The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  The British and Americans were alert to any hint of communist sympathies in the political landscape of the country. Next door Sékou Touré ruled Guinea with his own unique African brand of communism. On the other side of us was Liberia: a satellite of US interests in Africa where the people spoke with American accents, the flag was a wan copy of the Stars and Stripes and you could buy hamburgers. Our tiny nation found itself in a strategically important position at a time when two world powers were concerned lest the Reds gain another foothold in West Africa. Official documents from that time are fall of whispered suspicions; many fell upon the APC for its left-wing ideologies and Stevens as a former trade unionist. Visits or periods of study in the People's Republic of China or Cuba on the part of party officials were noted and included in the risk calculations, like a red mark in the margin of an exercise book. Both socialist regimes openly wooed the newly independent African states – especially the People's Republic of China, desperate then to accumulate vital votes at the United Nations and recognition for Mao's post-revolution regime.

  At Kew I leafed through thousands of documents. After the 1967 elections my father's name began to appear in the records for the first time. At first no one on the circuit of cocktail parties and diplomatic dinners in Freetown was at all sure who he was and they mistook him for a run-of-the-mill politician with a similar name. Our father walked out of nowhere, a nobody from the despised provinces with the biggest following in the country, a bigger majority even than Siaka Stevens. He made them jittery because they'd been caught looking the other way. A red-hot APC man, they called him. No wonder the police chief had begun to spy on us.

  Farcical as the Special Branch agents’ methods were, they brought new strains into our household. And in a short time the behaviour of the police transformed into something altogether more menacing.

  Our father was away as usual at one of his meetings. But on this occasion he was gone for several days, much longer than was normal. At home our mother waited with knots coiling like snakes in her stomach as she watched the hours pass. When he finally returned to the house he told her what had happened: the meeting he had attended had been declared illegal under martial law and broken up by the police. Several of them had been arrested, held at the station and only just released.

  The police were successfully gathering intelligence and using it to halt all political activity. A Sierra Leonean man, now an academic, who described himself as ‘a youthful supporter of the APC’, recounted for me what happened at one meeting:

  A group of men, including our father, was gathered late at night in a deserted shelter in fields close by a village whose chief was sympathetic to the party. The shelter was made of poles and layered with palm fronds, used by workers to rest and sleep during the harvest but otherwise unoccupied. About twelve men were present. The talk circled around whether the military rulers of the NRC would continue to resist pressure to hand over to a civilian government. In the last few months the election results had been finalised: our father's party the APC had been declared the clear winner. But Juxon Smith had recently elevated himself to the rank of brigadier; he showed no signs of stepping down from the limelight.

  People were talking in low voices; the room was barely lit by a single hurricane lamp; above the motor hum of the crickets, the only sound in the melting night air was the fluttering of a fat-bodied moth, the occasional scratch of an animal in the bushes. Someone excused himself from the discussion to go outside and urinate. The conversation lulled while people waited for him to come back. Minutes passed. He was taking his time. Someone made a joke. Laughter, followed by a gasp as realisation dawned too late. A uniformed figure appeared in the entrance of the hut and ordered them all out. When they stepped out of the shelter they saw they were completely surrounded by police. A Land-Rover stood nearby; the back door was unlocked and everyone pushed inside. There, lying on the floor, was their handcuffed colleague.

  Within a matter of weeks the meetings were being broken up regularly. Sometimes the organisers were held for a few hours, at other times overnight. The activists refused to back down. They held ‘pocket meetings’ in cars: three or four people travelling together. When they were stopped they claimed to be relatives on their way to a wedding, or sometimes a funeral. They came into the house in ones and twos, masquerading as patients, and talked behind the surgery doors. Finally they began to meet under the auspices of the Poro, the Temnes’ secret society.

  My father's society name was Bomo, Burning Flame, chosen by Pa Roke, who paid a fee to the Poro before he placed his young son in the care of the Poro elders for three days of initiation. The purchase of the name guaranteed the boy a high status within the brotherhood and determined his future role in the Poro. In the final moments of the ceremony the skin of each novitiate was twice pulled taut and sliced through with a sharp blade. On our father's chest, high on the sternum, were double sickle moons, scars of the Poro.

