ whether the funding simply disappeared quietly somewhere along the way, whether it died in bitterness or torpor. The last I heard of it was from the sous-préfet just before I left for England. He explained that latest costings suggested that the whole stream would have to be simply put in a pipe to supply the town without any access for Dowayos along the way‚ as this would be too expensive. This would involve initial discomfort and adjustment but would be a more efficient use of the water and, after all, the Dowayos could always move.

The peace of the village seemed strangely disturbed. In the bush could be heard the voices of men talking. An odd humming filled the air. There was an uncanny glow in the sky as if the Great Bulb had been transported to the centre of the village by a miraculous agency.

A strange sight greeted me as I peered between the spiky plants. It seemed that I was to be haunted by cinemas. In the public circle was assembled a large crowd. Just about every Dowayo capable of movement, including the halt and lame, had gathered before the shrine to the skulls of slaughtered cattle.

In front of the shrine for dead men, a collapsible screen had been erected, iridescent in the glare of a gleaming projector. Over to one side stood a fleet of shiny Land-Rovers whose doors bore the stencilled insignia of some UN agency.

One's first fears are always selfish. It was probably a hut on fire. I felt with strange certainty that it was mine. All my notes on local healing techniques, my camera and equipment, my documents and records were now doubtless disappearing in a pall of smoke. I broke into a trot and arrived at the cactus-hedge hot and dishevelled.

Though lacking the ecological appeal of the Great Bulb, the equipment was impressive. Power was provided by one of the vehicles purring smoothly. With the curiosity natural to the young, little boys had gathered round it, poking their fingers into the speeding parts and quite ignoring the film. In a spirit of experimental exploration, they tested the effects of introducing their bows and arrows into the mechanism. A large, irate man in a peaked cap chased them away from time to time.

A group of old Dowayo ladies, dressed in the bulky leaves of widowhood, had taken their seats in the thick dust below the screen. They passed a calabash of peanuts from hand to hand, chewing gamely on the hard shells, and spat the sherds daintily to one side, devoting to the film the same half-attention that they would bestow upon their sons' goats. The real focus of their attention was the scandalous behaviour of one of the young ladies of the village. They raked her over the coals with relish.

Matthieu and Zuuldibo, oblivious to my return, were standing arguing loudly with a hirsute white man, clearly the organizer of the event, about how much money Zuuldibo would require for allowing the film to be shown in his village. I crept in quietly at the back and sat down on the convenient roots of a tree. No monkeys were present.

Further loud conversation came from a group of younger women, eyes fixed on the screen, as their hands flashed with practised movements over a pile of shredded bark, transforming it into semi-spherical baskets. Later, they would plaster over the inside with cattle dung to make them suitable as food-containers.

It seemed, from descriptions I heard later, that I had missed the first offering, a Tom and Jerry cartoon. The second feature was now in progress, a rather macabre presentation about the relationship between mosquitoes and malaria, urging villagers to kill the former and so prevent the latter.

To the anthropologist, this was a heaven-sent opportunity to conduct a little research in visual anthropology, the sort of equipment being here presented that a researcher could not normally even dream about. In previous work, I had established that many older Dowayos seemed unable to interpret photographs of human or animal faces. They had simply never learned to do so. It would be interesting to see what they made of their first cinema show. The younger men‚ of course, had been to the city and sampled many of the delights of modernity such as the cinema. It was certain that the old women here would never have seen anything even remotely similar. I settled back cosily and composed the list of questions I would ask. With luck, it would make a nice little article.

Huge representations of filthy disease-bearing mosquitoes slavered repulsively across the screen, plunging rasping probosces into human flesh. Close-ups of agonized human faces, streaming with sweat, followed immediately afterwards implying -- to us -- a causal connection. Martial music blared from loudspeakers on the roof of one of the Land-Rovers to accompany a map of Africa down which a sort of dark cloud spread like wine on a tablecloth. There was a vague background noise of a commentary in French quite drowned out by the man in the peaked cap who ad-libbed his own version in Fulani. The old ladies chewed on impassively, occasionally slapping at one of the huge numbers of mosquitoes attracted by the light, now busily engaged in feasting on the audience.

Travel literature is full of reactions of credulous natives to the motion picture. People are supposed to go round to the back of the screen to seek there the bodies of the cowboys who have been shot, for their delectation, at the front. Other peoples seem to have problems of a different kind. While they accept the immaterial and insubstantial nature of the images presented to them, they never believe that the cowboys are only actors and that they are not really being shot but only pretending. Other anthropologists have presented local people with cameras and made much of the fact that they point them at their feet. Dowayos were totally unimpressed by the whole thing.

