Yet, valuable as all this was, I felt that I was no closer to the facts of circumcision which, after all, was what I had come to witness. We went through endless rehearsals with the impatience of a peacetime army. Matthieu and I cleaned and checked the equipment. Fungus and the ravages of termites had affected only unimportant parts of the apparatus. We practised loading film. I taught Matthieu to take photographs both with an automatic and a manual camera. He swiftly mastered both.

Time had dragged on in Dowayoland. My own metabolic processes seemed to have adapted to a slower pace of life. Outsiders who appeared seemed to flash across the horizon at indecent speed. I rose, ate, drank, excreted, talked. Time passed. Most of the day was spent with a local healer who had accepted me as a pupil. We went out together, discussed illnesses. (How do you know it is this illness? Is this just a sign of another illness or an illness itself?) I became skilled in the art of diagnosis. I learned how to rub slices of zepto together, like the healers, to divine whether the ultimate cause of disease was ancestral displeasure, witchcraft, a violated interdiction, contact with polluted people and so on. I learned herbal remedies. I learned how to bleed a woman suffering from excess of blood owing to exposure to sunlight. My tutor was as sagacious, gentle and rigorous as my tutor at Oxford had been.

While we were engaged in such time-filling activities, we seemed to see a lot of the chief's youngest daughter, Irma. She developed the habit of coming and preening herself in the space before our huts. There is nothing particularly unusual in this. The compound, after all, belonged to her father. Dowayo maids are much given to self-beautification. They weave their hair into intricate patterns. They rub their skin with oil and red kaolin until they shine like antique mahogany.

After a while, however, she began to adopt what seemed to be consciously languorous poses along the logs that served as seats before her father's house. She sang odd little melodies and showed her profile to full advantage. Matthieu's embarrassment was manifest. It was obvious to all that she had set her sights on him. Of course, she was married already but this did not necessarily count for very much. Dowayos frequently divorce. The introduction of a young, unattached but highly marriageable young man such as Matthieu into the compound was bound to have a certain disruptive effect on social life. I was relieved that the impact seemed to be on Zuuldibo's daughter rather than one of his wives. Thus far, I had heard no murmur of complaint, a sign that everyone must have been on their very best behaviour where there were so many jealous ladies watching each other's every move.

Irma had not been greatly favoured by nature. From her father came her stocky frame, unrelieved by the slightest sign of a waist, and the bullet-like skull that she emphasized by constant shaving of her head. Her real strength in the marriage stakes lay, however, not in her physical charms. Her great attraction lay in the proof she had given of her unusual fertility, having produced two children -- one alas now dead -- in the course of a mere two years of marriage. She was now pregnant again. Should she divorce at this point, the ownership of the child would make a splendid legal wrangle that the Dowayos would digest with relish. She was admittedly a little older than Matthieu but this is no great impediment in a culture where a boy may expect to inherit his father's wives or take over those of a Nestorian uncle. She would be a very good match for him if he could raise the bride-price. I knew with a resigned certainty that his hopes would centre on me as his source of finance. I would be subject to pleas, cajolery and ill-temper until I promised, in a moment of weakness, to help. Looking back over conversations of the past few days, I paranoiacally detected a common theme in Matthieu's discourse. His father's cattle were sick, the millet did not look good this year. I resolved to strike back with a few dropped remarks about my own poverty and lack of cash.

Over the next few days, Irma decided to up the pressure herself. We were always playing about with cameras, surely we would wish to photograph her? Would we prefer a picture with her child (we knew of course that she had already had two children) or without? It was a pity that she had had no chance to decorate herself, she indicated her ample form with an elegant gesture, but perhaps we would be content with her everyday appearance? In a fit of gratuitous wickedness, I suggested that Matthieu should take some practice shots of Irma.

One particularly invidious technique used by Matthieu in the past, to bring pressure to bear, was to place relatives at strategic points in public places. They could then leap out upon me, embracing my knees and crying out my generosity to the world. Tears of gratitude would spring spontaneously to their eyes as they contrasted my wealth with their poverty, my open-handed beneficence with the hard-heartedness of those demanding bride-price. They would wail and shout, thanking me for things I had never agreed to do, until in the public mind, I would be guilty of the worst perfidy were I to refuse.

Thus it was only after a lengthy stay in our company that Irma retreated to the guest hut where she and her husband were lodged. Zuuldibo had honoured them greatly by putting them next to the beer hut, a position of great trust. Immediately, we heard raised voices, the slap of a husbandly hand and the head of Zuuldibo's son-in-law rose over the low mud wall to glare at us. That he should do this in her father's village showed that things were heading for a crisis. I decided we needed an expedition to remove us from the village until things had settled down.

