The Innocent Anthropologist Read online

  I decided to have a word with my favourite female informant, Mariyo, the Chief’s third wife. We had become good friends after my drugs had cured the Chief’s younger brother; I was interested in her for several reasons. She lived just behind my own hut and I could not help but notice the incessant streams of farts, coughs and deafening eructations that issued from that area after dark. I felt great sympathy for her as one whose guts were as little suited to Dowayoland as my own. One day I mentioned this to Matthieu who gave out a loud scream of laughter and ran off to share my latest folly with Mariyo. About a minute later, a loud scream of laughter came from her hut, and thereafter I could chart the progress of the story round the village as hysteria hit one hut after another. Finally Matthieu returned, weeping and weakened by laughter. He led me to Mariyo’s compound and pointed to a small hut directly behind my own. Inside lived the goats. Being unversed in the lore of goats, I had been unaware of their human-sound detonations. After this, Mariyo and I were stuck with a joking relationship where we could only communicate by pulling each others’ legs. Dowayos have many such relations, both with specific classes of kinsmen and with sympathetic individuals. At times they are enormously diverting, at others vastly tedious, since they take no account of mood.

  As the result of our joking sessions, Mariyo was a very relaxed informant and accepted my stern separation of joking from ‘asking about things’. She was the only Dowayo I ever met who seemed to have some inkling of what I was after. On one occasion I asked her about the special star-shaped haircuts that female kin wear at a dead woman’s jar ceremony. Did they wear them on any other occasion? She answered in the negative, as any Dowayo would but, unlike the others, added, ‘Sometimes the men do,’ and went on to give me a list of occasions when men cut their hair in this fashion. Since most female rites can only be understood as derived from male rites, this gave me the clue to their interpretation and opened up a whole new line of inquiry that paired designs on the human body with decorations on pots and native ideas of conception that allow the woman to be viewed as a more or less flawed vessel.

  I had gleaned the information regarding pregnant women and threshing floors from other female informants, so I was curious what Mariyo would tell me. I worked round to it gradually. How was a threshing floor made? What happened there? Was there anything one most not do on a threshing floor? Was there anyone who must not enter there? Once again, she replied that pregnant women must not enter, ‘At least,’ she added, ‘not until the child is fully formed and ready to be born.’ This put the matter in quite a different light. She went on to explain that if a pregnant woman appeared on the threshing floor she would give birth too soon. So my pairing of stages of millet and female fertility was saved. It is impossible to explain to a layman the deep satisfaction that comes from such a simple piece of information as this. It serves as a vindication of years of teaching of platitudes, months of disease, loneliness and boredom, hours of asking foolish questions. In anthropology, moments of validation are few and this one came as a needed morale restorative.

  But, as usual in Africa, doing a methodical job could not long be allowed to disrupt a dozen minor concerns and I was forced to take a day off to wage war on the various forms of animal life that had invaded my hut. Lizards I could live with. They ran about in the roof, darting from beam to beam. Their only inconvenience was their habit of defecating on one’s head. Goats were a constant curse one had learned to take precautions against. I had a standing feud with one old billy-goat who loved nothing better than to creep into my compound at two o’clock in the morning and jump up and down on my cooking pots. Chasing him away secured relief only for an hour or so; after that he would come sneaking back and perform an encore, kicking my gas cylinder with his back hooves. The worst thing about him was his stench. Dowayo goats stink so badly that it is possible, when trekking in the bush, to tell whether a male goat has been along the same track in the last ten minutes by smell alone. I finally defeated him by subborning the affections of the Chief’s dog, Burse, who was hopelessly addicted to chocolate. Giving him one square every evening ensured that he spent the night outside my hut and chased all goats away. Thereafter he introduced his wife and children into the family business and proved a considerable drain on supplies. Dowayos were vastly amused to see my retinue of dogs who would follow me for miles in the bush and sometimes nicknamed me ‘the great hunter’.

  Termites were a constant threat to all paper. They had a cunning habit of invading books from the inside and devouring them so that externally they appeared perfect while consisting of the merest wafer-thin shell. A short bout of chemical warfare routed them.

  Mice were more infuriating. They stonily ignored my food. Like all other life-forms in Dowayoland they were addicted to millet; the only thing I had that they liked was plastic. They devoured the hose for the water-filter in a single night. They made concerted attacks on my camera. What I hated worst about them was their clumsiness as they crashed and thudded from one piece of equipment to another. Their fate was sealed one appalling night when I woke up in the darkness to feel a quivering form on my chest. I lay there immobile, convinced it was a deadly green mamba curled up directly over my heart. I tried to estimate its dimensions. Should I lie there and hope it would go away? Alas, I am a very untidy sleeper and feared that I might well fall asleep and turn over onto it with fatal consequences. I decided that my best move was to count to three and leap up, throwing it off. I counted, uttered a loud yell and flung myself sideways, leaving a goodly part of my knee on the raised edge of the bed. With an unerring dexterity that quite impressed me at the time, I snatched up my torch and shone it on my attacker. There, transfixed in the beam, trembled the smallest mouse I have ever seen. I felt quite ashamed until, in the morning, I discovered it had tried to eat my dentures. That hardened my heart and I made a tour of the village collecting mouse-traps. In a single night I killed ten mice which the children ate.

