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 sorrow and fear, I threw back my head and howled. Snot welled in my nose, blocking my air passages and making it hard to breathe. I began to feel nauseous. In the farthest fields of my vision I could just about make out my brother and sister crying too. I took choppy, shallow breaths and pushed the sobs up through my chest and out of my gulping mouth.
Our mother's voice briefly cut through the clouds. ‘You must be joking if you think I'm staying here. I'd rather sleep in the car.’ She was holding onto a sheet and a pillow. Maybe she had them before. She may have even been on her way there already. I don't know. Whatever, she still didn't move. Her eyes locked onto my father's.
In that second Memuna broke ranks, ran forward and put her arms round my mother's thighs. Our mother hugged my sister to her and they stood defiant. Our father looked exasperated but no less angry as he stared at them both.
‘I'm going with you, Mummy,’ said my sister, a cub facing off the leader of the pride.
For a moment I had no idea what was going to happen. We were all suspended in the moment, afraid to breathe or move. My father shrugged. ‘Fine, fine.’ He turned away. Suddenly he swung around and his gaze dropped down on my brother and me, hard like a pebble. The sob in my throat hung suspended, bobbing and trembling, too terrified to come out, but incapable of returning. My chest quaked.
‘And you two? Do you want to go with your mother as well?’
Us, us? What did this have to do with us? Up until then I had thought I was just watching, as I did everything else that went on in the house. I couldn't even begin to imagine why my father was suddenly questioning us. I automatically thought I must have done something wrong. I certainly didn't want to sleep in the car.
‘No, Daddy,’ we said.
My sister and my mother went out to the car and stayed the night there. Sheka and I crept back to our beds.
By the time of their fifth wedding anniversary our parents’ marriage was falling apart. The only time I remember them together, actually physically together in the same space, was the night their raging broke into my dreams. My father, obsessed only with his patients and politics, had withdrawn almost totally from his wife. He was away for days at a time; when he returned he was wearing the same clothes he left in; he was unwashed and the skin round his eyes sagged with exhaustion.
The young activists were travelling huge distances, moving from village to village around the country canvassing and holding meetings, many of them clandestine. They were forced to stay out of the way of the authorities, especially the police, who were breaking up APC gatherings and arresting the leaders. At night they slept rough or on floors and ate whatever their supporters, who were mainly poor villagers with little to eat themselves, were able to spare.
My father went round his Lebanese diamond-dealer clients, soliciting funds and persuading them to back the APC. Most of them traditionally supported the SLPP but they were alert to the mood of the country and anything that might influence their chances of making money. They donated generously to the new party and, to cover themselves, funnelled a bit more cash in the direction of the SLPP as well.
At home my mother was left holding the fort. She spent her days with no idea where her husband was or when he was coming back. There was nothing to tell the sick people who came to the clinic, except that the doctor wasn't in. When my father did eventually come home, usually after two or three days, it was late in the evening. He showered quickly and changed his clothes, but instead of going to bed he would unlock the surgery and usher any waiting patients inside.
One evening a young woman arrived at the house in time for evening surgery. She was haemorrhaging badly: the back of her lappa was stained dark red and blood streaked her legs. She was weak and stumbled as she tried to walk, supported on her husband's arm. My mother let them wait on the veranda. By now my father's appearances and disappearances had a sort of rhythm: he tended to be gone for two nights, three at the most, return for one night and depart again early in the morning of the next day. He was never at home for more than a day at a time. The woman settled to wait. On our veranda her husband spread out cloths to lie on and mixed a little of the rice and sauce they had brought.
In the early hours of the morning the headlights of a car lit up the front of the house. My father was home. As soon as he saw the bleeding woman he admitted her straight into the ward. After she was comfortable he lay down and slept for a few hours. In the morning he called my mother and she helped while he rapidly performed a D&C. When the patient had recovered sufficiently, he was gone.
By now our income was dwindling fast. My mother still worked at the Volkswagen garage and gradually her earnings alone supported the family. The clinic was no longer bringing in money and our father had contributed the family's savings to the political fight. Added to that, the Austin was gone – given to the party to help ferry activists around the country. Fortunately, my mother still held on to her Beetle.
In February 1967 a date for the elections was announced. They were to be held in March, just one month away. Everyone in the country had been waiting and preparing for this moment. The APC planned to challenge virtually every seat, with the exception of some of those in the southern Mende heartlands, where they reckoned they could not possibly win. They mobilised a formidable campaign. At its heart was the message to the people that the APC intended to stop Albert Margai's republican constitution from advancing any further.
One night we children were already in bed; my mother was sitting up talking with Foday, the man who owned the bookshop in town and who occasionally stopped by for a visit. We were good customers; my sister and brother were avid readers, my sister especially: a precociously early learner she earned her place in family lore by finishing Lorna Doone when she was four. I hadn't conquered reading or discovered the world of books; my pleasures were as yet confined to ants, dogs and mud. Foday had brought my mother a gift: a copy of the newly published Encyclopaedia of Cooking.