It was at this point that Gaston arrived on his bicycle. There was a man in town, a black-white man, who claimed to know me and was looking for me. Gaston had sent him to the mission and ridden back to warn me in case I wanted to avoid him. This Dowayo view of the world as full of people who had to be avoided, as rich in opportunities not to see people, was one that always appealed to me.

I guessed at once who it was, my colleague Bob, the man who had accompanied me in the incident of the monkey and the cinema. The designation 'black-white man' does not indicate one of mixed race (Bob was very dark) but a black man who is Westernized and behaves like a white man.

Bob and I had met purely by chance some time before. I was driving into the city for supplies when I came across a strange sight. There, standing by the roadside, was a man hitch-hiking. In itself, there is nothing very unusual about this. People in Africa hitch-hike all the time. Whole families do it together, often with most of the family possessions and livestock on their heads. The approved method, however, is to stand by the roadside waving the whole lower arm in a curiously limp-wristed, flapping motion. The lift, if offered, is not normally a gratuitous benefaction for payment is expected. This constitutes an important supplement to the salaries of lorry drivers, for example. No vehicle is ever considered unsuitable for the large-scale transport of people and chattels. Petrol-tankers, for example, are held to be ideal for this purpose and are regularly to be seen thundering along with rather wide-eyed passengers clinging to their rounded tops.

The present figure was unusual in that he was hitching after the Western fashion, jerking an extended thumb into the air at approaching vehicles. This was unfortunate. In Africa, interpretations of this gesture may vary but all agree that it is extremely rude. Such a gesture, executed in the face of a huge African trucker, may readily lead to rage and violence. Should any female member of his family, such as his mother or sister, be in the cab of a truck so addressed, the consequences are likely to be extreme.

The hiker seemed innocent of slanderous intent. An expression of puzzled disappointment was stamped across his features. Occasionally a truck would swerve dangerously towards him, sometimes a face, distorted with anger, would appear briefly through a cab window and mouth silent words of rage at him. None stopped. I did.

My passenger, assuming I was French, conversed with me for some time in that tongue. Having ascertained that I spoke English as well, he switched to that language, albeit with a strong American accent. It was still not obvious that he was not of wholly African origins. Often, the gilded youth of Africa will model its English on the heroes of the no-longer-silent screen and attain John Wayne drawls or accents rich in the lore of the plantation, without ever having visited the USA.

It was only after some miles that he grudgingly confessed to being a black American or as he put it 'an African of American origin'. It seemed that his truck had broken down some miles to the east of where I picked him up. What was he doing here? Was he perhaps with the Peace Corps? Bob's expression betrayed a certain lack of admiration for the Corps and its values. He was an anthropologist. His research centred on market-traders in the cities. He was seeking to determine what factors affected the type and price of goods in the market-place and the subtler cultural aspects of its economic operations. Since he had been so reticent about his own origins, I was silent about mine and encouraged him to give me a lecture on the nature of the anthropological endeavour. I no longer recall exactly what he said except that he seemed to reserve a special sort of scorn for anthropologists who concerned themselves with religion or ritual as I did. They were, it seemed, inherently frivolous and evil, diverting attention, as they did, from the realities of economic exploitation.

I suppose that, had Bob and I met in Europe or America, we would have fairly rapidly decided that we were not likely to get on and simply left the matter there. But so great is the sense of isolation of Westerners in Africa, that all differences seem to pale to insignificance. You end up feeling warmly about people you would not even talk to at home.

As it was, he seemed rather desperately anxious to speak English with someone and, as I dropped him in one of the less smart townships of the city, he offered the normal form of hospitality -- a beer.

His house was modern but modest, of square mud bricks covered with a skim of cement. A small garden lay at the back together with a separate cooking hut. Africans are appalled at European preparedness to cook and sleep under the same roof. He had furniture, I noted with envy, including such luxury features as a bed and chairs of angle-iron. Curiously, although of immense strength, these were, as always in Cameroon, broken. The present specimens were lacking occasional legs and arms as if veterans of some withering campaign. The most wanton self-indulgence was a low coffee-table on which we set our beers. To make up for such fripperies, we drank man-to-man from the bottle. From the temperature of the beer, he had a refrigerator too.

Bob and I got to know each other quite well in the course of the next few months. Lonely Westerners tend to seek each other out in the same restricted selection of locales. It was almost two months before he ever asked me what I was doing in Cameroon, no doubt assuming that I was involved in one of the many development projects, and providing me with a sort of cameo of the anthropologist in his natural setting. When he did find out, it inevitably became a joke between us, he constantly threatening to visit me in the field.

