The Innocent Anthropologist E-Book

Nigel Barley

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Nigel Barley was a 'new anthropologist', one of the younger generation of academi whose learning and research had been acquired in institutes, research departments, from academic journals and university libraries. But after suffering years of gentle put-downs from leathery old field-workers, their 'teeth permanently gritted from years of dealing with natives', he was determined to gain his own experience. The two years he spent among the Dowayo people in the Cameroons (1978-80) produced a comic masterpiece of travel writing, The Innocent Anthropologist, which remains as honest, as funny and as compelling a read as when it was first penned - and a devastating critique of academi attempting to impose their rules and their order on West African life.

Leseprobe

The Innocent Anthropologist

Notes from a Mud Hut

NIGEL BARLEY

Contents

Title Page

Map

1 The Reason Why

2 Be Prepared

3 To the Hills

4 Honi soit qui Malinowski

5 Take me to your Leader

6 Is the Sky Clear for You?

7 ‘O Cameroon, O Cradle of our Fathers’

8 Rock Bottom

9 Ex Africa semper quid nasty

10 Rites and Wrongs

11 The Wet and the Dry

12 First and Last Fruits

13 An English Alien

About the Author

Copyright

1

The Reason Why

‘Why not go on fieldwork then?’ The question was posed by a colleague at the end of a somewhat bibulous review of the state of the art of anthropology, university teaching and academic life in general. The review had not been favourable. Like Mrs Hubbard we had taken stock and found the cupboard was bare.

My story was a familiar one. I had been raised in the institutions of higher education and drifted more by chance than design into teaching. University life in England is based upon a number of untenable assumptions. First, it is assumed that if you are a good student you will be good at research. If you are good at research, you will be good at teaching. If you are good at teaching, you will wish to go on fieldwork. None of these connections holds. Excellent students do appalling research. Superb academic performers, whose names are never out of the trade journals, provide lectures of such stultifying tedium that students vote with their feet and disappear like dew in the African sun. The profession is full of devoted fieldworkers, skins leathery from exposure to torrid climes, teeth permanently gritted from years of dealing with natives, who have little or nothing of interest to say in an academic discipline. The whole subject of fieldwork, we effete ‘new anthropologists’ with our doctorates based on library research had decided, had been made rather too much of. Of course, older teaching staff who had seen service in the days of empire and ‘just sort of picked up anthropology in the line of business’ had a vested interest in maintaining the cult of the god to whom they were high priests. They had damn well suffered the trials and privations of swamp and jungle and no young whippersnapper should take a short cut.

Whenever pressed in debate over some point of theory or metaphysics, they would shake their heads sadly, draw languidly on their pipes or stroke their beards and mutter something about ‘real people’ not fitting the clear abstractions of those who ‘had never done fieldwork’. They evinced genuine pity for these deprived fellows but the matter was perfectly clear to them. They had been there, they had seen. There was nothing more to say.

After several years teaching the received orthodoxies in a department of anthropology of no particular academic distinction, the time was perhaps right for change. It was far from easy to determine whether doing fieldwork was one of the unpleasant tasks like national service that might quite properly be suffered in silence, or whether it was one of the ‘perks’ of the business that a man should feel grateful for. Colleagues’ opinions were of no real help. Most had had plenty of time to enfold their experiences in a rosy glow of romantic adventure. The fact of past fieldwork is something of a licence to be a bore. One’s friends and relatives are a trifle disappointed if every subject from doing the washing to treating the common cold is not larded with a sauce of ethnographic reminiscence. Old stories become old friends in themselves and soon nothing but the good times of fieldwork remain bar a few awkward islands of unreduced misery that cannot be forgotten or submerged in the general euphoria. For example, I had a colleague who claimed to have had the most marvellous time with agreeable, smiling natives bringing gifts of fruit and flowers by the basketful. But the inner chronology of the stay was provided by statements of the form, ‘That happened after I got food poisoning’ or ‘I wasn’t too steady on my feet at that time since I still had the festering boil under my toes’. One suspected that the whole business was rather like those cheery war reminiscences that make one regret, against all better knowledge, not having been alive at the time.