They had been keeping company a while when my father stepped through the door. He was as unkempt as usual, but beneath the tiredness he was restless and evidently excited. He kissed his wife, sat down next to her and waited. Foday sensed his company had become superfluous and stood up to go. When the door closed behind the bookseller my father pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and passed it to my mother. He gave no explanation, just watched her closely. He looked pretty pleased with himself, my mother said later, puffed up from inside with pride.
In her hand was a flyer, no more than about eighteen inches in size. At the top of the sheet was the red rising star, the symbol of the APC; in the centre a picture of my father. He had recently shaved off his beard, and in the photograph his chin was clean. The printer had touched up the white shirt he was wearing and also the whites of his eyes, ever so slightly, in order to give some definition to what was a rather poor quality image. The whole effect was to make my father, who already looked startlingly young, even more wholesome. His name was printed in capitals, below that his qualifications: MB, ChB, DRCOG and then the words:
‘This is Your APC Candidate.
He is your Karefa-Smart's Choice
Vote APC all the way.’
Siaka Stevens had personally asked him to take on John Karefa Smart's former seat of Tonkolili West and our father had agreed. It was his home constituency. My father was the obvious – indeed, the perfect – choice.
As the election date drew closer, my father was absent round the clock. His constituency was a whole day's journey away. By now the small, discreet meetings had burgeoned into rallies attracting huge crowds, but in order to hold a political meeting of any kind the candidates needed the approval of the paramount chief, most of whom were loyal to the
government. It became routine for permission to be refused. Under these circumstances any meeting that went ahead, impromptu or otherwise, was likely to be heavy-handedly broken up by the police. Across the country there were frequent, sporadic clashes between government and opposition supporters.
Koidu, in Kono, lay on the axis between the SLPP Mende strongholds of the eastern provinces and the Temne north, which was mobilising behind the APC. One afternoon, on the way back to our house from school, with we three children in the car, my mother turned a corner and drove into a pitched battle between several hundred APC and SLPP supporters on the main street in town. Some people were waving guns, others hitting each other with their fists, sticks – anything they could lay their hands on. My mother pulled up, intending to reverse out. But the people nearby, who were as much engaged in the fighting as anyone else, recognised our car and started to shout for people to clear the road. There was a pause in the battle, like a black and white slapstick movie when the music stops, and we drove through the crowd. When we emerged on the other side and looked out of the rear window, the music and the fighting had started up again.
Some evenings later my mother was at the ‘nightclub’ having a drink with her Lebanese friends. It was a favourite haunt of the Lebanese merchants and other well-to-do folk and she often went to sit and chat in the evening air. The bar was next to the mosque, a typical provincial prayer house built in concrete with four squat, plain minarets, one of which housed the muezzin. These were the days before it became standard practice to rig up an automated loudspeaker system, and in Koidu the muezzin still climbed the stairs of the tower and called the faithful to prayer five times a day.
That night my mother's attention was caught by the familiar sound of the prayer call starting up. It was well after midnight – nowhere near time for prayers. Gradually it became apparent to everyone this was no muezzin, but an audacious protester who had seized the mosque's loudhailer. For a time everyone was still as the words ricocheted off the tin roofs, fluttered like feathers down into the streets, whizzed around the heads of the people as they sat on the steps of their houses.
‘No more Albert, no more Margai, No more Albert over me,’ he sang.
Within minutes a crowd of supporters and detractors gathered in the street below the mosque, shouting encouragement or insults accordingly. Soon enough they started to scuffle between themselves. The man in the minaret sang on: ‘And before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave.’
Thirty minutes later the police arrived. They dragged the protester down from the tower and took him away, but not before they had given him a hearty beating in front of the crowd of onlookers.
By now SLPP support in Kono was wavering badly. Determined to win at all costs, some in the government were beginning to resort to extreme tactics. My father was campaigning in other parts of the country, supporting candidates in more marginal seats, as well as canvassing for votes in his own district. Driving home from the south, he stopped one night for petrol at Panguma Junction, by coincidence encountering a local APC candidate on the run from the police. A warrant had been issued for the arrest of all four opposition candidates in the region: the plan was to stop them registering themselves as candidates by using the law to hold them for forty-eight hours over the crucial registration period. My father gathered the four together and urged them to stay. He found a good lawyer, who also happened to be the cousin of the attorney-general, and they all went to the police station and challenged the local police chief. By the end of the afternoon the warrants were withdrawn.
There were only four weeks between the date parliament was dissolved and polling day. With my father away for the whole period, life in our house moved quietly from day to day. My mother followed her usual routine of work, friends and family life. Ade Benjamin, an old friend from Freetown, turned up unexpectedly to stay and the two of them went out dancing together, lifting her spirits considerably. Meanwhile, she waited to hear from my father.
