The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir. Aminatta Forna
of a cause célèbre in Freetown. My father’s self-assurance had always bordered on arrogance and he refused to budge an inch. I believe he probably enjoyed the stand-off. The privates, who already respected him for his dedication as a medical officer, loved him even more for standing up to Lansana and they were vocal in their support. Lansana was forced to back down. Our father left to set up his own practice. He had worn his olive green uniform for less than six months.
All the time Lansana was persecuting him, my father never revealed the incident which was the cause of their argument. He could easily have done so. It would have publicly humiliated Lansana and brought a halt to the whole debacle, but it would have meant breaking his doctor’s oath of confidence to the young woman. The issue, as far as he and Dr Panda were concerned, remained their authority as doctors to determine the use of the hospital facilities. Yet even with this knowledge Lansana did nothing to curb his own excesses. It merely seemed to drive him to go further.
The story quickly reached members of the opposition party, the All People’s Congress, who searched our father out and asked him to join in their struggle. Two of his close friends were already APC activists: Ibrahim and Mohammed Bash Taqi, Temnes like us, who even came from Tonkolili, the same district as the Fornas. Ibrahim was the man behind the ‘Titbits’ column, a dedicated journalist obsessed with amassing evidence of SLPP corruption. He had once been a laboratory assistant while my father was head boy at Bo School; they next met when Ibrahim covered the independence negotiations in London, dashing between Lancaster House and the telex office to brief his newspaper. He was an ebullient and tireless man. Taqi in Temne means ‘troublemaker’, and as far as the SLPP was concerned the Taqis lived up to their name. Mohammed, a chain smoker who wore a toothbrush moustache and had bright, melancholy eyes and hunched shoulders, was the quieter of the two. To the world he was known as M.O.; I called him Uncle Bash.
In Freetown my father resisted joining the APC. He had long opposed the activities of the SLPP, but at the time he was still convinced his calling lay as a doctor. In Koidu he spent every day working with people who died of easily preventable diseases, whose life expectancy was well below forty and whose children’s stomachs were bloated with malnutrition. It didn’t matter that he worked all day and most of the night, drove himself to the point of exhaustion, the cure for the malaise lay beyond the talents of any doctor.
Every day for over forty years the Sierra Leone Selection Trust had wrenched minerals by the ton from the river beds, leaving red earth exposed like suppurating sores across the landscape. Every week the De Beers plane flew another consignment of diamonds out of the country. Before independence, diamonds were merely the spoils of conquest; of the money the company now paid to the government in Freetown as taxes in return for the diamond concession there was no evidence in Koidu, which remained as backward as ever. Inside the company compound was another world: paved roads, street lights, telephone lines, a school – for the children of employees only – tennis courts, flower beds and lawns.
The environs of Koidu were littered with the rusting frames of expensive cars, abandoned by dealers who found it easier to replace a Mercedes than go to the bother of repairing it. The diamond merchants’ wives flew back and forth to Lebanon on extended shopping trips. Every day illegal digging became more and more blatant, and yet the government did little to curb it.
As opposition to Margai grew, the APC swelled in popularity. Their leader, an ex-trade unionist by the name of Siaka Stevens, was amassing a huge amount of grassroots support, particularly among the Temnes and other protectorate people who saw no future under the Mende-dominated SLPP. But Stevens was convinced the party lacked the one element it most needed to seriously challenge Margai, and that was intellectual credibility: the kind of brain power required to create policies and a manifesto capable of winning the Creole vote in Freetown. Teams of young APC activists went out scouring the country. Their brief was to search out young, western-educated professional men and win them over to the cause.
During the day I rarely played inside. If I wasn’t doing the rounds with my mother I stayed in the yard where I could, if I cared to, see everything that went on in my world.
One day there was even more toing and froing than usual; it began in the morning and went on all day. In the afternoon a man arrived, older than the usual visitors. Uncle Bash was with him, and he and the other young men darted like egrets around a buffalo.
The man moved slowly, with the authority of age, as though he’d never been young, in fact. He had a stout build and a large square head on a muscular neck. Fleshy lids sloped down at the far corners of his eyes. His lower lip was thick, protruding and dark, and when he spoke he revealed his lower teeth. The curious feature was his hairline: a perfect semicircle above a high forehead; the hair at the sides was cropped so close there was barely any at all. The whole effect was of a small cap, like a judge’s black cap, on the top of his head.
This was Siaka Stevens, who at this time was effectively in hiding and moving from safe house to safe house. He was undertaking an extremely risky tour of the constituencies in an attempt to garner support. In order to change the constitution and introduce a republic with himself as president with sweeping new powers, Albert Margai needed the approval of two sessions of parliament with a general election in between. He’d won the first vote by a two-thirds majority. Now he had called the elections and these he was determined to win at any cost. Four APC MPs had already been arrested and held without charge, then deprived of their seats for absenteeism. Stevens was choosing to keep a very low profile.
When he reached me he paused for a moment and looked down. The whole entourage came to a halt and they gazed upon me too. Then Stevens said something to them and they all laughed. I didn’t understand. They passed on. At that moment my father came out into the living room, drying his hands on a cloth. My mother was there and she went to fetch cold drinks. Obviously this man, although I didn’t know then who he was, wasn’t one of my father’s brothers. He sat comfortably in one of the low wooden chairs we bought from the Forestry Commission shop and they spoke for a while. My father was very polite to him and acted in the way he usually reserved for Pa Roke. After a few moments my mother left them and the two men sat talking a while.
Uncle Bash sat outside on the veranda, with the other men. It was January and the temperatures were beginning to rise. The young men waited, beginning to sweat in the heat. They seemed very tense and excited. When Siaka Stevens reappeared they all sprang up and flew around him again. A few seconds later the cars were reversing, one after another, turning tightly in the restricted space of the compound until they drove off together, creating a great huff of dust that engulfed me.
Much later, when the day was old, Uncle Bash came back and hurried in. When he left my father was with him. They climbed into the Austin and drove away. My father didn’t come back that night, or the next. When he returned several days later he was dishevelled, unshaven and on foot.
One night I heard my mother’s voice – distorted by the dark, muffled through the walls of my room, disfigured by anger and tears. The three of us, my brother and sister and I, crept out of bed and opened the door. In the light of the corridor our mother and father faced each other and shouted. My mother’s hair tumbled around her shoulders in disarray, sticking to her face where the tears glistened. She was wearing her night clothes. My father’s anger was dark and rumbling. I had never seen him this way.
We stood there for a moment watching in silence. Big Aminatta had clearly made a decision to stay in her room. I have no idea now what the argument was about. I could not hear the words, but I could sense the emotions as painfully as boiling water poured onto my skin. Sheka and Memuna felt it too and, like frogs disturbed in their pool at night, we opened our mouths and lungs together and began to wail. I stood, in my patterned pyjamas, watching my parents fight and I screamed louder and louder.
The hot tears clouded my eyes and the scene in front of me blurred and faded. I felt as disorientated as I had once when I thought we were lost in the car during a thunderstorm; rain poured onto the windscreen, lightning shattered the sky and thunder crashed all around us. Now, completely lost in my own