But perhaps there was something to be gained by the experience. Tutorials would never drag again. When faced with the obligation to talk about a subject on which naturally ignorant, I should be able to reach into my ragbag of ethnographic anecdotes, as my teachers had done in their day, and produce some long-winded story that would keep my pupils quiet for up to ten minutes. A whole range of techniques for squashing people also becomes available. The memory of one occasion, as ever, returns. I was at a conference, dull even by normal standards, making polite conversation with several of my betters who included two very grim Australian ethnographers. As if by some prearranged sign, the others withdrew leaving me starkly exposed to the antipodean horrors. After several minutes of silence, I tentatively suggested a drink in the hope of breaking the ice. The female ethnographer gathered her face into a vile grimace. ‘Nah!’ she cried, mouth twisted with disgust, ‘we’ve seen too much of it in the bush.’ Fieldwork has the great benefit of making such phrases available; they are quite properly denied to lesser mortals.

It is the use of such turns of phrase, I suspect, that has conferred that valuable aura of eccentricity upon the really rather dull denizens of anthropology departments. Anthropologists have been very lucky in their public image. Sociologists, it is well known, are humourless, left-wing purveyors of nonsense or truisms. But anthropologists have sat at the feet of Hindu saints, they have viewed strange gods and filthy rites, they have boldly gone where no man has gone before. The reek of sanctity and divine irrelevance hangs about them. They are saints of the English church of eccentricity for its own sake. The chance of joining them was not to be lightly rejected.

To be fair, there was also the possibility to be considered – slight though it might be – that fieldwork would make some great contribution to human knowledge. On the face of it this seemed rather unlikely. Fact-gathering in itself has few charms. Anthropology is not short of facts but simply of anything intelligent to do with them. The notion of ‘butterfly-collecting’ is familiar within the discipline and serves to characterize the endeavours of many ethnographers and failed interpreters, who simply amass neat examples of curious customs arranged by area, or alphabetically, or by evolutionary order, whatever the current style may be.

Frankly, it seemed then, and seems now, that the justification for fieldwork, as for all academic endeavour, lies not in one’s contribution to the collectivity but rather in some selfish development. Like monastic life, academic research is really all about the perfection of one’s own soul. This may well serve some wider purpose but is not to be judged on those grounds alone. This view will doubtless not sit well either with conservative academics or those who see themselves as a revolutionary force. Both are afflicted by a dreadful piety, a preening self-importance that refuses to believe the world is not hanging on their every word.

For this reason, outrage was quite general within the discipline when Malinowski, the ‘inventor’ of fieldwork, was revealed as a rather human and flawed vessel in his diaries. Even he had been infuriated and bored by ‘blacks’, tormented by lust and isolation. It was widely felt that the diaries should have been suppressed, that they were a ‘disservice to the subject’, that they were gratuitously iconoclastic and would lead to all manner of disrespect for the elders.

This reveals a rather intolerable hypocrisy on the part of the purveyors of the art and should be remedied at every opportunity. It is with such thoughts in mind that I undertake the writing of this account of my own endeavours. There will be nothing new here for those who have undergone the same experience but I shall dwell precisely on those aspects that the normal ethnographic monograph punctuates out as ‘not anthropology’, ‘irrelevant’, ‘unimportant’. In my professional work I have always been more attracted by the higher levels of abstraction and theoretical speculation since it is only by progress here that the overall possibility of interpretation moves closer. Keeping one’s eyes firmly fixed on the ground is the surest way of ensuring an uninteresting and partial view. This book may, then, serve to redress the balance and show students and, it is hoped, non-anthropologists, how the finished monograph relates to the ‘bleeding chunks’ of raw reality on which it is based, and convey something of the feel of fieldwork to those who have not had that experience.