Even during this intense period my mother remained detached from the swirl of political activity around her, despite the fact that the election outcome and our own lives were now completely intertwined. Although she chose not to say so to my father, she was frustrated to see the success of the clinic faltering. My mother was as pragmatic as my father was idealistic; she saw herself first and foremost as a doctor's wife, and it had been her plan to remain one.
Polling day, when it came, created a storm of speculation and excitement in the rest of the country. This was the second democratic election in our fledgling state, and a great deal hinged on it, including, as far as many saw it, the future of democracy itself. People were beginning to anticipate a victory by the opposition APC and an end to the Margai government. The anticipation and even trepidation as people queued to cast their votes was intense. Yet the tempest passed over our small house, leaving the domestic scene inside untouched.
The news took a while to reach us that my father had won his seat. He not only took Tonkolili West for the opposition but by the greatest margin and the greatest number of votes cast in favour of any one candidate during the entire election: close to eighteen thousand. The ruling party candidate had not even managed to secure five hundred.
In Kono the APC took two of the four seats. In Freetown every single seat went to the APC. The party's triumphs were sweeping the country as opposition candidates toppled government incumbents in constituency after constituency. Victory began to look inevitable.
Four days later, in the early morning, a car arrived at the house. It was a long, low Mercedes, one my mother recognised as belonging to one of the wealthiest of the Koidu diamond merchants. Inside were two young APC party workers, smartly turned out in clean white shirts, unrecognisable from the sweat-stained young activists we were used to seeing. They told my mother they were to take us down to Freetown to attend the swearing-in ceremony for the new prime minister and cabinet.
The inside of the car was air-conditioned and smelled of leather. Under my bare legs the seats were cool and smooth. We took the new road to Freetown; it was still being built and hadn't been tarred but it surpassed the old, rocky road. Our route that day took us through Magburaka, in Tonkolili district, and it was strange to see posters and flyers of our father's face pasted everywhere: on shop fronts, on the sides of market stalls, rows and rows of them. People cheered as we drove in; young men ran alongside the car to catch our companions’ outstretched hands; little boys dressed only in shorts danced barefoot in the dust, sticking out their bottoms and stamping their feet, and the driver sounded the horn at pedestrians who waved back at us.
We pulled up outside a house in the middle of the town and within moments the car was surrounded by people. There was a lot of backslapping and clapping as our companions climbed out. We were all led inside and my mother and we three waited while the clatter of excited voices speaking in Temne flew around our ears.
Presently, a woman came forward bearing an enormous dish piled with rice and cassava leaves, stewed with meat and peppers. Everyone ate from the same dish. Cold, sweet drinks were pressed into our hands. All the time an unending stream of people arrived and the clamour of laughter and congratulations swelled until it could scarcely be contained by the walls of the room and burst out of the windows, trickled through the cracks in the floors and flew into the street, where other people heard it and came to join the throng. It was like a wedding party and we were unexpectedly the bride and groom.
Makeni, Lunsar, Port Loko, Waterloo – everywhere we passed the electorate had just voted to overturn their government and on the roads the people were in celebratory mood, heady with the first sweet success of what democracy could do. Young men in freshly pressed trousers and open shirts wandered about in groups; at the roadside bars the owners strung up rows of coloured bulbs; in village after village people gathered on their verandas overlooking the street. On the roads crowded poda podas raced along, full of supporters travelling to the capital to take part in the festivities
. The Mercedes swept on towards Freetown.
We had been travelling all day and now the shadows were just beginning to chase away the remaining sunlight. Our plan was to go to a friend's house so that we could shower and change into the clean outfits our mother had packed. After that no one really knew, but we had all the confidence in the world that once we reached our destination our father would have taken care of everything.
In the back of the car our mother entertained us with games of I Spy and songs. My favourite at the time was ‘Soldier, soldier’. We took turns at the verses while my mother sang the lead:
‘Oh, soldier, soldier, won't you marry me, with your musket, fife and drum?’
‘Oh, no, sweet maid, I cannot marry you, for I have no shirt to put on,’ sang the next person.
Everyone joined in – eventually I think even the APC boys learned the words:
‘So off she went to her grandfather's chest and brought him a shirt of the very, very best and the soldier put it on . . .’
I hadn't yet assigned myself a gender and I liked the idea of having a musketfife'n'drum, whatever that was, as well as all the rest of the fancy regalia that the young woman kept in her grandfather's chest. My mother must have shown me a picture because I had a very strong image of the gold-braided coat and tall, peaked cap I would wear one day.
It was dusk as we passed through the outskirts of Freetown an hour or so later. Strangely the long road into town was almost empty of people, even the tradesmen who normally sat at the roadside in huddles around their lamps seemed to be few and far between. In the front of the car the two party workers exchanged a few words in Temne. I suppose they were wondering whether we were late and all the people had already made their way to State House to greet Siaka Stevens, the new prime minister. What if we'd missed the ceremony?
The Devil that Danced on the Water Page 10