The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  I'd seen plenty of fights before, but this was different. People in Sierra Leone didn't usually wait for an invitation to intervene in a fracas. Once I had seen a man hit a woman: a tight, hard rap with his knuckles across her face. He was wearing a ring, and a spring of blood welled up below her eye. The market women nearby, who up until then had been resting on their haunches over their baskets, sprang to their feet and began to upbraid him loudly. His wife joined in, telling everyone who would listen why he was no good. He stalked away, swaggering like a cat but retreating all the same, while people queued to inspect the shiny welt across his wife's cheekbone.

  This time nobody moved. I could see two uniformed soldiers in the shade of a tree – one of them even had a rifle but neither of them did anything either.

  A new man entered the fray. He was dressed exactly the same as the other man, in a red T-shirt and a pair of old shorts. He strode up to the man on the ground, still limbo dancing in the dirt, coming at him from the opposite side so that the man didn't see him. He swung back his foot and gave a terrific kick which landed on the side of the man's face. I heard the crack. The hurt man's scream died abruptly: his jaw must have shattered. He stopped wheeling around and began to whimper, crawling towards the onlookers. For an instant I saw his fear and tears – and his face all skew-whiff and broken. A memory came to me suddenly of the crippled ant trying to escape from the ant lion.

  I shoved through the people, shielding the chicken with one arm and pushing with my other outstretched hand. I felt the texture of the crowd: the pliable stomach of a woman with a baby on her back, the slippery hardness of a shirtless labourer, tangles of clothing grabbed at me. Only when I was free did I realise I had lost the others. I was next to the meat section: flies shimmered like blue satin on every surface – piles of pink pigs’ ears, mounds of black kidneys, giant blue-green tongues. I ran on. I found myself engulfed by printed pineapples: a wedding party in ashobi, all dressed in outfits of identical cloth. I wheeled round the other way. Panic was closing my throat, and the hot wind streaming into my face dried out my eyes; people were bumping past me all the time. I looked around for Santigi or Memuna or Sheka, but I couldn't see anyone or anything that was familiar. Just endless rows of stalls.

  Somehow, I was forced back out onto the perimeter road, where the cigarette sellers stood. I slowed my pace and tried to concentrate. I pushed on, walking now, as fast as I could, round to where I reckoned the Land-Rover was parked. I could feel the sweat prickling across my scalp and my forehead. I felt as though I couldn't get enough oxygen, drawing in deep, uneven breaths of air so hot it seemed to burn my windpipe.

  Uncle Ismail was still there, lounging on the bonnet, lying back and gazing at the sky. I sat down on the bumper next to him. He heard me, pulled himself up and glanced down at me. I thought he was about to start teasing me, as was our way, but he didn't say a word. He handed me a piece of cola nut. I didn't much like cola nut – the taste was so bitter – but I bit a piece off and nibbled it, handing the rest back to him. We waited in the sun.

  The others appeared. They had been looking for me, of course. Auntie Yabome was out in front wearing a look on her face. I braced myself for trouble. Beside me Uncle Ismail stood up and stretched. He walked towards my stepmother. A few words passed between them. He spoke in Temne. Was it about me? Or had she just had enough of me? My stepmother swept past without so much as a glance, as though I didn't even exist.

  I made myself useful, taking care to keep some distance between myself and my stepmother. I helped load the Land-Rover. What didn't fit inside in the space between the benches we strapped onto the roof. Afterwards I climbed up and wedged myself into my place on one of the benches. Uncle Ismail walked around to lock the back doors for the drive home. Just before he closed them he leaned through the gap and passed me a bundle. I took hold of the chicken, feeling the silky feathers and pulsing heart and I tucked her carefully into a space on top of the sacks.

  22

  The memories are like the discarded differently coloured squares of mosaic – meaningless fragments. Two words: ‘Ginger Hall’ – a name like a place in a children's story; a man dressed all in white; magenta scars blooming on another man's forearm; red T-shirts.

  I saw what was happening. Not enough to make sense of, really. I wouldn't be able to gather the many missing pieces, create the entire picture until much later, until now. Back then, in 1970, I saw the detail, but not the whole.

