The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  Out in the town, with my father, people still greeted him warmly everywhere we went – mostly the poor people, it has to be said. We had been waiting in the early evening for the car to be filled up at the petrol station when we heard a commotion on the other side of the street. A group of men had been pushing a lorry when one of them slipped and trapped his ankle under the wheels. My father went across to offer his help while we waited in the car. Long after the man had been freed, given first aid and dispatched, we were still there, as more and more people recognised our father and came up to shake his hand. When my father was with us I felt confident and utterly unafraid, but now I was alone, facing a beggar in rags and a dirty skull cap who wanted to know my name and I swam in uncertainty.

  ‘Dr Mohamed Sorie Forna.’ I barely moved my lips. It was the start, though I didn't know it, of never being able to utter my own name without watching the face of the listener, trying to guess what his or her response is likely to be.

  The leper reached up to take my hands in his awkward stumps. ‘God bless yousef, God bless you daddy, God bless oona all.’

  On Christmas morning we exchanged presents. Among mine was an autograph book; it had a purple cover with three stars and smooth lilac pages. Also a small, plain bingo set with wooden numbers. I put this aside while I occupied myself with my other, more impressive gifts.

  I can count off Christmases and birthdays on my fingers, working backwards remembering each one over the years: my sixth birthday, both the real and the mythical one, my seventh when Mum surprised me at High Trees, waiting in the chill of the front hall with a bag of presents and a cake, and all the other birthdays and Christmases after and before, starting right back to when I couldn't have been more than three or four and still lived with my mother. These are the building blocks of childhood memories – the reason, I suppose, parents try hard to make those days count, so that their children can store them up afterwards, carry them around in their minds as souvenirs of happy times.

  How pathetically little I knew of what was really going on around me that Christmas. We had taken up where we had left off. My mother and father, even the three of us, smiled and pretended everything was normal, and to a large extent we succeeded. I was overjoyed to be home, to be with my father, to be a complete family. I still didn't understand exactly why my father had been imprisoned. I never asked anyone, including Mum, especially Mum, because I didn't seriously expect to receive an answer. I knew enough to understand that my father was not a criminal, yet the secrecy that surrounded all talk of him in London, our altered circumstances in Sierra Leone – I could not entirely interpret the meaning of these – and for the longest time I carried hidden within me a small, secret sense of shame.

  That holiday I went around the house persuading everyone to write a message in my new autograph book. My stepmother tried to demur, saying I should be collecting the autographs of better-known people; finally she agreed and penned: ‘If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.’

  Next I presented my father with the book. He laid his pipe down on the coffee table. While he wrote I picked up the plastic pouch and sniffed the tobacco. I thought it smelled just like fruit cake, edible and delicious. Afterwards he handed the book back to me and I read what he had written there: ‘Honour and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part: there all the honour lies.’

  My father had signed ‘M. S. Forna’, and added the word ‘Daddy’ below. I read and reread his message and I was mystified. I couldn't guess at the meaning of the words, or why they had any significance for me. If the truth were told, I preferred Mum's easy adage. Some years later, when the binding of the book began to fall apart, I tore out the page my father had inscribed and held on to it, though even then I still hadn't managed to work out what exactly it was he had meant.

  And yet now when I look back I remember. I remember how, when the two of us were alone together for a few brief minutes, I witnessed an incident as momentous as it was insignificant.

  It was our regular outing, on Sunday, to go to Lumley beach. Mum wasn't much of a beach-goer, but she came along all the same. Our father and the three of us loved the water. Lumley, lying just on the western edge of Freetown, was a spectacular beach which attracted hordes of people at the weekend. The beach was over two miles long. I knew that because we had once all had a discussion about how long a mile was, so our father had reset the milometer on the car and driven down the beach road. After we clocked the first mile we looked back along the beach, stretching out along the peninsula to the hotel at the end. One mile. By the time we had nearly reached the end of the road we had driven a whole mile more, two whole miles of beach.

  It was late in the afternoon but the sun was still high; hawkers carried bottles of drinks in trays of melting ice; whole families basked like turtles in the water. I had left my sandals in the boot of the car and I walked back beside my father to collect them. Along the edge of the water the sand was cool, but farther up the beach it burned and I persuaded him to give me a piggy back over the dunes and across the bank of coarse grass with blades sharp enough to cut naked feet. As I searched for and found my shoes in the boot, wedged among the drinks coolers and towels, my father waited in the passenger seat, legs stretched out of the open door in front of him.

  In the distance I heard the sing-song sound of sirens above the traffic on the beach road. A pair of motorcycles emerged out of the warped air rising up from the tar. They were followed by a black car, and then a white Mercedes; behind that was a third car and two more police outriders. It was the presidential motorcade. People sitting at the bar on the other side of the road stopped talking and looked up; children selling peanuts stood to attention by the roadside; vendors put down their loads and got to their feet; drivers pulled their cars in to the kerb and switched off their engines. The president was coming.

