The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  Stevens had smiled and ignored the interruption, acting as though nothing had happened: ‘I have called you here,’ he repeated slowly, pulling his lips back and enunciating each word, ‘because the three of us – ‘ his wave encompassed Jenkins Smith and the brigadier – ‘have had a number of meetings.’

  My father struck the desk, sharply this time, with his fist and he too repeated himself. Nobody else in the room uttered a word.

  The police commissioner was the first to move. He stood up, put on his cap, saluted, clicked his heels and walked towards the door. The others followed suit, leaving the minister of finance and the prime minister alone in the room. In the hallway one of the men, a communications officer in the army, grasped Jenkins Smith by the hand: ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘It does no good to be there when big men make palaver.’ None of them could entirely believe the scene they had just witnessed.

  Jenkins Smith told me what they all suspected: that Stevens must have stood to make money out of the deal. In the future, if it was ever investigated, it was almost certainly the minister of finance who would take the blame. But Stevens had been outmanoeuvred by our father's boldness.

  Some time later, when our father was alone in the house, came the early-morning warning blast in the bathroom of Minister's Quarters 4.

  I remember a man: dark and lean, he sometimes sat alone, waiting under the mango tree. He would talk with the servants who brought him his food, and as soon as our father came out of the house he jumped up to open the car door and rode along in the front seat of the official car next to the driver, with his elbow on the window frame. I don't remember his features especially, certainly not his name. Just the silhouetted matchstick figure, in a short-sleeved uniform, sitting on the roots of the tree behind our house, while I ran in and out playing with my brother and sister.

  I remember Janet Thorpe, too. She was my father's confidential secretary at the ministry and she found an easy route to my affections by serving me cold bottles of Fanta and Vimto out of the fridge behind her desk whenever we visited the office. Sometimes she stopped by the house with a gift or a dish of something she had cooked herself. Janet was unmarried, attractive in an earnest way, with a bookish air about her and a way of folding her hands in her lap like an old-fashioned governess. She was fond of her boss, who had often confided in her about us, his plans to have his children live with him again. She didn't approve and she dared to tell him so; children were better off with their mother in her view, and his political life didn't leave him enough time for three young children. But she felt sorry for him all the same. When he came back from cabinet meetings it was Janet who listened while he gave vent to his growing frustrations.

  So on the morning our father walked into the ministry building to find several of his staff huddled outside his door, it was Janet who was pushed forward in front of everyone else. She told him the rumour that was rife in the office: his own personal bodyguard was spying on him for Stevens. The man had been caught sending daily reports on all our father's conversations and meetings back to the prime minister's office.

  Dusty files stacked in the converted school building that was once Bertha Conton School, papers containing names and addresses, salary scales, terms of pay and conditions: special information agents to the prime minister's office. Somehow a few have survived the thirty years, even the day when most of the government archives, including the cabinet papers and the records of the Ministry of Finance, were destroyed – that terrible day in 1997 when the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front left their bush hideouts and brought their ten-year war to the capital. In seeking revenge on the elite they held responsible for the misery, they wreaked vengeance on the ordinary people. As they advanced through the country upon the capital they sliced off the hands, lips, ears and genitals of men, women and children and burned alive those who resisted them. In a display of disdain for a corrupt and rotten system they torched government offices and the law courts of the capital, sending a nation's history up in smoke.

  Among the yellowing, fly-spotted papers stored in the makeshift archive of our old classrooms are dozens of names, including somewhere the forgotten name of my father's bodyguard. These were the prime minister's web of spies, paid eight hundred and forty leones a month – more than most Sierra Leoneans saw in the year, certainly more than a teacher, a nurse or even a doctor in a government hospital. A good price, then, in return for betraying your neighbours, family, friends, or your boss – who you were conveniently also paid to protect.

  Our uncles – Bash and Ibrahim – visited us at home almost every day, still ebullient. Bash lived only a few dozen yards away in another ministerial house. They came alongside others uncowed by Stevens's bullying: men like Sarif Easmon, a medical doctor and a writer who still dared to criticise the prime minister in the newspapers, and Cyrus Rogers Wright, another prominent Creole and a lawyer. Lami Sidique, the civil servant who had helped bring the APC back from exile in 1968, had been repaid by Stevens, who had put out a warrant for his arrest. My father had once offered him a safe place in our house, knowing Stevens wouldn't dare send the police into the home of one of his own ministers. They would sit on the veranda facing the garden deep in discussion with our father.

  Stevens had tried to fracture the so-called Tonkolili group. He had excluded Ibrahim Taqi, the man to whom he owed so much of his electoral victory, from the first government and left him on the backbenches. Ibrahim used his independence in parliament to tackle Stevens in public over the beatings and over the detention of opposition MPs. In due course Stevens gave him the post of minister of information, but if he hoped a government position would quell Ibrahim, he was wrong. After a year Stevens lost patience, reshuffled the cabinet and Ibrahim was on the backbenches once more.

  Our father's massive election victory made him indispensable to Stevens. A rumour circulated that during the Privates’ Coup the young soldiers had at first demanded Mohamed Forna as the country's leader. Our father had declined; it was Stevens whom the people had elected. But the soldiers had wanted the country led by a northerner, a Temne man after the Mende Margais.