  People say they didn't notice, never saw what was happening to their neighbours, knew nothing of the arrests, the burning houses, the children shot at dawn, failed to spot the prime minister's growing power, glimpsed nothing of the shadows drawing in around the edges. People were rendered blind, deaf and dumb and they plead ignorance. How could they have stood up against what they didn't even know was happening?

  But even I, a child who lived my life vicariously through my parents, my pets, the people who surrounded me, who saw only what was going on in her own world – even behind the protection of those walls I saw enough to sense the coming storm. My father saw it, too, because he was at the very centre of the cyclone.

  Burns upon black flesh, bright like florid pink blooms against the dark earth. I waited for my supper and gazed at the elderly man as he sat patiently on one of the chairs in the hall. He had rosy patches up the length of his forearms. Both his hands were bandaged thickly. The thugs had dragged him from his bed into the street and kicked him in the groin as he begged for his life. The more he pleaded, the more they laughed. They were the same age as his sons, these boys; they forced him down onto his knees and made him clasp his hands and pray to them for his salvation. Then they poured kerosene over his hands and threw matches at him until one caught and blazed. I stared at his bandaged hands. I imagined them pink and curled as chicken claws under the wrappings. The old man had come to ask for help; he went into my father's study and the door closed behind them.

  By the time Siaka Stevens ascended to the premiership of Sierra Leone he was riven with grudges, scored as deeply into his soul as fresh tribal marks on an infant's face. In the luxury of the Villa André in Conakry, where he stayed as a guest of Sékou Touré, there was plenty of time to brood. His list of enemies was long: his usurper David Lansana, his political opponents in the SLPP, Juxon Smith, even some in his own camp: Ibrahim Taqi, who had declined to follow the others to Guinea and stayed behind in Freetown, had fallen out of favour.

  Once inside State House Stevens set about securing his position: he ordered the arrests of all those, civilians and soldiers alike, who had served under the NRC and, dropping his fleeting pretence at governing as part of a coalition, he set about jailing members of the opposition. Those men who still held seats in parliament found themselves challenged one by one through the courts. Within six months only four SLPP parliamentarians remained in the House of Representatives.

  Upon towns and villages where the people had voted against the APC was visited a more graphic revenge: in one village a pro-SLPP chief was stripped naked and paraded before his people, then set upon by thugs armed with night sticks; a man who had canvassed on behalf of the opposition was bound hand and foot and driven hundreds of miles from his home in the boot of a car. In Kambia SLPP voters were tied up and brought before a kangaroo court of APC youths. In Bo the paramount chief was beaten and dragged into a police station. In by-elections in Kono and Kenema the APC swung in easily after voters were frightened away from the polls by youths in red T-shirts armed with machetes and acid, who arrived and left in high-speed convoys. Bloody battles took place between the thugs and anyone who refused to be cowed. For a while in late 1968 the country teetered on the brink of anarchy.

  Despite the growing outrage Stevens refused to condemn the violence. Moderate members of the government visited State House to demand the prime minister halt the country's drift into disorder. From his high-backed swivel chair in State House, covered in the finest Italian leather, Stevens offered them bland platitudes: he personall
y knew nothing of the origin of these attacks, he assured them. Below his window, in the forecourt of the presidential palace, lupine youths in red T-shirts and bandannas lounged, cruel and confident as predators. They jostled and spat at delegates who came to hand their petitions in to the premier, glared and hissed like cats at anyone who took issue with them, even members of their own party. The same young men lolled upon the veranda and in the front rooms of the home of S. I. Koroma, the representative for Port Loko just north of Freetown, from where some of the worst reports of violence were emerging.

  Sorie Ibrahim Koroma was a dark-skinned African who favoured white suits in the style of Sékou Touré. He thought it amusing to keep a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince on the table in the room where visitors were asked to wait and he openly revelled in his nickname: Agba Satani, Satan's Chief Disciple. S.I., as he was also affectionlessly known, took a theatrical delight in cultivating dread and his name would become a byword for thuggery in Sierra Leone.

