The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  Three years on, our father had come to ask Pa Roke's counsel again. He had been bitterly disappointed by his experience of government and had lost all faith in Siaka Stevens. The prime minister was an arch manipulator and tireless in his machinations; our father was dangerously isolated in cabinet. Pa Roke listened. What my father told him would not have been entirely new to the old man: the country rustled with rumours; some of the stories had appeared in the newspapers. Pa Roke warned his son that whatever he did he must be careful, and he should be wary of Stevens. The prime minister bore grudges, that much had been demonstrated by the fate of others; he would almost certainly take their fight to the finish.

  When we were done eating another of Pa Roke's wives returned with a second dish. This time father and son sat down to eat together while we ran outside to find our cousins. Looking back I realise now the full weight of the discussion that took place between them that day. I imagine now it could only have been that day and no other because it was the last time I saw Pa Roke standing tall. He was already well into his eighties by then and not long afterwards he suffered a stroke. The next time we visited as a family he lay, partly paralysed, on the bed in the corner of the room. With each visit he grew thinner, but the fingers of his one good hand tapped and flew, as alive as ever.

  In the afternoon we left Magburaka and Pa Roke and travelled north to visit the Bumbuna Falls, close to my stepmother's own village. The falls lie almost exactly in the centre of Sierra Leone, at the point where three rivers converge into one: the Tonkolili, the Seli and the Rokel. Down the water flows over one hundred miles to Freetown and the Atlantic Ocean. From the village we walked down winding bush paths to the river, just below the waterfall.

  Over the edge of the rocks the violent rush of water pitched into a serene, drifting river, edged by boulders, skirted by kingfishers and herons. Here and there pale green weeds below the surface caught the sunlight and the water gleamed phosphorescent. Up close the roar of water was like pounding drums. Yet only a few yards’ walk farther along the rocky edge of the water the silence of the lake completely overpowered the sound of the waterfall. It was as though the river were a lost child looking for its mother and as soon as the two found each other, the child grew quiet.

  The villagers viewed the falls with awe and they claimed the waterside was enchanted. People avoided going there alone or at dusk. As we sat in the barrie afterwards someone told us a story about a woman who had been to fetch a last jar of water as night was falling. People had heard her screams as she ran back to the village, where she collapsed in the dust. At first she could barely speak but finally she told those gathered around her what had happened. She had seen a devil, they heard her say, a devil dancing on the water.

  The woman was in the barrie with us and I glanced across at her. She was leaning against the wall with her lappa tied carelessly about her waist and a slightly sullen face; she was about twenty years old. She didn't react while the story was being told.

  I, on the other hand, was spellbound. ‘What did the devil look like?’ I asked her.

  ‘It had one big foot. Just one giant foot. It was too far out on the water.’ She was loosening one of her tight braids. She let go of it briefly, waved her hand and shrugged.

  ‘These devils – they have ears like an antelope and big teeth that stick out of their mouths, nostrils as wide as caves. Not-o-so?’ The storyteller looked at her too, and put his fingers up on either side of his head like a pair of ears, then up to his mouth to make two fangs.

  She glanced at him, neither answered nor contradicted. I pressed her: ‘But what else? What was it doing? Did he see you?’

  ‘I don't know. I didn't stay there. I saw it and I ran. That's all.’

  ‘But did he say anything to you?’

  She paused and she stopped fiddling with her plait for a moment. ‘He was laughing,’ she said at length. ‘I could hear him laughing.’

  I imagined the spirit as she had seen him: a solitary silhouette on the flat lake, turning, pirouetting, as graceful as could be on his one proud foot. He was enjoying himself in that beautiful place, laughing with the sheer pleasure of it all, of that I was certain. I thought that it was probably the woman who had frightened the devil, screaming and running away as she had, rather than the other way around. I wondered if he danced alone at dusk every day.