  The motorcade progressed at an unhurried pace, the wail of the sirens reaching a gradual crescendo as it neared. For the first time I saw, ahead of the motorcycles, young boys running in formation. They were dressed in shorts and open shirts, and they carried long canes. Raray boys. They jogged down the middle of the road forcing the oncoming traffic over to the side. Six-foot canes cut through the air, stinging the earth, flashing at the feet of nearby people. Get up, stand up for the president. I straightened up from buckling my sandals and turned towards the open-top car.

  As the motorcade slid past I had my first and only real view of Siaka Stevens. He sat alone on the pale leather upholstery behind his liveried chauffeur. He was wearing a white suit and a cream straw Panama hat. There was the jaw, the pendulous lower lip and low brow that appeared on our stamps and on all the banknotes. The people around me clapped and waved. I waved along with them. The president waved back. We all waved again.

  ‘Long Live the Pa!’

  ‘Pa Sheki, Pa Sheki!’

  Stevens turned his head from side to side. I thought he was looking at me and I straightened my shoulders and stuck my chest out, but he did not seem to see me. His eyes shifted sideways and lingered there a moment. Then he turned away.

  As the tail of the motorcade flicked past people breathed out, sat down, resumed their conversations where they had been interrupted. I turned towards my father. He was sitting exactly as he had been, in the front seat of the car, one arm draped across the head rest.

  ‘That was the president,’ I pointed out superfluously. ‘Siaka Stevens.’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. He moved to stand up.

  ‘But you used to know him. I think he looked at you.’

  ‘Yes,’ my father agreed. I looked at him expectantly, waiting for an answer. When nothing more seemed to be forthcoming, I persisted: ‘So why didn't you say hello? You should have said hello.’ I would have liked to tell Memuna and Sheka I had met the president.

  My father pushed down the lid of the boot and locked it with the key. Then he walked round and locked the car on the driver's side. We began back down the sand.

  ‘Oh, I don'
t suppose he'd remember me, Am,’ was all he replied. And we made our way down the beach to join the others.

  34

  We flew back to England in January: alone this time, as unaccompanied minors. I cried at the airport, of course. I had allowed myself to imagine that once our father was free I wouldn't be going back to High Trees any more: I dreamed of going to school in Freetown, of wearing a blue check uniform and becoming an Annie Walsh girl. On the last night we all went out for a farewell family dinner at the Armenian restaurant on the bay next to Cape Club, where the wrecked fishing boat used to lie, and we sat eating our favourite kebbe. My father was relaxed, telling jokes – one about a man asked to recount the milestones in his life, who was pestered by his wife to include her name on the list. Eventually, when he had had enough, the husband turned to his wife with the words: ‘I've been asked about the milestones in my life, not the millstones, my dear.’ I tried to tell a joke of my own, about what I can no longer remember, but I stumbled at the punchline.

  Our holiday ended on a high, and it was back to the routine of the Lent term. Memuna and I spent the exeat weekends and half term running along the empty school corridors, eating with the other overseas children among the empty trestle tables of the dining room. In a way I quite enjoyed staying at school when the other children were away: the teachers were more relaxed and we caught a glimpse of the personality beneath their brisk exteriors. As the weeks spun by we began rehearsals for the Passiontide Service at the end of term.

  The next time I saw my father he was standing in the front hall of the school wearing a pair of white shoes. It was a Saturday morning at break. Memuna and I ran down to find him, dragging our friend Beverley, who giggled nervously when he shook her hand. We had no idea he was coming to visit; he travelled the short distance direct from Gatwick Airport to collect us from High Trees. He met the headmaster and some of our teachers and then took us for a day out in Brighton, collecting Sheka from his boarding school in Horsham along the way. All day long we teased him about his unfashionable shoes and we would not rest until he went into a shoe shop and bought a new pair in a more conservative shade. We had lunch in an empty hotel, and trudged alone along the pebble beach, head down to the wind, our school macs flapping behind us. Late in the afternoon we waited for him outside a small, terraced house while he consulted a fortune teller. The woman showed him to the door and greeted us; she was middle-aged with sparse, flame-coloured hair. As we walked away I pestered him to tell me what she had said. ‘She told me I had three children,’ he volunteered eventually, and I was impressed.

  We went back with him to the airport, where he unearthed presents for us in his baggage in the left-luggage locker. In a passport photo booth he had his photograph taken and afterwards we all piled in on top of each other and posed, four times over, for each flash of the unseen camera.