  Stevens owed his election to the northern vote and he knew it, for he possessed an instinctive understanding of tribal politics. He was a quisling, a man for all people. He variously claimed to be Vai – through his mother; or Limba – through his father, although he could not speak the language. He liked to tell Mendes how he was raised in Moyamba among their tribe and Creoles how he was educated in Freetown. Once in power he set about strategically promoting many Limbas, especially within the police and army, in the knowledge that through this small and disenfranchised group he could gather a core of effective support. The one major group on whom he had no claim was the Temne, and in the early months while he still held on to power with a faltering grip, he relied on the support of the north.

  Stevens was suspicious of northerners in his own government and sent spies to report the discussions between the Taqis and my father. Gradually the three men met more often in our house. In time the conversations shifted from the veranda to our father's ground-floor study.

  It had become impossible to know who could be trusted, even in our own household. There were constant visitors: neighbours, young men in need of a job, constituents down from the provinces to discuss a local issue, former patients, people who claimed to be our supporters. But which of them had an ulterior motive, who was there to win false trust, report on the comings and goings, pose a sly question to the servants – it was impossible to tell.

  In the spring of 1969, a year before we came home, our father had been made guest of honour at the annual Old Boys’ Association convention at Bo School. He was the most prominent of the distinguished alumni, which included a number of ministers and members of the House of Representatives. Our father delivered the keynote address at the start of the weekend of celebrations. For an hour he spoke with emotion against the use of violence as a political weapon. He referred to many of the men sitting at tabl
es around the room: the school had united them from every region of the country, he told them, yet politics was pitting one group against the other. He received a standing ovation.

  S. I. Koroma did not attend the festivities at Bo School and so he didn't hear the minister of finance speak first hand, but news of the speech reached S.I. in a matter of hours. A day later he arrived unannounced at Spur Loop. He was a soft-spoken man, and he begged a little of the doctor's time. He thought that perhaps the doctor had made a mistake in saying some of the things he had. Dr Forna had spent a great deal of time in Britain – perhaps too much time, S.I. said. But this wasn't England. He laughed lightly as he continued smoothly: Politics in Africa were very different. Here politics and violence were inseparable. It was regrettable, but . . . He shrugged. He had a habit of picking imaginary pieces of lint from his spotless white suit. He smiled. Dr Forna didn't realise all of this, being an intellectual, he concluded – and he made the word ‘intellectual’ sound like an insult.

  In March 1970 in Ginger Hall in the East End of Freetown youths in red shirts threw dynamite at Fulah shops and the homes of Fulah and Mende inhabitants. The attacks came in the early morning and dozens died in their beds in the flames. Those who could fled the city and their homes and did not dare return. In the Freetown City Council elections that followed days later so few SLPP voters attended the polls that the APC swept the board clean in an unprecedented victory.

  23

  We drove up to Magburaka to see Pa Roke. The trips up-country were an adventure: the journey took several hours on appalling roads and at times Sullay had to slow the car to a crawl and he and my father, who was in the passenger seat, pressed their fingertips against the windscreen to absorb the impact from the stones kicked up by passing poda podas. Villages lined the road like seeds springing up along the bank of a river after a drought.

  At Mile 91 we stopped for refreshments and the roadside sellers homed in on the car, offering oranges skinned to the pith; sun-roasted peanuts with papery skin; mangoes, pawpaws and pineapples. We bought oranges and the vendor sliced off the top; we sucked the juice out, sieving the pips through our teeth. The empty baskets in the boot were filled with fruit to take to the family. All the time the crowd of people round us swelled. Some were there to sell, but most just came to stare. The car, our clothes, especially the fair complexions of my brother, sister and me, transfixed people. In the provinces, away from Freetown, children still shouted ‘Oporto’ after the seventeenth-century Portuguese traders or ‘John Bull’ whenever they saw a pale skin. They pressed their faces against the glass without shame, and behaved as though we too were impervious to their scrutiny.

  I was uncomfortable. I hated being stared at, and on top of that I was sitting in the middle of the back seat, where the arm rest went. I leaned forward, gripping the two front seats, with my feet on the centre hump and my knees up by my middle. Inside I was experiencing a tumble of emotions: excitement about the trip and shyness because of the crowd; one of my legs was numb, too. But there was another feeling, a nagging in my brain that made me feel shivery and bad, restless and unhappy all at the same time. Yet I dreaded anyone asking me if I was all right. I had never had this feeling before: I felt as though I had been caught stealing. I felt guilty.

  An afternoon, a week or two before, my father had come home carrying a young fawn. Her mother had been killed in a hunting accident, he explained. No one had seen the baby she was shielding with her body. The fawn was ours to raise. I was mesmerised. I knew immediately that I wanted to be the person who looked after the fawn. I reached out and touched her. The hair was slippery smooth and her skin shivered under my touch, but she had let me stroke her.

  We had other animals – several dogs, which I regarded as mine; plus, until recently, a mongoose, a hooligan that chased the dogs, stole the sugar from the table and raced up the curtains until one of the dogs plucked up courage and dragged the mongoose round the yard by the tail and it ran away for good.

