The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  And I was different, too. I noticed the biggest change in myself when we arrived at the house in Kissy, where Santigi, and some of our cousins – Morlai, Esther and Musu – waited to greet us. When I opened my mouth to speak to them in Creole I found the years had robbed me of my childhood language. Everything people were saying around me was perfectly intelligible, I understood it all, but when I tried to answer it was as though I was on stage in a school play and had forgotten my lines. My mind was a blank. I tried a different approach, to take a thought and put it into words, remember each word, one by one, but that didn't work either.

  Our new home was a modest, concrete-built house in Samuel's Lane, Kissy, in the industrial East End of the city, far, far from Spur Road and Wilberforce. We lived in the top apartment; the landlord and his wife lived below us. As part of the deal our father had spent several weeks refurbishing the upper floor: he had bought furniture and beds to make it ready for all of us. The house was set on the edge of a gully, with a stream running along the bottom leading up to a slaughterhouse. Vultures wheeled in the sky above; one of them had an old tin can tied to his leg with a piece of string and everywhere he flew he rattled through the air like a mechanical crane.

  December had brought the harmattan and a ubiquitous layer of red dust coated the facades of buildings. On the days the wind really blew the dust erased the horizon, the view of the hills and even blurred the outline of houses.

  Early on we went to visit Pa Roke and the family. In the north the dust of the city blew from the crevices of our clothing and the dirty buildings were replaced by infinite shades of green: the powdery velvet of the banana leaves, the lustrous wax of the mango trees, crinkly buds of golden lettuces planted in rows by the river next to mounds of deep, dark spinach and potato leaves. I felt my spirits soar, remembering how much I had – we all had – enjoyed these trips up-country.

  Before he was imprisoned our father had begun to clear the bush and build a house next door to Pa Roke's. The house, a three-bedroomed bungalow, was built in the same simple style as the rest of the street with the difference that our house was made out of concrete blocks. There was a wasps’ nest in one of the bedrooms, and some of the older boys among my cousins began to knock it down with a stick. As the honeycomb of earth crumbled, the wasps, with long swallowtails full of poison, flew furiously round the house. Someone was stung – a teenage boy, whose whole arm swelled up in minutes. Meanwhile the three of us ran around the house excitedly, choosing which bedroom we would sleep in, inspecting the kitchen and bathroom and trying the taps – it was the first house with running water in Magbesseh Street. There was still some work to be done, but it was almost finished.

  Pa Roke lay paralysed by a stroke, on a low cot in the corner of the main room of his house. We filed in one by one and stood around him, murmuring greetings while he looked us over and whispered softly to our father. News of Pa Roke's condition had reached our father in prison; as soon as he was released more than a year later he travelled straight to Tonkolili to see him.

  When our father defied the APC government in 1970 the whole family had become a target for the prime minister's fury. In Magburaka the Fornas had been threatened and had their homes searched by police claiming to be looking for arms; scores of people were arrested or detained. The government had determined to quell us all.

  Our father must have felt responsible for Pa Roke. The house next door meant we could spend more time in Magburaka and Pa Roke would have somewhere to lie in comfort. I smiled at Pa Roke. I thought he looked very long and flat lying there. I couldn't really hear or understand what he was saying – he murmured and gestured with his one good hand, while our father sat on the corner of the cot and held on to the limp fingers of the other one.

  Our father had taken offices in Walpole Street, close to the Cotton Tree, just off the main road through the town, which had been renamed Siaka Stevens Street. The president's face appeared on all the country's new coins and banknotes, and on the stamps as well. There were photographs of him in the lobby of every building, though not our father's offices in Walpole Street. On a door on the second floor was a sign, INTERNATIONAL, COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISES, and behind it the offices, just a pair of rooms really, which smelled of new paint. We took turns sitting behind his desk and swinging in his chair. In a cardboard box on the floor I found a heavy wood and brass nameplate, left over from his days in government. I dusted it off and arranged it on his desk; it looked a little absurd, too grandiose for the modest office, but I was delighted and left it there while our father took us all out to lunch.

  After a six-year absence our father had decided not to return to practising medicine. He worried he was out of touch with medical advances; perhaps he wondered, too, how many patients he would be able to attract as the foremost known opponent of the government. In prison he had decided there was money to be made trading rice and as soon as he was released he set to work on a business plan. A month or two later he was approached by a young man, another former political detainee, who had been turned away from his government job at the Electricity Corporation and was having trouble finding work. Abu Kanu was a trained accountant, and so our father agreed to take him on to do the company's books, warning that he would not be paid much at first.

  Little by little they expanded; within a few months they opened a couple of stores in the provinces and began to buy and sell other commodities. They planned, one day in the near future, to start importing medical equipment and drugs from Europe, something our father knew about and which the country needed. Lying on his desk were brochures from drug companies alongside a number of syringes, still in their plastic wrapping, and our father's old metal stethoscope in its box. I asked if he would let me have one of the syringes – for the animal hospital I was creating – and when he agreed I chose a good-sized one from the selection and dropped it into my pocket.

