A Plague of Caterpillars: A Return to the African Bush

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When local contacts tipped off Nigel Barley that the Dowayocircumcision ceremony was about to take place, he immediately left London for thevillage in northern Cameroon where he had lived as a field anthropologist for 18months. The Dowayos are a mountain people that perform their elaborate, fascinatingand fearsome ceremony at six or seven year intervals. It was an opportunity thatwas too good to miss, a key moment to test the balance of tradition and modernity.Yet, like much else in this hilarious book, the circumcision ceremony was to provefrustratingly elusive.

This very failure, compounded by the plague of caterpillarsof the book's title allows Nigel Barley to concentrate on everyday life in Dowayolandand the tattered remnants of an overripe French colonial legacy. Witchcraft fillsthe Cameroonian air; add an earnest German traveller showing explicit birthcontrol propaganda to the respectable Dowayos, an interestin the nipplemutilatingpractices of highlanders, unanswered questions of the link between infertility andcircumcision and you have the ingredients of a comic masterpiece. But beneath allthe joy and shared laughter there is a skilful and wise reflection on the problemsof different cultures ever understanding one another.

Author Bio

Nigel Barley, was born in Kingston-on-Thames in 1947 and studied Modern Languages at Cambridge before completing a doctorate in Social Anthropology at Oxford. He taught at University College London and the Slade School of Art before joining The Department of Ethnography at the British Museum in 1988 where he remained for some twenty years. After several academic works, he wrote The Innocent Anthropologist in 1983. It contradicted so many cherished assumptions that it led to calls for his expulsion from the professional body of anthropologists. He remained, however, and now the book has been translated into some twenty-five languages and is often the first work embraced by students of anthropology in their studies. He left the Museum in 2002 and is now a professional writer, living in London and Indonesia. His most recent work is Island of Demons, a fictionalised treatment of the life of the painter Walter Spies.