  ‘I wish I'd seen him. I'd like to see a devil. I'd like to see a devil dancing on the water.’ I privately made up my mind to try and catch a glimpse of him the very next time I could: the very next time we visited Bumbuna. I wondered about my chances of getting down to the water alone and unnoticed. Could I find my way back along the paths?

  The man who had told the story in the first place chuckled. ‘Oh no you wouldn't,’ he said. ‘You wouldn't want to see a devil.’ He wagged his finger at me and shook his head. ‘For then something bad will surely happen to you.’

  In August our father gave us each money to buy Auntie Yabome a present for her birthday at the end of the month. We went along to Patterson Zochonis, or PZ, where we searched for a suitable gift among the merchandise. Our stepmother dressed with the greatest of care and in the height of fashion and after some searching we found our gift. In the shoe department: a pair of cream and lime-green platform shoes rotating on a dais. We hurried to count our money and left with the shoes hidden at the bottom of a bag.

  Auntie Yabome and I were getting along a bit better, and I had managed to overcome my feelings of guilt sufficiently to continue to defy her when the occasion presented itself. Alone in the garden one afternoon, I heard a distinctive hiss from behind the bushes. I turned to see a figure beckoning me from behind the fence. I moved closer, peering through the foliage. It was Milik. I crept through the bushes until I reached him and we squatted down out of sight. Our fingers touched through the fence and he pushed some sweets to me as we whispered together for a while. After a few minutes Milik slipped away, back in the direction he had come.

  Both Sheka's and Memuna's birthdays fell the following month, and in the house plans were underway for a big party on the same day to celebrate them both. My parents, worried I might feel left out, included me in the celebrations. For many years I believed it had been my birthday and I remembered that day as my birthday alone and no one else's.

  The day began before anyone was awake. In the room I shared with Memuna it was scarcely light when my stepmother shook me awake. She told me to dress and come downstairs, and when I arrived there I found her already waiting in her car with the engine running. We were alone. I climbed into the front seat and we drove down Spur Loop and out onto the roundabout by Wilberforce barracks. I didn't know where we were headed and, because somehow I sensed the start of an adventure, I didn't ask.

  The British high commissioner's house was built on the side of the hill above Hill Cot Road, and part of the house jutted out over one of the hairpin bends of the road. I passed it on my way to and from school every day and I liked it so much, surrounded by lawns and flamboyant trees, I dreamed about what it would be like to live there. I told everyone how one day I would buy the house. But I had never actually been inside. When my stepmother turned the nose of the car into the high commissioner's gate and we travelled up the long gravel drive to the porch, it took me a while to realise where we were.

  Stephen Olver, the high commissioner, came to the door. He greeted Auntie Yabome first and then he turned to me: ‘So, young lady, I'm told you would like to see my house.’

  I nodded, transfixed and tongue-tied. The high commissioner called his son, a boy of about thirteen, and gave him instructions to show me around. For the next half hour I followed him from one splendid room to another, while he kept up an impressive commentary. We looked behind every door, upstairs and down, including the boy's own room, where a dozen model aircraft spun on wires suspended from the ceiling, like flies grown lazy in the heat. At the end of the tour I was brought back to the high commissioner's office, where my stepmother waited.

 
; From the desk in the corner Mr Olver beckoned to me to sit in front of him and asked me if I would like a drink. A moment later a servant brought me the cold drink on a tray. The high commissioner asked me if I liked the house. I replied that I did, very much indeed. How much might I propose for it, then? He was offering to sell the house to me. I gave the question a moment's consideration. I had two leones in my dresser drawer at home and my pocket money was fifty cents a week. It took me a moment but I decided to offer him the entire sum of my savings. He laughed out loud. Up until then our conversation had been conducted in complete solemnity, and only at that moment did I realise that none of them had taken me seriously from the start.