  But International Commercial Enterprises soon began to encounter obstacles. Abu Kanu had been to see a merchant about buying a consignment of tomato purée for one of their stores. Soon after he left the businessman received a visit from a pair of plainclothes officers. Within a short time it became a regular occurrence for people who had dealings with the company to be visited and questioned.

  A lawyer who worked in the chambers on the opposite side of Walpole Street stopped our father on his way into the office, beckoning him over. He led our father upstairs to his chambers and stood him in front of the window. Before them was a clear view of the length of the whole street. The lawyer pointed to the red-brick church at the top, on the other side of the junction. The front of the church faced the side of my father's building. There was a small courtyard leading into the vestry, and just beyond the gates they could see two men sitting in the shade. The young lawyer, who had known my father slightly in times past, pointed to a building farther down the road, again on the same side of the street as the offices of International Commercial Enterprises. It was a low-rise building, painted yellow on the outside; inside it housed a doctor's office. The metal grid doors were open to the streets, and just inside sat two more men. They were government agents, who had been watching our father from the day of his release. Men from the security services even sat below the lawyer's office, among the clients waiting in reception. From there they watched our father, they watched our whole family: as we stopped by the office to have lunch with our father, as we dropped in on our way to Chellerams supermarket or passed by to collect him on our way home from the beach. They watched us at home, too, from the shadows of the veranda of the house opposite, the home of Nancy Steele.

  In August, just days after his release, our father had attended the Medical Physicians Annual Ball at the Cape Sierra. The dance was held around the open-air dance floor in the grounds of the hotel, and was attended by over a hundred doctors as well as local dignitaries and diplomats. The story was told to me by Karl and Hildegard Münch, the former German ambassador and his wife, who had been good friends and admirers of Mohamed Forna whe
n he was a government minister, when Karl and he saw themselves as bright young men helping to shape a new country's future. We were sitting in their parlour, in a modern suburb of Munich, where I had flown from England to meet them in the year 2000, some years after Karl had retired from the diplomatic service.

  My father had arrived late and alone. He stood, dressed in black tie, at the entrance to the ball. A hush passed from table to table as the nearest guests recognised him. Though it was generally known that he had been released from prison, few people expected him to appear in public so soon. My father smiled but spoke to no one as he crossed the room to join a group of friends at a table in the far corner. Excited whispers replaced the hush as the news coursed from table to table, people craned their necks to get a glimpse of him, but he sat with his back to them all and did not turn once.

  Late in the evening the band leader announced the Ladies’ Choice. Hildegard stood up. ‘I am going to dance with Mohamed,’ she declared. So far Karl Münch had managed to exchange a nod across the room with his old friend, but no more. He recalled how he had teased his wife, saying she would be the last nail in the coffin of his career. Germany was a significant donor of aid to Sierra Leone and for Hildegard, the wife of the German ambassador, to dance with the country's leading political dissident was an audacious statement – and she meant it to be: she wanted to demonstrate in public that Mohamed Forna still commanded the respect of a major European power like Germany. The dance was a slow waltz, and as the couple moved across the dance floor every eye in the room was upon them.

  Afterwards my father escorted Hildegard back to her table. Karl stood up to greet him, grasping him by the arm as he did so. ‘For God's sake, Mohamed,’ he whispered. ‘Leave the country. Get out as soon as possible. They will kill you.’

  My father had brushed him off. ‘Don't worry about me,’ he replied. ‘Things aren't so bad.’ He joked about prison being the safest place to be at certain times, and with that the two men shook hands and parted.

  The Münchs were not alone in trying to warn our father. His old friend Lami Sidique, who had left the civil service and was running a supermarket, said the same. Even Abu Kanu was beginning to wonder if they might both have more luck if they started somewhere new, for during the years our father had been imprisoned Siaka Stevens had systematically set about erecting the pillars of tyranny.

  The country now had two separate paramilitary forces, loyal only to the president. Internal Security Units One and Two were staffed by troops brought in from Guinea; later they were brought together and renamed the SSD, the State Security Division – more popularly known on the streets as Siaka Stevens's Dogs. At the same time the army was slowly weakened, denied proper pay rises, ammunition and weapons. The moves served to emasculate John Bangura, the head of the army, whom Stevens both feared and hated and who had incurred the president's wrath by initially refusing to use his troops against the UDP.

  In March of 1971 there had been an attack on the private home of the president. Stevens publicly claimed to have been in bed when his house was fired upon and to have been in fear of his life, describing how he dived for cover as bullets peppered his bedroom wall and tore up the mosquito net and bedding. Yet press photographs the following day showed no more than two panes of broken glass, and there was a more damaging rumour that circulated and refused to die. It was said that far from being in his house Stevens had in fact spent the night in the home of a professor at Fourah Bay College, a man who soon afterwards was awarded an ambassadorship and departed the country.