The idea of ‘doing fieldwork’ was now planted in my mind and the seed would grow as such things always do. ‘Why should I want to do fieldwork?’ I asked a colleague. He made an expansive gesture that I recognized as belonging to his lecturing repertoire. It was used on occasions where students asked questions like ‘What is truth?’ or ‘How do you spell “cat”?’ Enough had been said.

It is a polite fiction that anthropologists are consumed with a fire to live among one single people on the face of this planet whom they believe to be guardians of a secret of great relevance to the rest of the human race, and to suggest they work elsewhere is like suggesting they might have married anyone but their unique spiritual soul-mate. In my own case, my thesis had been written on Old English material in published and manuscript form. As I put it somewhat pretentiously then, I ‘travelled in time, not space’. The phrase mollified my examiners, who nevertheless felt obliged to wag their fingers at me and warn me to work henceforth in more conventional geographic areas. I thus had no loyalties to any particular continent and, not having specialized at the undergraduate level, I was not repelled by any particular locale. Judging personally on the basis of completed work as the reflection of the people studied rather than as the image of those who had studied them, Africa seemed by far the dullest continent. After a great start with Evans-Pritchard the work tailed rapidly downhill into pseudosociology and descent systems as functioning wholes, rallying a little as it was dragged screaming into the consideration of ‘difficulf’ topics such as prescriptive marriage and symbolism, but basically remaining true to its ‘plain and sensible’ persona. African anthropology must be one of the few areas where dull pedestrianism is advanced seriously as a claim to merit. South America looked fascinating but I knew from colleagues that working there was notoriously difficult politically; moreover, everyone seemed to be working in the shadow of Lévi-Strauss and the French anthropologists. Oceania would be a soft option in terms of conditions of life but somehow all Oceanic studies ended up looking much the same. Aborigines seemed to have the monopoly on fiendishly complex marriage systems. India would be a splendid location but to do anything sensible would require sitting down for five years to learn enough languages to make any contribution at all. The Far East? I would go away and look up what I could.

Such evaluations may, indeed, be qualified as superficial, but many of my contemporaries, and subsequently students, have operated precisely along these lines. After all, most research starts off with a vague apprehension of interest in a certain area of study and rare indeed is the man who knows what his thesis is about before he has written it.

I spent the next few months noting stories of government harassment in the Indonesian area interspersed with general news stories of atrocities and destruction all over Asia. In the end, I tended rather towards Portuguese Timor. I knew well enough that I was interested in cultural symbolism and belief systems rather than in politics or urban socialization and Timor seemed to show all sorts of interesting possibilities, with its various kingdoms and prescriptive alliance systems, where marriage with a certain kinclass was required. It seems to be a rule of thumb that neat symbolic systems often turn up most clearly where such phenomena occur. I was about to settle down and work out a project when the newspapers suddenly became full of stories of civil war, genocide and invasion. Whites apparently went in fear of their lives, starvation loomed on the horizon. The trip was off.

Rapid consultations with contacts in the trade suggested that I would do better to return to Africa where permission for research was less difficult and conditions more stable. I was directed towards the Bubis of Fernando Po. For those who have not come across Fernando Po, let me explain that it is an island off the coast of West Africa, a former Spanish colony and administered as part of Equatorial Guinea. I began to sniff around the literature. Everyone was highly uncomplimentary about Fernando Po and the Bubis. The British scorned it as a place ‘where one is likely in late afternoon to encounter a sloppy Spanish official still in his pyjamas’, and dwelt lovingly on the fetid heat and numerous diseases to which it offered sanctuary. Nineteenth-century German explorers dismissed the natives as degenerate. Mary Kingsley noted the island as affording the prospect of a large heap of coal. Richard Burton, it appeared, had amazed everyone by actually going there and surviving. All in all a depressing prospect. Luckily for me, as I thought at the time, the local dictator began a policy of massacring his opponents, using the term in a very loose sense. I could no longer go to Fernando Po.