  At night in Koidu Poro men came by the house, remaining in the darkness beyond the rectangle of light cast by the windows. We would hear the three-note whistle of the Poro call. Our father rose from whatever he was doing and slipped outside: ‘Termoni’ He gave the Poro greeting.

  ‘Telka funka kinka.’ They acknowledged him as one of them and they went by foot to the meeting.

  They met deep in the sacred bush where nobody, including and especially heavy-booted Mende policemen, dared to go. In Tonkolili, in our father's constituency, a blue and white hut stood in every village. This was the Poro hut, really little more than a storage hut for the masks and costumes used by the society members to stage dances at festival time. But it was considered a sacred site, like everything else connected with the Poro, and provided the activists with a safe place to meet.

  The true success of the Poro, however, was to dam the trickle of intelligence that had been reaching the authorities. Men who might become loquacious over a beer or for the price of a few leones thought hard before they broke the Poro oath of silence.

  Two months after my father's election victory, my parents sat up late into the night talking. Pressure was mounting; my father was locked into a dangerous game. There were reports of scattered violence, even talk of civil war. Our European mother was conspicuous; without family she was alone much of the time. The day had come for us to go.

  One minute I was chasing Jim in the dusty confines of our compound; the next I was gazing at green scenery that raced past my window as, for the first time in my life, we drove along smooth roads that didn't cause the car to shake and rattle like a can tied to a stray dog's tail. After our father drove us to Freetown we boarded the ferry across the bay to the airport at Lungi, where we walked up the steps of the plane and left him behind. I remember nothing of leaving Sierra Leone or arriving at Gatwick, nothing of our journey to Scotland to my grandparents’ house in Aberdeen. This was the first of a pattern of sudden departures and unheralded arrivals in new countries that would mark my childhood.

  14

  The first time I saw snow I stood, layered in clothing, at the top of the steps of our caravan and surveyed my brilliant world. It was as though the clouds had tumbled out of the sky and covered the earth. I could see across the roofs of all the other caravans in the site at Nigg, across fields – only yesterday thick with heather, broom and gorse – to the rows of houses and blackened buildings of Aberdeen. The view of the city from Nigg was uninterrupted save by a single Norman church. To the right and behind me was yet more heath land; half a mile beyond that the North Sea. On a cloudy day, which this was not, it was hard to tell where the city ended and the sea began, so seamless was the transition from granite cityscape to flinty grey water.

  I hadn't seen snow before, but perhaps it was the memory of my mother's retelling of Grimms’ fairy tales, bristling with forests and spired castles; or the pictures on cards sent to us in Sierra Leone at Christmas time: of snowmen, of fat-cheeked Dutch children with strange medieval features throwing snowballs and skating on the canal. I
knew what to do. I set off down the five metal steps leading from the caravan.

  A narrow path to a sloping driveway led sharply off to the right, down from the plinth of rock and stone upon which the caravan squatted. Overnight flurries of snow, glistening like salt pans, had levelled the land and the opaque expanse looked smooth and secure. From my position on the bottom step, without waiting for my mother and without hesitation, I ran straight out onto it where, for an instant, I pedalled rapidly before plunging through the layers of soft, cool crystals until finally the snow closed over my head. Startled, though unafraid, I opened my eyes. The sun was bright, penetrating the snow; I looked into miles of radiant, white wonderland. It was marshmallow quiet. I felt as though I could swim into it and tried to move. Moments later I felt my mother's groping hands latch onto me from behind.

  I trudged through the site in the wake of my mother's footsteps. The snow squeaked beneath our feet as we went past the other caravans to the road, where we searched for our Mini under the snow drifts. From the surface the snow was still glorious, but in my mind the beauty of the world beneath the snow was matchless.