  At the peak of the violence, a few months after the APC took office, the young minister of finance drove to Port Loko and confronted S.I. directly. The two men had a shared history. Both were Bo School boys; S.I. had been a prefect when our father arrived on a scholarship. Even then the older boy had never been more than a mediocre pupil whose career ended after the fifth form. What he lacked in intellect S.I. made up for in ambition. His ruthlessness and dogged devotion to Siaka Stevens had seen him climb through the ranks of the party and his power lay in his personal command of the youth wing. But S.I. bitterly resented being surpassed by young, western-educated men like Mohamed Forna, wooed by Stevens before the elections and then given positions of prominence. Our father was the senior minister of the two, and that night in S.I.’s Port Loko estate he ordered his cabinet colleague to call off his thugs, telling him he had no right to bring terror to the country.

  Our father received his reply two months later. In the early hours of a warm January morning an unmarked Mercedes Benz pulled up in front of the offices of Freedom newspaper. The lower windows of the offices were boarded up; the opposition newspaper had been attacked before. That morning armed men sprayed the front of the building with automatic gunfire, dust and masonry flew, windows exploded, some bullets ricocheted off the pipes on the outside of the building. Beyond one of the windows Francis Biareh, a twelve-year-old boy collecting newspapers to sell to drivers in the early-morning rush-hour traffic, was hit by bullets in the neck and chest. He fell to the floor. The car sped away.

  Within the hour two hundred people had gathered on the pavement outside the Freedom building. Some of them gathered up the boy's bloody body and carried him through the city traffic to the prime minister's office. There they waited by the gates, and when the motorcade bringing the prime minister to his offices appeared the crowd began to press in upon the car. Someone hurled a stone at the windscreen. Others began to follow suit. The prime minister's driver slowed down for a moment, then he accelerated and swept on, past the crowd and down the hill.

  The next day the prime minister did not attend the APC rally as scheduled. Our father and those moderate members of the government who supported him in his stand against the violence also stayed away. S. I. Koroma went, though, and addressed the gathering. He took to the stage and swore the killing of Francis Biareh was a blatant attempt by the opposition to turn people against the government. He vowed it would not succeed.

  The playground for the junior school at Bertha Conton was a small triangle of bare earth at the back of the classrooms; it faced directly onto State House and boasted a solitary tree that barely ever saw the light. Sometimes, during break or lunch, when we heard the familiar sound of sirens starting up, we would stand and watch the prime minister's motorcade as it arrived and departed.

  At school we did our sums on old-fashioned slates, because the school could not afford paper. Bertha Conton's teaching methods were Victorian: every day we stood behind our desks reciting passages from our shared primers, repeating the names of countries, capital cities, the names of the Apostles, or singing the national anthem for the pleasure of our teacher. Mistakes were not tolerated. You were caned if you arrived at school late, if you wet yourself, if you faltered on the capital of France, if you drew in your exercise books; you were caned for all infractions, however minor. And we were the lucky ones, privileged enough to attend one of the best schools in the country.

  All the classes were held in the same massive hall, under a corrugated iron roof upon which the rain thundered so loudly the lessons sometimes had to be stopped. I was in a class with my cousin Fatmata – she and her brother lived with us at Minister's Quarters – and we shared our books and homework. Late one afternoon we sat round the dining-room table at home tackling our maths. We worked our way down to the last sum: four times six. No, said Fatmata, pointing at her own slate, it is six times four. We bickered lazily for a while. But it's all the same anyway, I shrugged, bored with the debate. I wrote the sum down as I pleased. The next day, as I waited at the front of the class to have the free will beaten out of me for getting my sums ‘wrong’, I realised Fatmata, who had been at school in Sierra Leone all her life, had known something I'd been slow to grasp.

  In front of the porticos of State House sat a row of squat armoured cars, grey and sleek as blood-swollen ticks. When the last motorcycle passed through the gates, from outside they could be glimpsed for one fleeting moment.