At this point another of my colleagues helped by pointing my attention to a strangely neglected group of mountain pagans in North Cameroon. Thus I was introduced to the Dowayos who were to become ‘my’ people in love and hate from then on. Feeling a little like a ball in a pinball machine, I set off in quest of the Dowayos.

A search through the International African Institute index yielded a number of references by French colonial administrators plus one or two by passing travellers. Enough had been written to show that they were interesting: they had, for example, skull cults, circumcision, a whistle language, mummies and a reputation for being recalcitrant and savage. My colleague was able to give me the names of a missionary who had lived among them for years and of a couple of linguists who were working on the language, and to point the Dowayos out on a map. It seemed I was in business.

I began work at once, having now totally forgotten the problem of whether I wanted to go at all. The two obstacles were to get the money to go and the permission to conduct research.

Had I realized at the outset that it would take two years of constant effort to get both together at the same time, I might have returned to the problem of whether it was all worth while. But fortunately my ignorance stood me in good stead and I began to learn the art of grovelling for funds.

2

Be Prepared

I assumed the first time round that what was necessary was to show a grant-giving body why proposed research was interesting/new/important. Nothing could be further from the truth. When an inexperienced ethnographer pushes this aspect of his research, a grant-giving committee begins, perhaps on the basis of sound experience, to wonder how the research is standard/normal/a continuation of previous work. By stressing the vast theoretical implications of my little bit of research for the continued existence of anthropology, I was putting myself in the position of a man extolling the quality of the roast beef to a party of vegetarians. Everything I did made matters worse. In due time I received a letter telling me that the committee were concerned about the completion of the basic ethnography of the area, the brute collecting of facts. I rewrote my application in moronic detail. This time the committee were worried about the fact that I would be doing research on an unknown group. I rewrote; this time, they let it go. I received my funding. First hurdle down.

The problem of permission to conduct research now became paramount, since time and money were leaking away. I had written to the relevant ministry in Cameroon about a year before and been promised an answer in due course. I wrote again and was requested to submit detailed descriptions of the project. I did so. I waited. Finally, when I had all but given up hope, I received permission to apply for a visa and proceed to Yaounde, the capital. I confess with some embarrassment to old Africa hands that I naïvely assumed this to be the end of my contacts with bureaucracy. I suppose that, at that stage, I pictured the administration as a group of informal ‘chaps’ doing the small amount of administration necessary with good-natured common sense. In a country of seven million inhabitants, most of it would surely be done man-to-man in shirtsleeves as in the old British Empire days. The idiom would be one of solid understatement with everyone turning his hand to what needed to be done.

I might have learnt all sorts of lessons from the Cameroonian Embassy, but I did not. Instead I put all conclusions in abeyance, in best anthropological fashion, waiting until all the evidence was in. Having telephoned the Embassy to make sure they were open, I turned up with all relevant documents, feeling rather proud of my efficiency in having the two necessary passport photos. The Embassy was shut. Prolonged ringing raised a grudging voice that refused to speak anything but French and told me to come back tomorrow.

I returned the next day and managed to get as far as the hall. Here I was informed that the relevant gentleman was absent and it was not known when he would return. I received the impression that asking for a visa was a strange and unusual thing. One useful fact, however, was gleaned: I could not apply for a visa without a valid return air ticket. I went to the airline office.

Air Cameroon regarded all customers as a confounded nuisance. I did not realize at that time that this was the way all government monopolies are run in Cameroon and put it down to language difficulties. They were suspicious of cheques, cash was inconvenient. I ended up paying for my ticket in French travellers’ cheques. What other people do I cannot imagine. (One sound rule for the beginner: always deal with exotic airlines through a British travel agent. They will take payment in normal forms of currency.) While there, I inquired about trains between Yaounde and N’gaoundere, my next stop up country. I was sternly informed that this was an airline office, not a railway office, but it so happened that there was an air-conditioned train between the two. The journey took about three hours.