  The day after we arrived at Gatwick our mother had bought a yellow Mini and we loaded it onto the train from King's Cross to Perth, where we disembarked and drove the rest of the way to Aberdeen. For the first few weeks of the summer we lived with my grandparents: I shared a bed with my mother in her old bedroom overlooking the stepped gardens behind Gairn Terrace, while my sister bunked with our grandmother and my brother slept on a camp bed.

  One morning in the first weeks of August a blue aerogramme arrived. On the front it bore the large diamond-shaped stamps of Sierra Leone; inside our father's sloping hand. He had been arrested on the orders of the junta on 29 July after rumours circulated that he had been raising money to buy arms for the APC. He had not been charged and he didn't know when he would be freed.

  As it turned out his spell in detention lasted four months. Years afterwards our father confessed to being baffled by the curious circumstances of his arrest. The envoy sent to Koidu by the NRC to investigate the rumours turned out to be a young man called Colonel Jumu, someone my father had taught at Bo School. Instead of pursuing his inquiries the young colonel tried to persuade our father to give up the APC and join the junta. My father refused. A letter followed reiterating the offer; he ignored it.

  Shortly after the encounter with Colonel Jumu our father was arrested and taken to Pademba Road Prison. There a second letter from the NRC hierarchy, which promised him promotion to lieutenant-colonel within a year, was forwarded by some thorough soul to the detainees’ wing of the central prison. From his cell our father penned an uncompromising reply refusing to join an illegal regime.

  There were cracks in the NRC leadership, rumours that Colonel Jumu and several cohorts planned to topple Juxon Smith. The British offered to pack Jumu off on a military training course in England, which was soon quietly effected. The commissioner of police, no fan of Juxon Smith himself, had been encouraging the dissidents whilst making efforts to secure his own position. All the while there was no indication that the NRC had any intention of making way for the rightful winners of the election. A newly-appointed council of civilians briefly brought hope that democratic rule was on its way, but time passed and – nothing. William Leigh, who now had a new job on the council, was certain the APC had hidden caches of arms around the country with plans to remove the junta by force if necessary. It could have been either him or Juxon Smith who gave the order to arrest our father.

  My mother showed the letter to her parents and my grandfather absorbed the news in the same detached manner he had greeted her return home six years after he had turned his back on her. About a year after we moved to Koidu a package had arrived. It was unsigned and bore no return address, but inside was a copy of the Aberdeen Evening Post. That was the closest my grandfather could bring himself to apologising to his daughter. You'd better get out and find yourself a job then, he observed; his advice was delivered without embroidery, short and to the point, as ever.

  Our mother enrolled on a teacher training course at a local college and applied for a grant. With the money left over from our savings she found boarding schools for Sheka and Memuna and paid the first term's fees. One darkening autumn evening our grandfather drove us all out to Drumtochty Castle. The castle was pink, built of rose granite with several impressive turrets and a tower; it lay in a hollow surrounded by thick pine forests. For all the world it looked to me just like the witch's house in Hansel and Gretel.

  We led my brother, dry-eyed, innocent of his fate, up to the long attic dormitory with rows of iron beds spread with tartan rugs. A boy whose parents had already driven away sat on the bed next to my brother's own and watched us. My mother asked his name. I stared, fascinated by his dead-straight, pale hair, equally pale skin and confident manner. Our grandfather placed Sheka's tuck box, with his name in stencilled letters, at the end of the bed and we said our farewells. Poor Sheka was to spend the next two years of his life in that bleak hideout. A few days later my mother and I deposited my sister, two weeks short of her fifth birthday, in her school ninety miles to the south-west in Ayr.

  My mother and I began to look for a place to live. We drove up and down the hills of Aberdeen looking at likely apartments. My mother was anxious to leave her parents’ house as soon as possible but there were few affordable alternatives.

  One afternoon we thought we'd struck lucky. The apartment comprised the upper floor of a sturdy, turn-of-the-century semi-detached house belonging to a widow who lived downstairs. She was fragile-boned, grey-haired and her face seemed kind. She showed us the rooms, explaining at the same time that the house was too big for her and she was looking to let part of it. The entrance was shared, but beyond that we would have complete privacy. As we walked from room to room my mother's optimism flourished. The space was clean, airy and decorated in plain Scots style: oatmeal walls, sprigged curtains and a settee covered in hard-wearing bouclé fabric.