  The next day Guinean MiG jets circled the air above the capital. John Bangura was arrested and charged with attempting to overthrow the government. Bangura, who had been drinking that night, had been persuaded by some of his men to make a broadcast to the nation, in which he announced the army was in control. He claimed he had only done so to prevent the spread of anarchy and because he had no idea of the whereabouts of the president. Nevertheless, he was found guilty by the court, condemned to death and later hanged.

  In April 1971 Sierra Leone was declared a republic. The bill was rushed through parliament by Stevens, who used his massive majority to change the very safeguards designed to prevent a leader from flouting the constitution and seizing power. A judge, Okoro Cole, was named the country's first president; the following day Okoro Cole resigned and Stevens assumed the presidency. Our father's political arch enemy S. I. Koroma was named vice-president and Christian Kamara Taylor, another of his main opponents, became minister of finance. The governor-general, Sir Banja Tejan Sie, fled to Britain, where he lived out the rest of his years in a suburb of London. Despite all of this, the facade of make-believe respectability satisfied the British government and they made no protest. Britain was pleased ultimately to be rid of Sierra Leone, the tarnished jewel of the empire.

  The country's budget surpluses and foreign exchange reserves had been drained away. At the time of our father's resignation an astute desk clerk at the World Bank had sent a memorandum up to his superiors, asking whether the bank should continue with a loan to Sierra Leone in the light of the former minister's claims of corruption in the government. The bank had gone ahead anyway. Within a short time the treasury in Sierra Leone had begun to default on payments of overseas loans; by the time we came home the new banknotes, printed with Stevens's face, could not be exchanged in any bank outside Sierra Leone.

  The country was crawling with spies, who reported every conversation, every whisper to the president. The newspapers had all been either brought under state control or closed down. Summary arrests, detentions and beatings had become commonplace. There was no opposition, no voice of criticism: people had learnt to fear for their lives if they spoke out against the government. And this was what, in the west, they called ‘benign dictatorship’. Good enough for Africa, good enough for Africans.

  Even in Britain the students had gone quiet since their media ‘coup’ at the high commission, though once during our father's imprisonment Mum, Memuna, Sheka and I had travelled along the length of the District Line to an anonymous suburban house where a photostat machine drummed away in a back room, and I grew bored playing with my dolls until eventually someone gave me dozens of sheets to staple and sort into piles.

  In May of 1973, while the country remained under the state of emergency, Stevens called the general election, postponed for three years since the days of the UDP. In the bloodiest of campaigns ever the SLPP, fearful of violence, withdrew every one of its candidates. On polling day every APC candidate was returned unopposed. One thousand Red Shirts drove from Port Loko to Freetown in celebration of S. I. Koroma's re-election chanting: ‘Unopposed! Unopposed!’ The APC became the single party in parliament and in the country. Sierra Leone was a one-party state.

  Only when his power was absolute did Stevens dare to free our father.

  33

  The Bottle-top Devil whirled in the dust. We leaned from the top floor of the balcony to watch. From his shoulders and the crown of his head myriad bottle tops, strung together, fell in layers, covering his face and cascading to the ground around his dancing feet. As he turned and twisted the metal tops clashed against each other. Behind him, and all around, danced small children and youths bearing hurricane lamps. I stared down at him. The swirling bottle tops revealed glimpses of the man beneath: an arm, the sleeve of his shirt, a flash of a belt buckle, his naked feet. And even though I knew that beneath the terrifying creature was an ordinary man of flesh and blood just like me, I felt the unmistakable tingle of terror.

  When the devil had finished dancing the small boys ran forward and collected the coins and notes we threw down. On Wilkinson Road, one of the main routes through the town, there was a place where cars veered off the road. The locals told of a she-devil who lived there, who lined her babies across the road, so the story went, and woe betide the speeding driver who hit one of them. We offered our coins in exchange for luck, to ward off misfortune and placate the mischievous devils. All through the holid
ays until New Year the devils of each secret society paraded the city and danced for the cheering crowds, who threw talismans and money at their feet.

  At home we celebrated Christmas. Mum was Christian; so was Santigi, who had recently taken the name Simon Peter and sat on the back stairs reading from his Bible, one syllable at a time. Two days before Christmas vats of jollof rice and bahal simmered on the stove, peppered chicken and skewered meats roasted on wood fires in the yard. In town we went shopping for presents at Patterson Zochonis. I barely recognised the department store. There were hardly any shoppers to speak of, and little to choose from among the depleted merchandise. At the entrance sat the lepers and a man with both legs so hideously swollen with elephantiasis he could barely walk. On the way in I offered some money to an elderly man with leprosy, who was crouched on the floor. He put out his hand; the disease had left him with a palm and a thumb but no fingers. On the way out he thanked me again, smiled toothlessly and asked me my name. I told him. ‘Which Forna?’ he asked in return. ‘From where?’

  I wavered. I had worn my name with pride all my life, except sometimes at school when I was being teased about it. As I looked at the man sitting before me, for reasons I couldn't analyse I wondered if I should tell him or keep it a secret. Somewhere in my subconscious a memory rose like vapour of those last weeks we spent hidden behind walls in Freetown.