Flushed with triumph and armed with my ticket, I returned to the Embassy. The gentleman was still not back but I would be permitted to fill in a form in triplicate. I did so and was surprised to note that the top copy which I had laboriously completed was thrown away. I waited about an hour. Nothing happened. Meanwhile various people were drifting in and out, mostly speaking French. It is perhaps necessary to point out that Cameroon was an old German colony taken over by the British and French during the First World War and subsequently given independence as a federal republic, later replaced by a unified republic. Although Cameroon is theoretically bilingual in French and English, it is a bold man who hopes to get far on English alone. Eventually, a huge African woman entered and I was the subject of a long conversation in a language unknown to me. I suspect now that it was English. If anyone approaches you in old British territory speaking a totally unintelligible tongue of which even the basic sounds are quite unfamiliar, it is probably English. I was led into another office where numerous volumes were ranged around the walls. I noted with interest that these contained the photographs and details of prohibited persons. It is still astonishing to me that it is possible for such a young country to have prohibited so many people. Having sought me in vain for some considerable time, the woman lay aside the volumes with what appeared to be a deep sense of disappointment. The next problem lay in my having produced two passport photographs which were joined together. They should have been separate and I was rebuked for presenting them in this condition. There began a protracted search for the scissors. Many people were involved in this, furniture was moved, the volumes of prohibited persons were shaken. Trying to show willing, I looked half-heartedly on the floor. Again I was rebuked. This was an embassy and I was to touch and look at nothing. Finally, the scissors were traced to a man in the basement who, it appeared, was not authorized to possess them. This was explained at great length. We were all required to show our outrage. The next problem was whether the visa should be paid for or not. In my innocence I gladly offered to pay for it, not realizing that this was a major issue. The head of the section would have to decide. Back to the waiting room, where finally another Cameroonian appeared who perused my documents with great attention and required me to explain myself yet again, looking the whole time extremely suspicious of my motives. The basic difficulty here, as in other areas, is explaining why the British government should find it worth while to pay its young people fairly large sums of money to go off to desolate parts of the world purportedly to study peoples who are locally notorious for their ignorance and backwardness. How could anyone make money out of such studies? Clearly some sort of hidden purpose is involved. Spying, mineral prospecting or smuggling must be the real motive. The only hope is to pass oneself off as a harmless idiot who knows no better. I succeeded in this. Finally I was given my visa, a huge rubber-stamped confection with what was clearly a heavily Africanized version of Marianne, the French revolutionary heroine. As I left, I felt strangely tired with a lingering sense of humiliation and disbelief. It was a feeling I was to grow to know well.

I now had something like a week to put my affairs in order and complete my arrangements. Vaccinations had played quite a large role in my life for some months and there remained only a final yellow fever shot before I was fully proofed. Unfortunately, this gave me a fever and vomiting attacks that rather diminished my enjoyment of farewells. I was issued with an intimidating box of drugs and a list of the symptoms they would cure, almost all of which I already had from the inoculations.

It was the moment for final words of advice. My immediate family, who were entirely innocent of anthropological expertise, knew only that I was mad enough to go to savage lands where I would live in the jungle, constantly menaced by lions and snakes, and might be lucky enough to escape the cooking pot. It came as some comfort to me when I was about to leave Dowayoland that the chief of my village said that he would gladly accompany me back to my English village but that he feared a country where it was always cold, where there were savage beasts like the European dogs at the mission and where it was known there were cannibals.

A book should doubtless be compiled of ‘sayings to young ethnographers about to go into the field’. It is rumoured that the eminent anthropologist Evans-Pritchard would simply tell his protégés, ‘Get yourself a decent hamper from Fortnum and Mason’s and keep away from the native women.’ Another West Africanist would reveal that the secret of successful fieldwork lay in the possession of a good string vest. In my own case I was told to complete my will (which I did), to take nail varnish for the local dandies (which I didn’t) and to buy myself a good penknife (which broke). A lady anthropologist revealed to me the address of a London shop where I could buy shorts with locust-proof pocket-flaps. I felt these to be an unnecessary luxury.