  As we stood in the hallway preparing to leave my mother told the woman we'd be happy to take the apartment. Is it just the two of you, then? The woman glanced at me. I was holding onto my mother sucking my thumb. I've two other children, a boy and a girl – they're away at school. And what about your husband? My mother certainly wasn't going to tell her he was in prison. He's a doctor, she replied. Her voice was deliberately casual as she added, He's in West Africa. Oh, I see, said the lady. She had a voice like a whisper, and the rhythm of her accent made it sound almost as though she were crooning. She paused and gave a troubled smile. The problem is, she said, and I'm sure you'll understand – it's just me on my own here and I don't want any foreigners coming into the place. Even if I didn't mind, it's my sons, you see. They'd worry about me awfully. Knowing, well . . . you know.

  After that my mother gave up hunting for a flat. An advert for a caravan for sale looked like the solution to our problems. My mother put a deposit on it immediately. It was parked on a site just south of Aberdeen on the other side of the Dee, but still close to her parents, and we moved in. At one end there was a separate bedroom complete with double bed; at the other end the caravan narrowed into a bay window with a pair of benches along either wall. Between them was a Formica table that folded down at night and the benches converted into bunk beds.

  My mother painted out the interior, sewed orange covers for the seats and hung a ribboned divider between the kitchenette and the sitting room. There was no bathroom, just a toilet in a concrete shelter shared with the caravan next door and a shower block in the middle of the camp. Near the entrance was the office, run by a woman who wore her peroxide hair teased into a high beehive, and the man who owned our site, Mr Gordon. He was middle aged and had black hair, side parted and slicked down with oil. He wore square, black-framed glasses and a sheepskin driving coat with big leather buttons. Most days we went into the office to collect our post or buy milk and bread. When we passed I would see Mr Gordon looking out of the wi
ndow by his desk and whenever he saw us he would slip out from his seat and come over to talk to my mother.

  In autumn the long grasses turned golden and the heather browned. A crisp wind blew straight in from the North Sea, and the site up on the crest of the hill caught the worst of it. My mother needed help to pay the hire purchase loan and the bills, so Sonia and Brian, a brother and sister who were also students – Sonia was at the same college as my mother – moved into the tiny space with us. I slept with my mother in the big bed; Sonia and Brian on the bunks. When Memuna and Sheka came home for weekends and holidays there was barely enough room for us all even after everyone doubled up.

  Sonia wore a sixties bob with wings of dark hair that framed her face. We three children referred to her between ourselves as ‘the lady whose hair was longer at the front than at the back’. We didn't do this to distinguish her from all the hundreds of other Sonias we knew, but rather because we remained deeply awed by her avant-garde hairstyle, the memory of which remained after her name faded.

  Brian was Sonia's younger brother and a student of architecture at Gray's. Brian and I got on well; we spent a lot of our time together. Early on weekday mornings, often before dawn, he dropped me at Gairn Terrace on his way into classes. Every day Gran opened the door, nodded briefly at Brian, and pulled me inside. At other times, if there was no one else who could look after me, if my mother was still in classes and Gran was busy, Brian took me to his lectures at the School of Architecture, where I waited for him in the common room in the company and under the care of a dozen male students.

  We had arrived in Britain from rural Africa in the middle of the Summer of Love of 1967. London and San Francisco throbbed to the beat of the sixties. The same could not quite be said of Aberdeen, but there was a vibrant student life and my mother's sense of fun, suffocated under layers of tension in Africa, resurfaced. There were parties in our tiny caravan late into the night, snapshots in my memory: sleeping next to my sister in the big bed, beneath a pile of heavy coats left by guests; the melody of ‘Day Dream Believer’ plucked on a guitar; the collection of nylon-haired gonks I kept on the shelf above my bed.