A Plague of Caterpillars: A Return to the African Bush

Nigel Barley returns to Cameroon on hearing that the elaborate and fearsome Dowayo circumcision ceremony, performed at six or seven year intervals, is about to take place. Yet, like much else in this hilarious book by the author of The Innocent Anthropologist, the circumcision ceremony proves frustratingly elusive, partly because of an extraordinary plague of black, hairy caterpillars. In the meantime, witchcraft fills the Cameroonian air, a man is lied to by his own foot and an earnest Ger...