  At home I laid my indignation to rest. I shared many of the same presents as my sister, including matching doll's houses, made out of painted tin. We spent the hour before breakfast assembling them. In the late morning we gathered behind the railings of the veranda and watched an acrobat perform cartwheels holding first a glass of water and then a plate of rice. Although the man flipped over and over, ending up in the splits, not a drop or a grain fell to the ground. I recognised the tumbling man from the beach at Cape Club, where we spent Saturdays and where he often served drinks on his hands in exchange for pennies. People would throw coins on the ground and he bent over backwards like a crab to pick them up with his mouth. I did not see him as a busker, but as the most talented performer I had ever known. It was as though Nijinsky himself had put in an appearance and was leaping across the lawn.

  At lunch time all the children sat in a circle and our stepmother brought out a record with a blonde woman on the cover and put it on: we sang along to ‘Happy Birthday’. There were jellies, which collapsed in the heat, melting chocolates, pass the parcel and blind man's buff. We sat on balloons and tried to squash them and chased each other round the tree. My brother, whose birthday it really was of course, wore a smart white suit, a pale-blue shirt and a matching bow tie.

  Late in the afternoon our father came home. He spoke briefly to my stepmother on the terrace, and then he came down to the garden. We persuaded him to join in our games on the lawn, he took off his jacket and shoes and humoured us for a long while.

  The wonderful day seemed to belong to me, a miracle created with me in mind, still untainted by too much knowledge or by disappointment. But that was just an illusion.

  It wasn't my birthday, of course, not even close. And on that day our lives changed for good. Our father had resigned in protest from the government. A resolution had been passed by the All People's Congress agreeing to turn us into a republic headed by an executive presidency, and many people – including our father – believed the country was now inescapably on the road to becoming a one-party state. Any minister who refused to agree to the new executive presidency would be refused the party symbol at the next election. Our father had left the house as Siaka Stevens's most senior minister; by the time he came home he was the government's leading adversary. And by bed time we couldn't even call the house home any more because it didn't belong to us – it belonged to the government.

  24

  In six years I had lived in eight homes: our first bungalow in Shettleston, which of course I could not remember; the apartment in Freetown rented to us by the Department of Health; a brief stay in the bungalow at Wilberforce barracks and then, after my father resigned from the army, the tiny, airless flat opposite PZ. I couldn't remember them either. Then there was the house and clinic in Koidu, my mother's caravan, my stepfather's diplomatic residence in Lagos; and finally Minister's Quarters at Spur Loop, which we packed up and left within twenty-four hours: family, uncles and cousins, the servants including Amadu and Amara, the dogs, everyone.

  My new and ninth home was a house in Tengbe Farkai. Situated on a plateau on one of the hills behind Freetown, where the old railway line passed on the way to Wilberforce, Tengbe Farkai was once a small village, now gradually being swallowed by the city. A bridge connected the village to the main road into town. Beneath the bridge, in a place they called Down Below, people lived in small, tumbledown shacks crowded around a trickling stream. From the steps of our new house I could almost jump and land on the steps of Uncle Bash and Auntie Amy's place. The two houses, reached via a short alleyway, stood side by side overlooking a shared compound of beaten earth. It was a far, far cry from the lush environs of Minister's Quarters.

  Everywhere in the country, from Freetown to Koidu, from Pujehun to Kabala, people were absorbing the impact of the resignation of two of the country's leading ministers. In Tonkolili especially the local people were in shock. In August, after the APC convention had voted in favour of breaking away from Britain and turning Sierra Leone into a republic, our father, Ibrahim and Bash Taqi had held a series of emergency meetings in Magburaka. After they made the decision to resign they travelled up-country to inform the local chiefs and to hold talks with the elders of the Poro society, but the news had not been entirely well received. No one voluntarily departed politics in Africa. The elders felt they had worked hard to get their men into positions of power, and the same men owed it to them to stay. For many people in Sierra Leone democracy was just another system of patronage. You got your man into government and in exchange he looked after you. The very notion of resigning in protest, on a matter of principle, was not commonly understood.