Bob was a man of unquiet mind. Most of his problems came from being black and his attempts to adopt a sensible, sensitive and self-aware stance to his colour and its implications. He had done something called 'Black Studies' in an Eastern college for he held the view that it was vital for coloured Americans to have an alternative cultural tradition that would assign them a higher place than did the white one. He never celebrated Christmas but an obscure festival of Swahili origin. He had been mortified to discover that Africans had never heard of it. He had learned Swahili and imposed it on his wife and children for one day a week in the house. Having never been informed otherwise and having assumed that Africa was in some sense a unity, he had been genuinely astonished that no one in Cameroon could speak it or had even heard of the language.

The first crisis had come after a mere few weeks. His small daughter had fallen ill. There is nothing like illness for cutting through the layers of pretension that all people use to insulate their self-respect. All Bob's African friends spoke of powerful purgative draughts and copious bleeding of the child with cupping horns. Bob wanted an American doctor, someone with sterile equipment and a reassuring white coat. In this, his wife had been in full agreement, firmly refusing the ministrations of local healers in the knowledge that they could worry about the implications of this for their avowed 'Africanness' later. Bob, however, had insisted that his child should stay with her family in the hot, noisy, dirty township, without plumbing. Bob's wife had insisted on moving to a hotel until the child recovered. Harsh words, impossible to call back, had been spoken. Life had become a strained truce.

All this, he confessed, had been in his green and naive days. Since arrival in Africa, he had settled down to learning Fulani, a language that came only with difficulty, and picked an unexciting but doubtless valuable research topic that he had worked on with a passion. In order to establish his bona fides with the local people, he insisted on living in one of the non-patrician areas of the town, in a hut without running water. It sometimes seemed that the absence of plumbing was his ultimate anthropological credential. Here he had installed his wife and three children in order to share the rich and colourful life of the local people and 'find his roots'. The problem was that his wife found the local life neither rich nor colourful.

An unhealable breach had developed when it was discovered that Bob, in accordance with local norms of friendship, had allowed the wives of neighbours to breast-feed the smallest child when she became fractious. His wife had been horrified at the thought of unwashed breasts being popped promiscuously into the mouth of her sanitized offspring. The child was sent home to live with her grandmother in the United States, 'for health reasons'.

Matters had finally come to a head over the issue of the schooling of the children. Bob, only too aware of the potentially divisive effect of segregation in education, had been unshakeable in his resolve to send the children to the local school. His wife failed to appreciate that the abysmally low scholastic levels her children encountered there were to be regarded as part of the rich and colourful local life. Since she and Bob had suffered from bad schooling in childhood and had had to make Herculean efforts to work their way through college, he could see her point of view and had offered only a half-hearted resistance. Reasonableness had led inexorably to defeat. The other children had followed the first, 'to be with their sister'. Bob's ideological bedrock had now begun to crumble. Worse was yet to follow -- the defection of his wife.

The next eruption had come over the issue of whether or not the children should be allowed to swim in the bilharzia-infested river, as did the children of the locals. A neat compromise had been found. Bob had been forced to spend two weeks away from his research trying to convince his neighbours to forbid their children from going near the river. He did not succeed entirely, but made enough converts to justify his own stance. Thus he fitted in with normality by changing normality.

Bob's parents having been at one time heavily engaged in domestic service, he stoutly refused all offers from washermen, gardeners, house-repairers, drivers and the like since, in his eagerness to throw off the shackles of an outmoded servitude, he was loth to impose on his fellows the indignity of menial tasks. This, again, was taken very ill by his neighbours, vitiating all his attempts at good relations. In Africa it is often the duty of the rich to supply employment for the poor -- this was exactly how it was explained to Bob's wife. Locals refused to comprehend Bob's unwillingness to help them. The only reason could be his notorious meanness. In cultures where the pagan virtues are preached if not always practised, meanness is held to be a far worse sin than in our own culture. Where the whole fabric of social life is held together by the largely unenforceable claims of reciprocal gifts and obligations, the world is threatened by a stingy man. It was this that -- added to the tedium of social life, the impossibility of finding what she considered to be food fit to eat, the general ill-will of other women who were scandalized at behaviour in her they would have accepted in a white American -- drove her to leave 'to be with her children'.

Though by nature good-hearted and generous, she was slowly worn down by life in the township. The worst thing was that all the neighbours insisted on treating her and her husband as American first and black second. There was no reciprocity to effusions of soul brotherhood. Bob's determination to live in an inconvenient, cramped hut was greeted with bewilderment. One man, in his cups, had upbraided Bob in the street. What sort of a man was he to live in squalor when it was known all Americans were rich? His wife and family were ill-served by such meanness. He had even quoted proverbs at a defenceless Bob.