The ethnographer is faced with a basic decision at the outset if he needs a vehicle. Either he can buy one here, fill it with all the goods he will need to survive and ship it out, or he can arrive unencumbered at his destination and buy what he needs from scratch. The advantage of the former method lies in cheapness and the certainty of finding what you want. Its disadvantage lies simply in the frustration of the extra contact with customs officials and other bureaucrats who will blandly impound it, charge duty on it, stand it in the monsoon till it rots, allow it to be rifled, insist on minute certified lists in quadruplicate, countersigned and stamped by other officials hundreds of miles away and otherwise gleefully harass and persecute the newcomer. Many of these difficulties will magically melt away in the face of a well-placed bribe, but the calculation of the appropriate sum and the point at which the bribe should be offered requires a fineness of touch that the newcomer will lack. He may well end up in serious trouble if he attempts this proceeding incautiously.

The difficulty of the second method, of simply arriving and buying what is necessary, is that it is extremely expensive. Cars cost at least double what they do over here and choice is very limited. The newcomer, unless he is very lucky, is unlikely to strike a good bargain.

In my innocence, I opted for the second alternative, partly because I had no time to prepare myself lavishly and was eager to be off.

3

To the Hills

As the plane landed on the darkened airfield at Duala a unique smell invaded the cabin. It was musky and sultry, aromatic and coarse – the smell of West Africa. Warm rain was falling; it felt like blood trickling down our sweaty faces as we hiked across the tarmac. Inside the airport was the most amazing chaos I have ever witnessed. Crowds of Europeans were huddled in desperate groups or screaming at Africans. Africans were screaming at Africans. A lone Arab was floating disconsolately from one desk to another. In front of each was the mad, jostling throng I recognized as a French queue. Here I had my second lesson in Cameroonian bureaucracy. It seemed that we had to collect three pieces of paper relating to our visas, health certificates and immigration arrangements. Numerous forms had to be filled in. There was a heavy trade in ballpoint pens. When the French had elbowed their way through to have the privilege of waiting in the rain for their luggage, the rest of us were attended to. Several of us made the mistake of being unable to supply exact addresses to which we were going and the names of business contacts. A large official sat at his desk reading the newspaper and ignoring us. Having established to his satisfaction our relative hierarchy, he interviewed us with an air of one not to be trifled with. Seeing the way things were going, I relented and supplied a wholly fictitious address, which was the recourse adopted by several others. In future I was always studiously precise in filling in all forms which were doubtless eaten by termites or thrown away unread. We all went back round the three desks again and through customs, where a drama was being enacted. A Frenchman’s luggage had been opened and found to contain certain aromatic substances. In vain the man claimed that these were herbs to cook the sauces of French cuisine. The official was convinced he had captured a major trader in marijuana, even though it was common knowledge that a trade existed growing it inside Cameroon and smuggling it out. The French jostlers were back in operation and seemed to be doing quite well until the huge form of an immaculate African who had got on the first-class section at Nice sailed through. With a click of his gold-adorned fingers he indicated his luggage, which was promptly seized by porters. Luckily for me, my own luggage impeded the removal of his and so I was waved through and out into Africa.

First impressions count for a lot. The man whose knees are not brown will be marked down by all manner of people. At all events, my camera case was promptly seized by what I took to be an enthusiastic porter. I revised my ideas when he swiftly made off into the distance. I set off in pursuit, using all manner of phrases uncommon in everyday speech. ‘Au secours! Au voleur!’ I cried. Fortunately, he was delayed by traffic, I caught up, and we began to struggle. It ended with a swift blow that laid open the side of my face and the case was abandoned to me. A solicitous taxi driver took me to my hotel for only five times the normal fare.

The next day I tore myself away from the charms of Duala and flew on to the capital without incident, noting that I had adopted the loud, hostile manner of the other passengers towards porters and taxi drivers. In Yaounde I suffered a long bout of bureaucracy; as it took about three weeks to have my documents processed there was nothing to do but play tourist.