  In our father's first year as minister of finance the country had, for the first time ever, produced a surplus. The two most pressing needs in the country were healthcare and education. The money could either guarantee free primary education for children or it could go to the government hospitals, where even the most basic standards of healthcare were absent. Like a mother who has to choose which one of her children should receive the extra food, these are the judgements to be made in the poor countries like ours.

  Although he was a doctor, our father argued strongly in cabinet for the money to go to education. Only a tiny percentage of people knew how to read and write, and if people could just understand the basic rules of hygiene, understand why they must take their children to be vaccinated, then more good would ultimately come of it than spending the same money on the hospitals.

  Siaka Stevens spent the money on the fleet of armoured cars, for his own personal protection, bought from a British company who willingly advanced the extra money they would cost at an inflated rate. In time Stevens would eventually create his own personal army, adding two Internal Security Units and a Special Security Division, loyal only to him. He encouraged his minister of finance to give assurances to representatives of the world's banking community that in return for free development grants and soft loans Sierra Leone would sign no more credit agreements of the kind that had dragged us into debt once already. And while his minister was out of the country, Stevens took control of the finance ministry and signed the agreement for the cars himself.

  In public Stevens lavished praise on his brilliant young minister, treated him as a protégé and honoured him as his right-hand man, leaving him acting prime minister when he visited Europe for medical treatment or went abroad on state visits. I stood in a crowd of cheering schoolchildren at the gates of Bertha Conton watching my father drive past. The car stopped; he climbed down to shake hands with the teachers and children close by. I was too short to see properly and struggled on tiptoe. ‘That's my father,’ I told the boy next to me as I used his shoulder for leverage.

  He looked at me disbelievingly. ‘No he isn't,’ he had replied and elbowed me sharply in the ribs.

  At the same time and in private the Pa undermined his finance minister constantly, allowed him to take decisions which he later overturned, skirted cabinet approval, sent over orders to make arbitrary payments: promotions for new Limba police officers, army commissions for Limba officers, a loan for the suddenly urgent construction of a rock-filled road less than two miles long, yet costing six million leones. The road would do nothing to ease con
gestion in the city. Both our father and M. O. Bash Taqi, the minister for works, defied Stevens, declining to rubber stamp his demands and persuading cabinet to reject the project.

  Our father took his complaints directly to Stevens himself. Pa Sheki, the ‘father of the nation’, as he like to be called, hid his anger behind laughter. ‘Why are you so worried?’ he had joked. ‘These debts won't be due until our grandchildren's day.’ Stevens believed everyone had a price: so long as a leader shared the spoils everyone was happy. Within months of being in office the government was split and Stevens resorted to new tactics to outwit the defiant elements in his cabinet.

  My father received a telephone call from Stevens summoning him to State House to attend a meeting at short notice. When he arrived he found several police officers, including the police commissioner, Jenkins Smith, as well as John Bangura, the force commander, accompanied by two of his officers. The story was told to me by Jenkins Smith; he had already been to my father for help when Stevens began to order a series of unauthorised promotions of police officers, hand-picked by the premier himself.

  Stevens began: ‘Ah, Dr Forna. I'm glad you're here. Sit down, won't you.’ He indicated a chair in front of his desk, in a position where our father would be sitting with his back to the others in the room. The minister sat down. Stevens continued: ‘I just want to let you know about a series of meetings we've been having. We have made a decision to synchronise the military and police communications systems.’

  It was, quite simply, an outright lie. No such meetings had taken place and everyone in the room knew it. Neither the police nor the army had any wish to share a communications system – quite the contrary: they were keen to maintain their independence. The scheme Stevens was talking about was one proposed by a new contractor and cost three million leones, a vast sum of money. According to Jenkins Smith, Stevens was still speaking when the finance minister interrupted, slapping his hand palm down on the table for emphasis. He was angry and Jenkins Smith suspected he must have come to the meeting with the knowledge that something like this was likely to happen. In the plainest terms he told Stevens his ministry would not sanction such a deal; the plan proposed by the existing suppliers of communications equipment had come in at a tenth of the price.