So, Bob was left on his own with his project and soon fell under the wing of a matronly neighbour concerning whose relations with the 'black-white man' scandalous rumours began to circulate.

For Bob, on his cultural pilgrimage to Africa, had found an experience that saved him.

For this saving of a human being, I myself claim no credit. But I think some must go to the Dowayos and -- more especially -- to Irma.

The straw that broke the camel's back was Bob's work on markets. The local Fulani merchants rigged the local market with such a tightly enforced monopoly that all newcomers and non-Fulani were excluded. They, moreover, assigned to themselves profits of such proportions that Bob was appalled. Having experienced all his life the hard school of deprivation under white domination, he found it difficult to cope with the notion that black Africans could oppress black Africans with equal fervour and complacency. Ultimately he was to break off his studies and return to America. Curiously, his dedication to Black Studies was in no way diminished. When last heard of he was setting up a major programme on African literature.

Bob turned up at the village some time later -- Matthieu and I having abandoned all hope of getting away from Irma who had posted herself, still simpering, across the compound. He explained that he had been on his way to one of the southern cities 'for some comparative work' and had decided to look me up for a few hours. Matthieu and I took him on a guided tour. We visited the chief, the skulls of the dead, finally the men's washing-place, a haven set among trees where men bathed in the gushing cold water and lay around on the sunny ledges to relax and talk. Bob was entranced. He had never really visited an isolated village before, spending all his time in cities and those villages by the main highway which supplied produce for the city markets.

He loved the houses with their cool compounds tiled with broken pots and their smooth red walls. He loved the delicate patterns of light and shade cast upon the ground by the awnings of plaited grass. He loved the meadows rolling away to the tumbling river. He loved the mountains, jagged and brutal that rose up through the clouds. He loved the fields with their neat rows of crops.

Bob contemplated it all with love. Most of all he loved Irma. She seemed to have taken to him with fierce devotion, adopting a semi-swooned position at his feet as we sat down outside my hut. Communication between them was difficult, Matthieu acting as interpreter -- and interpreting with great freedom. She gave him a present of a little bundle of red peppers. He gave her some chewing-gum and a photograph of himself, suitably inscribed. I thought inevitably of Black Héloïse. Would that grinning image turn up in fifty years' time at the bottom of an old woman's trunk? Bob was ebullient. Irma, he revealed, was fresh and natural, the true Africa. It was cities that were bad and cities -- as everyone knew -- were a foreign importation. All that was bad, he saw now, came from the oppressive forces of the West. But there were still pockets of indigenous wisdom. He warmed to his theme, contrasting the harsh deprivations of his own city life with my own good fortune in living with these truly wonderful human beings. Matthieu rapidly gave up translating all this, explained to him in Bob's halting French interspersed with rhapsodic outbursts in English. 'He said the village looks rich,' he would explain to a frantic Irma, or, 'He said the city is expensive.'

Dowayoland conspired with him to fit into some idyll of rural peace and fulfilment. The village basked in benevolent warmth. Chickens did not screech, they cooed. Children existed solely as a source of pure and innocent laughter that trickled, like music, to our ears. Cattle lowed in hushed tones that exuded fat contentment. No youths strutted with blaring transistors to remind of a larger, harsher world. Matthieu's own radio lay silent in the red, glossy cosy he had sewn for it. Gone were the human figures toiling for hour after hour, bent double in the broiling sun. They could be glimpsed like delicate sculptures, recumbent in the field-shelters. Their elegance of gesture, the sweet mumble of their voices, suggested poetry rather than a wrangle over the ownership of cattle. The fields themselves looked suave and complete as if simply there without human effort. A sumptuous peace reigned as far as the eye could see, in some vast cosmic act of imposture.

After several hours of this Bob and Irma had worked themselves up into a mutual fervour. Somewhat anti-climactically, he announced his departure, climbed into his air-conditioned vehicle and was gone. The treacherous Arcadian phase was shattered in a bitter quarrel between Irma and her husband. Chickens once more screeched, children quarrelled. The Dowayos could be seen toiling in the fields wresting a scant living from a hostile soil.

Bob's image of Africa, of himself, of Black America were saved by a romantic vision. Small wonder, then, that he sought sanctuary in literature rather than further anthropology. As for Irma, she was in tears at his departure, but she now had someone to dream about. Possibly that was all she had ever wanted. Henceforth she totally ignored Matthieu.