  Far worse than these, however, were cicadas. Ten million cicadas scattered around the hills of Dowayoland produce that pleasant hum that is the hallmark of evening in tropic climes. A single cicada trapped in your hut is a recipe for insanity. They have a curious ability to secrete themselves into small crevices. It is strangely difficult to get a directional fix on their sound. In light they are completely silent. In darkness, they produce the most piercingly strident rasping screech. The only way to detect them was to saturate the area with the contents of a can of insecticide that optimistically displayed images of choking cockroaches, gasping flies, mosquitoes going into tailspins, etc. This was just enough to make them break cover and career woozily over the floor where they could be dispatched with about ten blows from a heavy object. After several sleepless nights the violence and rage required for such a proceeding comes quite naturally.

  What had really provoked me to a declaration of all-out war was the discovery that scorpions were nesting in one corner of the hut where I kept my spare pair of shoes. Having picked these up in all innocence, I was appalled when a large, snapping scorpion rushed out and made straight for me. Shrieking in most unmanly fashion, I retreated through the door where stood a Dowayo waif of about six who looked at me quizzically. Stress had somewhat disrupted my lexicon and I could not find the word for ‘scorpion’. There are hot beasts within!’ I cried in an Old Testament voice. The child peered inside and with an expression of profound disdain stamped the scorpions to death with his bare feet. (For the benefit of others, let me point out that scorpions are rarely fatal but their sting can cause severe pain. It is treated by immersing the area in cold water and taking anti-histamine tablets that are issued as standard for hay fever.)

  Dowayos were always surprised that I found snakes and scorpions as horrifying as I did but had actually been known to avoid running down that most horrible of birds, the owl. On one occasion I had been seen to pick up a chameleon, whose bite is held to be deadly, after some children had been tormenting it, and place it on a tree. This was an act of great f
olly. My most useful madness was that I was prepared to handle the claws of the ant-eater. Dowayos would not touch these since if they did so their penises would permanently acquire their drooping shape. The claws could be used to kill a man by embedding them in the fruit of the baobab tree and calling out the name of the intended victim; when the fruit drops, he will die. Dowayos who had killed an ant-eater would publicly summon me and present me with the claws as an earnest of their peaceful intentions to fellow villagers. I would then have to carry them up into the hills and bury them away from frequented places. My role as a cosmological pollution control officer was much appreciated.

  I gathered from travellers that the millet of my ‘true cultivator’ was not yet ready for harvesting, so I was able to settle back and watch the latest distraction – an election in Kongle. The sous-préfet had summoned all the villagers at a certain place and time so that he could talk to them about it and the outstanding problem of the chiefship. In fact he never turned up, leaving them all sitting under a tree for two days before they drifted back to the fields. Several days later there appeared a goumier in the village. These unpleasant people are ex-soldiers used by the central government to ensure obedience in recalcitrant villages where gendarmes cannot keep an eye on things. They take up residence for long periods, living off their hosts, and bully them into doing whatever is demanded of them. In areas where people are ignorant of their rights, or know perhaps how little store to set by them, they exert a considerable tyranny. This particular individual was to ensure that polling booths were prepared for the elections. Hitherto Dowayos had shown themselves very unimpressed by national politics; their enthusiasm was to be stimulated.

  All Dowayos, male and female, were to report on the appointed day and vote. It is the Chief’s responsibility to ensure a good turn-out and Mayo humbly accepted this as his lot while Zuuldibo sat in the shade calling out instructions to those doing the work. I sat with him and we had a long discussion on the finer points of adultery. ‘Take Mariyo,’ he said. ‘People always tried to say she was sleeping with my younger brother, but you saw how upset she was when he was ill. That showed there was nothing between them.’ For Dowayos sex and affection were so separate that one disproved the other. I nodded wisely in agreement; there was no point in trying to explain that there was another way of looking at it.

  At the polling booths democracy was in full swing. One man was being upbraided for not bringing all his wives. ‘They would not come.’ ‘You should have beaten them.’ I asked several Dowayos what issue they were voting for. They stared at me blankly. You took your identity card, they explained, and gave it to the official over there who stamped it and your vote was marked. Yes, but what were they voting for? More blank stares. They had already explained, you took your card … Not one of them knew what the election was for. No negative votes were accepted. At the end of the day’s proceedings it was felt that not enough votes had been recorded, so everyone was made to vote again. I happened to be in a cinema the week the results were announced with something over ninety-nine per cent of voters choosing the single candidate put up by the only party. I took it as a healthy sign that the audience, safely anonymous in the darkness, hooted with derision.