My first impression of the city was that it had few charms. It is unpleasantly dusty in the dry season, a vast morass in the wet season. Its main monuments have all the appeal of motorway café architecture. Collapsed gratings in the pavements offer the unwary visitor a direct route to the town sewers. Newcomers seldom survive long without wrenching at least one limb. The life of expatriates centres around two or three cafés where they sit in deep boredom, staring at the passing yellow cabs and fighting off the attentions of souvenir sellers. These are gentlemen of the greatest charm who have learnt that white men will buy absolutely anything as long as it is overpriced. They offer for sale a blend of perfectly acceptable carvings and absolute rubbish as ‘genuine antiques’. The whole trade is practised with something of the air of a game. Asked prices are something like twenty times what is reasonable. Should a client protest that he is being robbed, they giggle and agree, cutting their price to five times the going rate. Many enjoy something like a client/patron relationship with jaded Europeans, fully aware that the more outrageous their lies the greater will be the amusement they cause.

The saddest cases are the diplomats who seem to pursue a policy of minimal contact with the locals, fleeing from locked office to locked compound via the café. For reasons that will become apparent later, I occasioned the British community some inconvenience.

Far more interesting were the young French community of co-opérants, people doing foreign service as an alternative to national service in the army. They had somehow managed to set up a replica of provincial French social life incorporating factors such as barbecues, motor rallies and parties with minimal regard to the fact that they were in West Africa. I rapidly established links with one ménage, one girl and two boys who were variously engaged in professional teaching and later proved invaluable. Unlike the diplomatic community, they actually left the capital and had information about the state of roads, the vehicle market, etc., and spoke to Africans who were not their servants. It came as a great surprise to me after the officials with whom I had to deal, how extremely friendly and pleasant the people were; I had by no means expected this. After the political resentments of West Indians and Indians I had known in England, it struck me as ridiculous that it should be in Africa that people of different races should be able to meet on easy, uncomplicated terms. Of course it turned out not to be quite as simple as that. Relations between Europeans and Africans are complicated by all kinds of factors. Often the Africans concerned have learnt to conform so well that they are little other than black Frenchmen. On the other hand, Europeans resident in Africa tend to be rather weird people. Their conspicuous ordinariness is perhaps the reason the diplomatic community fare so badly; madmen – and I met several of them – fare very well despite the havoc they leave behind them.

As an Englishman I was perhaps unreasonably impressed by the fact that complete strangers would greet me and smile at me in the street, apparently without ulterior motive.

Time was passing and African cities are by no means cheap; Yaounde is classed as one of the most expensive places on earth for a foreigner. While I was living in no great style, money was going fast and I simply had to get out; I would have to make a scene. Steeling my nerve, I went to the Bureau of Immigration. Behind the desk sat the supercilious inspector I had dealt with on previous visits. He looked up from the documents he was reading and began an intricate process involving a cigarette and lighter, ignoring my greeting, and threw my passport on the desk. Instead of the two years I had asked for, I had been mysteriously given nine months in the country. Thankful for small mercies, I left.

It was at this point that I made two blunders that reveal how very little I knew about the world I was moving in. First, I went to the post office to send a telegram to N’gaoundere, my next staging post up the railway line, warning them of my imminent arrival. It got there a fortnight later, which was considered about average by old hands. It also acquainted me with a very odd Australian who, despairing of arrogant officials and locals who had learnt their jostling from the French, was reduced to standing in the middle of the floor shouting to everybody’s surprise, ‘I’ve understood. I’m the wrong bleedin’ colour in’ I?’ He thereupon declared in good round terms that he never intended to write to his mother again from Cameroonian territory. Luckily, I was able to sell him one of my own stamps at which point he exploded in maudlin Commonwealth affection and insisted I take beer with him. After several of these he revealed that he had been travelling for more than two years and never spent more than fifty pence a day. I was suitably impressed until he took his leave without paying for the beer.