  In Freetown our father's resignation letter had been published in several of the newspapers. It appeared the morning of the day of the birthday party. When Auntie Yabome woke me up to go to the high commissioner's house it was already on the news stands. I had often wondered at the real purpose of our early-morning visit to the British high commissioner's residence and not long ago I asked my stepmother about it, but she couldn't seem to remember the visit at all. So I wrote to Stephen Olver, long retired by then, but he answered by return of mail – a short note scrawled on the bottom of my own letter to him – that these matters belonged to the past and he had no desire to discuss them.

  While the Taqis’ letters were short and gave little away, my father spelled out exactly why he would no longer serve Stevens. He laid the blame for the violence that had swept the country in the last two years at Stevens's feet: the death of the young boy at Freedom Press, the violence and intimidation at Ginger Hall, the beatings in Port Loko. The letter went on to detail their disagreements over the use and misuse of government funds, how Stevens had lied to the World Bank, and how the country's reserves were at risk from the prime minister's lavish spending. He accused Stevens of being behind the wave of diamond smuggling in Kono. But even that was not the worst of it.

  Stevens thirsted for nothing less than absolute power. He was already in the habit of making decisions without recourse to his cabinet. Lately he had become obsessed with removing the queen as head of state in Sierra Leone. At certain official functions protocol dictated that a toast to the Queen of England was drunk, and Stevens had begun to grow increasingly impatient with the practice, which he took as a personal snub. He felt further upstaged by the governor-general, representative of the queen, whose arrival at the same public occasions was heralded by the national anthem. A few months before, at a banquet at State House, Stevens had ordered the national anthem to be played for his own entrance. The police bandleader obeyed and struck up with ‘High we exalt thee, land of the free’. Minutes later and in front of visibly baffled foreign dignitaries, the entire piece was played through for the second time when the governor-general arrived.

  ‘This display of infantile vanity may appear trivial,’ wrote our father, ‘but to me with a trained medical mind, they are the manifestations of megalomaniac syndrome. It is the top of the iceberg submerged below a sea of personal shyness. This coupled with an insatiable thirst for power can only spell disaster for the country.’

  Our father was among those who believed Stevens's plans to turn Sierra Leone into a republic masked darker ambitions. Given the opportunity to alter the constitution, the prime minister would use it to increase his own power beyond imaginati
on. Our father wanted to warn the people of what was coming, what he saw in Stevens: the ruthlessness and a viciousness concealed beneath a mastery of charades. Pa Sheki fooled hundreds, if not thousands, with humour and charm. He enjoyed taking advantage of the gullible, and when someone he had duped left the room, be it a local chief or an international business consortium, he would turn to his aides and joke: ‘Dem see soak leopard, dem call am puss.’ Some people see a wet leopard and they mistake it for a pussy cat.

  A few days before the resignations Stevens had left the country on a state visit to Zambia, appointing a relatively junior minister, Kawusa Conteh, minister for the Southern Province, to act as prime minister instead of Mohamed Forna. Meanwhile rumours had already reached my father that Stevens planned to eject him from the government as soon as he left the country to attend the World Bank conferences. For some weeks Janet Thorpe had already been secretly typing drafts of his resignation letter. By September he felt there was nothing further that could be achieved by staying on.

  Left alone to face the crisis, Kawusa Conteh flustered and panicked. He called a series of hasty meetings with hard-core loyalists Joseph Barthes Wilson and Christian Kamara Taylor, and they decided to save face by expelling the two ministers from the APC. A day later five thousand people converged on Freetown's Victoria Park for a public meeting at which the dissident ministers were to speak. Kawusa Conteh attempted to stop the meeting going ahead, but Police Commissioner Jenkins Smith, summoned to Kawusu Conteh's home late the previous evening, foiled his efforts by refusing to allow the police to be used for such a purpose.