  But in the village everyone took the voting very seriously indeed, in accordance with regulations. Identity cards were meticulously checked, care was taken to place the stamps exactly in the space provided on the card, the percentage of villagers voting was calculated with precision, the registers were transferred from one official to another with much signing of receipts. No one seemed to see any contradiction between such painstaking observation of minutiae and the blatant disregard of the principles of democracy.

  It was the same at the schools. They are all weighed down with an incredible bureaucratic apparatus for strictly determining which pupils shall be expelled, which promoted and which obliged to take a year again. The amount of time spent in the abstruse calculation of ‘averages’ with arcane formulae is at least equal to that spent in the classroom. And at the end of this, the headmaster arbitrarily decides that the marks look too low and adds twenty across the board, or he accepts bribes from a parent and simply changes marks, or the government decides that it has no need of so many students and invalidates its own examinations. At times it becomes bad farce. It is impossible not to smile at the sight of question papers being guarded by gendarmes with sub-machine guns when the envelope they are in has been opened by a man who sold the contents to the highest bidder several days before.

  After this interlude it was time to go off to my ‘true cultivator’ for the harvest. This involved a trek of some twenty miles and the temperatures were climbing daily. It was a matter of some importance to decide whether to walk the distance at night when it was cooler, or hope for a lift if one set out in full daylight. In the end I opted for the latter course and was lucky enough to run into one of the French Catholic priests commuting between two mission stations. He kindly embarked us and we had a most agreeable trip as he told me his theory of Dowayo culture. It homed in on sexual repression. Everything was ‘about’ sex. The wooden forks set up when a man is killed are, on one side a penis, on the other a vagina; the stress on circumcision represents a deeper uncertainty about castration; the lies about circumcision involving sealing of the rectum are a sure sign that the Dowayos, as a race, are anally obsessive. But he had not only read his manuals of psychology; he had also read anthropology. On examination, this remark meant that he had read a little on the Dogon, a most articulate and self-analytical tribe of Mali. He shook his head sadly over the Dowayos. After all the years he had spent among them they had still not told him their myths or about the primal egg. Having learned that the Dogon were not exactly like the French, he could not cope with the idea that the Dowayos were not exactly like the Dogon.

  It was hard not to accept that part at least of the persuasiveness of an omnipresent lurking sexuality had nothing to do with the demands of sexual continence in an African cultural climate. Perhaps reliance on the Bible prepares one for the belief that all truth is to be found in a single book. Certainly cultural relativism comes especially hard to those with a clear faith, be they missionaries, self-satisfied settlers or the German volunteer who confided to me the encapsulated verity of his three years in Cameroon: ‘If the natives can’t eat it, fuck it, or sell it to a vite man, zey aren’t interested.’

  Our destination was a desolate village at the foot of the harsh granite mountains. It seemed a miracle that anything could grow in the thin, baked soil. The difference in temperature between here and what I had come to view as ‘my’ end of Dowayoland was considerable and both Matthieu and I were glad to slump in the shade while our host was being sought.

  He revealed himself as a short, wizened little man dressed in rags. He was very drunk indeed, although it was only ten in the morning. We went through the normal greetings; mats were brought to sit on. As I had feared, food was to be prepared. I could quite easily handle the odd Dowayo repast of yams, peanuts, even millet; unfortunately, when I turned up at a strange village, there was a social imperative to offer me meat as a sign of respect. Since no one was about to go out and slaughter a steer for the mere joy of impressing me, this normally meant smoked meat which had been suspended in the intermittent smoke above the cooking fire for an indefinite period. Once a sauce was added it released a stench that had a powerful emetic effect. Fortunately, it is impolite to watch strangers eat and so I would retire to a hut with Matthieu to dine. This enabled me to renounce all claims to the proffered food without giving offence, Matthieu eating for two of us while I crouched in a corner and tried to think of other things.

  While this feast was being concocted, I began to talk to my host about inconsequential matters, asking, for example, for information on subjects I already knew about. As I had feared, the answers I received were evasive and liberally mixed with half-truths. Moreover, it seemed that there was some doubt as to whether or not the harvest was imminent. Perhaps he would be
able to arrange it for tomorrow, perhaps not. Ideally, in the course of fieldwork one would have no truck with such informants but restrict one’s activities to those of a polite, kindly and generous disposition who found that answering the relentless and pointless questions of an anthropological inquirer was an amusing and rewarding pursuit. Alas, such people are rare. Most people have other things to do, are easily bored, become annoyed at the inanity of their interlocutor or are concerned more to present themselves in a favourable light than to be strictly honest. For these, the best tactic is quite simply bribery. A small amount of money converts the anthropological quest into a worthwhile activity and opens doors that would otherwise remain closed. On this occasion, as on others, it worked. A small present ensured that the harvesting would be organized with minimum delay and that I should witness the whole operation from start to finish; he would go off and organize it now. As he waddled away, one of his wives arrived with an enormous dish of smoked meat.