  The mongoose had been followed by a parrot called Sheka, bought at market for my brother, who had shown no interest in the bird so I began to take care of him. Thinking to please my brother, I named the parrot after him. I fed Sheka peanuts and kept him in a cage with a broken lock, tied up with string. Each morning I found Sheka wandering about the floor, the knot carefully unpicked and the string lying on the floor next to his cage. In time the clipped red flight feathers on the underside of his wings grew back and the bird headed for the open window and the sky.

  I didn't regret our animals leaving. I don't think it even occurred to me that they were supposed to be permanent fixtures. But there was something about the fawn's vulnerability that made her different. We kept her in my father's downstairs study and on that first evening I carefully carried a pan of milk which I set down beside her and watched as she lapped at the surface.

  But we were young and we were excited. We wanted to be near the fawn and so we played in the same room, including her in our games: unwittingly terrorising and tending her by turns. By evening the fawn was showing signs of restlessness. I stood by the door holding the bowl of milk, watching her stumble around the room. She fell to her knees and couldn't seem to rise again. Every time she managed to straighten one leg another would crumple. I put down the basin and ran to fetch Auntie Yabome. My stepmother watched the fawn for a few minutes. ‘She wants to die,’ she said, with old village wisdom.

  In the morning the fawn was lying on her side in the centre of the floor. I thought she was asleep and so I left the basin of milk next to her. When I went back and she still hadn't touched it I called Auntie Yabome again. Even then, it took me a while to understand the fawn was dead.

  Somewhere in the western hemisphere of my brain I remembered what someone must once have told me, about the survival instinct of animals. Yet we had tormented the motherless fawn until she willed herself to death. I wondered about all the terrible things I had done, how I had tried to get rid of Auntie Yabome. I didn't really worry that my stepmother might lie down on her bed and decide to die, but I began to feel bad all the same.

  We reached Magburaka at midday and stopped outside Pa Roke's house. It was painted red, with blue shutters and window frames. But there was no glass in the windows; they were just empty holes, like eye sockets. Everyone called the house ‘Mohamed's house’ because my father's brothers had set about building it for us to live in when he came home from Britain. After he was posted to Freetown the house lay empty until Pa Roke decided to move in. It was the only house in the street with a proper plaster facade; all the rest, including my aunts’ and uncles’ homes, were built of clay bricks with earthen floors that were swept clean morning and evening. None of them had electricity, running water or indoor plumbing. Out back, on the edge of the bush, was the latrine and as I sat, thigh muscles tensed, suspended over a stinking pit in the tiny thatched hut, it was the only part of our visits I regretted.

  Pa Roke came out wearing his long gown. He rarely smiled: ‘Impiere.’

  ‘Seke.’

  ‘Seke, topia.’

  After several exchanges we went inside. There was a pause while we all sat down, then the greetings began again like a mantra. I hadn't learned to speak Temne. I sat there with my shoulders rounded, my chin sticking out, half listening, half dreaming.

  People came over to greet my father, sat a while and moved on. Nobody ever seemed to be in a hurry. People say time moves slowly in remote places. In Magburaka time moved at pretty much the same pace as everywhere else, but it had a different texture. In Temne the days of the week have no names, the years have no numbers, there are no dates, no decades, centuries or millennia. There are three words to denote the passing of time: today, tomorrow and yesterday. Everything else is viewed in relation to those three positions and extends only a few days in either direction, perhaps because life in rural Africa is so full of hazards that people prefer to live in the here and now rather than speculate on an uncertain future.

  So people don't
cook a meal in anticipation of their guests’ arrival, for who can say how long a journey might take? Or whether the guests will make it at all. It was only after a long interval that one of Pa Roke's younger wives arrived with some food and we three children sat on the floor in the middle of the small room eating from a large plate of rice and plassas.

  We dug into the mound, burrowing into the slopes in front of us, until gradually the pattern of roses on the tin plate began to appear. I remember I kept up a stream of chatter about it, and began to take food off the top of the pile and once I reached across and dipped my spoon into the rice on the other side of the mound, from where my brother was eating. We ate alone. I don't know where our stepmother was – perhaps she was out visiting our aunts. Pa Roke and my father did not join us. They stood over us, watching and talking in Temne. Pa Roke had a long, oval face like mine. He looked grave. He seemed to be gazing at the three of us intently. Every now and again he would ask something and once I saw him jerk his head in our direction.

  In 1967 our father had travelled to Magburaka to tell Pa Roke he wanted to go into politics and to ask his advice. But our grandfather had told his son he was not qualified to tell him what he should do. Pa Roke belonged to a past world, one in which the elders chose the new chief, initiated him and guided him throughout his reign. They ruled following traditions that were hundreds of years old. The chief who refused to pay heed to their advice could be brought before the Poro society or a council of the elders. Pa Roke still sat and listened to cases in the barrie every day. When the British arrived they had ruled the people absolutely and by decree, yet it was they who bestowed a system on all the new nations in which people were supposed to elect their own leaders. No wonder a lot of people were confused.