A Plague of Caterpillars

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...
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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 birth‐control propaganda to the respectable Dowayos, an interestin the nipple‐mutilatingpractices 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.