The hirsute white man eventually noticed me and came across. We circled each other with the wariness of sniffing dogs. He proved to be German. He appeared more than a little piqued that interest in the mosquito film was not greater, explaining with visible satisfaction that sometimes people fled screaming from the images of giant insects. On the basis of this, he had developed a sort of philosophy of size. People only saw reality when it was big. The world could be transformed merely by an act of magnification. Had not the magnifying glass changed our perception of things? The camera would do yet more. Quite gratuitously, I thought of a cartoon I had once witnessed showing a giant rabbit pushing over the skyscrapers of New York. The caption read, 'If that were a gorilla, people would be worried.' I wisely kept the image to myself. Normally, he revealed, he only showed one serious film, otherwise people were liable to become confused about the message he was trying to get across. Since the mosquito film had not gone too well, he wondered about following it up with a hot little number on birth control. He had had it in his possession for some time but always hesitated to try it out on an even partly Muslim audience. Since the people here were pagans, there could surely be no problem?

Although Dowayos are much given to fornication from an early age, adultery playing much the same role in their out-of-work activities that television plays in our own, they are prudes. The sexes must not see each other naked even in wedlock. To do so would be to risk dire repercussions. A man would become catatonic, a woman become blind. A boy must know nothing of the sexuality of his mother or sister. They, in turn, would be horribly humiliated by reference to the sexuality of a male relative. The insistent obscenity of all-male rituals is the most common pretext advanced for the exclusion of women from all the most important activities. Really close friends of the same sex are those who can be obscene in their talk to each other, indeed must be so on risk of ruining the relationship.

It seems to be an inevitable assumption of Westerners that moral and ethical problems are the exclusive invention of the big world religions, that guilt and fear of punishment are simply pernicious notions exported by rabid missionaries.

Looking round the public circle, there was Marie, the chief's third wife, with her brothers on a visit from the mountains, one of them holding his little daughter on his knees. Over the other side was a venerable mother with her sons and grandsons ranged respectfully about her. It was very tempting to unleash upon them a film of explicit sexual content. It would certainly be the ultimate test of who could work out what was happening on the screen. In my mind's eye, I pictured the results -- everyone flying in opposite directions, hot-faced with shame, uttering cries of outrage, faces averted, eyes on the ground, genitals clutched in deep embarrassment.

There is something in everyone that wants to break windows‚ release mice at a gathering of maiden aunts, spike their tea with unexpected gin. The prospect of the birth-control film was deeply alluring. But I knew that the villagers would be more than just shocked in a way that they would laugh about afterwards, they would be deeply and permanently shamed. The only solution would have been to have separate showings for males and females.

Further enquiry revealed that the film was of Swedish origin and involved only white participants whose faces were obscured. It was hard to know what the Dowayos would make of that. It seemed likely, however, that they could scarcely absorb any appropriate message concerning birth control but would rather become bogged down in the incidentals of the performance. The Dowayos certainly have no interest in birth control. In this they have much in common with West Africans generally. It has been said, with a certain amount of justice, that the only material that may be sent through the internal postal service with absolutely no risk of molestation is contraceptives. Dowayos are much concerned to have as many children as possible and infertility is frequently advanced as a reason for divorce. 'Does a man dig a field to raise no crops?' as Zuuldibo tactfully put it. This is not to be regarded as foolish self-indulgence, blind to ecological concerns. The natural fertility of Dowayos is so low from endemic venereal disease, dietary imbalance and the mutilations of the circumcision ceremony, the rate of infant mortality so high, that there is no risk of a population explosion. Sadly, the German went away and packed up.

With the younger people, I fared much better. There were some interesting interpretations to be looked into. Tom had quite generally been identified as a leopard. Although he had no spots, he lacked the stripes that generally characterized cats in Dowayoland. Cats, in this area, are universally of the tabby kind.

Profiting from this windfall, I was able to begin my explorations into visual anthropology the next day. First, I homed in on the group of loquacious old ladies who had witnessed the performance, all of whom were known to me by name. Accounts of what they had witnessed were understandably confused. In West Africa, it is seldom the case that there are the performers and there is the audience, the latter being expected to observe in silence the activities of the former. The line is never that sharp. The 'audience' expect to participate in the activities of the 'actors' in a way that would justify eviction from most Western performative events. What they remembered were the witty comments they had made in turn on the spectacle presented to them. Some were, moreover, so old and afflicted with cataracts that they only had a very hazy notion of what had occurred on the screen. This point became obvious when I noted that each old lady gave me a different list of her friends who had been in the group.

Most seemed to have arrived at a surprisingly coherent interpretation of what had happened on the screen. It is true that I had not seen the film with them, but I remembered it well from my misspent youth. Matthieu and I busied ourselves greatly with note-taking. It was, for example, interesting that Dowayos offered up accounts of the film in forms appropriate to the Dowayo folktale, ending with the formula, 'So… It is finished.'

Only after several days' work did I discover that‚ immediately after the performance, all the men had gathered -- somewhat baffled -- around the fire while one of the youths -- a city slicker versed in the art of cinematographic interpretation -- retold the story as a folktale.

As for the moral of the mosquito film, I fear it was largely lost on the audience. Of course, people explained, they accepted the point that the huge, slavering mosquitoes they had witnessed on the screen could be dangerous and even kill a man. Luckily, those in Dowayoland were quite different, tiny by comparison. Those on the screen had been bigger than a man. Here, in Dowayoland, they were minute. How had the white man not noticed this?