A plague of caterpillars: a return to the African bush

Nigel Barley looks at everyday life in Dowayoland and the tattered remnants of an overripe French colonial legacy.

Witchcraft fills the Cameroonian air; add an earnest German traveller showing explicit birth control propaganda to the respectable Dowayos, an interest in the nipple mutilating practices of highlanders, unanswered questions of the link between infertility and circumcision and you have the ingredients of a comic masterpiece.

But beneath all the joy and shared laughter there is a skilful and wise reflection on the problems of different cultures ever understanding one another.

The Dowayos are a mountain people that perform their elaborate, fascinating and fearsome ceremony at six or seven year intervals.