  Since his release our father had been denied permission to leave the country. Then, in mid March, he was re-arrested and accused of being in contact with a US embassy official, who was supposedly involved – according to the government – in dealing diamonds. Our father spent the night in custody at the CID headquarters, until it was proved the car seen parked outside the American's house did not belong to him – he had part-exchanged it for another several months earlier. After his overnight detention, quite unexpectedly, his request to travel to Europe was granted. He stopped by Lami Sidique to say goodbye. ‘Take my advice and don't come back,’ his old friend told him.

  When I came to the task of assembling the fragments of my father's life in the period after he was released from prison, I spent many hours reconstructing his trip in the spring of 1974 using old letters, tape-recording conversations with some of the people with whom he visited or stayed, retrieving my own memories of the weeks we spent together with family friends in Ireland.

  That September of 1974 Sheka was due to leave his prep school, and my father was determined to secure him a place at an academically prestigious school in Elstree. My brother had recently sat his entrance exams and the headmaster of the school, who was minded to give him a place, had requested an interview with his father before they made their final decision. Among the many questions he was asked were several about the whereabouts of our mother – the school was nervous of being caught up in the middle of a custody fight, they were seeking reassurance. After the cards that arrived while my father was in detention we had not heard from our mother again. Of all the events that swirled around our lives, his life, the challenges he had seen and met, the one time my father confessed to feeling apprehensive was before that interview.

  He stayed in St Albans with Brian Quinn and his wife Mary. Quinn now worked as an economist at the Bank of England and he had agreed to act as our guardian in Britain. A long-time confidant of our father, he warned him that letters from Freetown routinely arrived evidently opened and then clumsily resealed, and he added his voice to the many: he feared for his friend's safety if he continued to live in Sierra Leone under Siaka Stevens. But my father reassured him, as he reassured everyone, adding that he had spoken to Stevens to tell him he no longer harboured any political ambitions; he planned to devote himself instead to building up his new business. At that time, just free from prison, he was given to joking with people he knew well: it amused him to refer to himself as an ‘unemployed, ex-detainee, ex-MP, ex-minister’. Quinn listened and nodded, but his disquiet remained all the same.

  School broke up for the term and we all flew to Ireland, to family friends called the Rekabs in the Dublin suburbs. Our father left us there briefly while he visited the United States. In New York he saw the civil rights era stage play A Raisin in the Sun.

  Despite the play's renown and the fame of its author, Lorraine Hansberry – the first black woman to have a play staged on Broadway, who died when she was just thirty-four – I had never heard of A Raisin in the Sun. In June of 2001, for the first time in a decade and a half, the play was mounted at the Young Vic in London.

  In the dark of the small auditorium I watched, mesmerised by the character of Asagai, a young African student dating Beneatha, the daughter of an African-American family. While Beneatha's family aspire to a life outside the ghetto, Asagai dreams of his country's independence. When the family's hopes of buying a new home – in a white neighbourhood – appear to be thwarted, Beneatha turns on Asagai:

  ‘Independence!’ But then what? What about all the crooks and thieves and just plain idiots who will come into power and steal and plunder the same as before – only now they will do it in the name of the new Independence – what about them?

  To Beneatha, in her despair, progress has become an illusion and the human race is locked in an endless cycle of destruction. Asagai gives his reply:

  It isn't a circle – it is simply a long line – as in geometry, you know, one that reaches infinity. And because we cannot see the end – we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd but those who see the changes, who dream, are called ‘idealists’ – and those who see only the circle we call them ‘realists’.

  Walter, Beneatha's brother, is unimpressed and when Asagai is gone it is he who has the last word: ‘You know what's going to happen to that boy someday – he'll find himself sitting in a dungeon, locked in for ever – and the takers will have the key!’

  Did my father see himself in Asagai? Did the playwright's words strike him in the same way they struck me, straight to the core? Did he wonder then, after all the warnings, whether he should return to Sierra Leone? Or was there simply no question but that he would?

  In America my father looked up a series of old friends from the weeks he had spent there while he was in office, and he paid a visit to John Karefa Smart, who welcomed him warmly. In the three years since the arrests, contact between the former members of the UDP had eroded, the members were scattered or behind bars. There were a few meetings in the early days between those who had made it to the west, but by 1974 the party effectively no longer existed. Karefa Smart had no intention of
leaving his post as a professor of public health at Harvard to step back into the fray of African politics. He later remembered that their conversation had turned to business: my father asked his advice on contacting pharmaceutical and medical supply companies.

  In Ireland I awaited my father's return with mixed feelings. I had pinched a packet of cigarettes from the lady whose house we were staying in, and lit them one by one in the garden, holding them between my fingers while they burned down to the filter, occasionally putting them to my lips and pretending to puff. One afternoon old Mrs Rekab looked out of the window and caught me, threatening to tell my father, though in the event she kept my misdemeanour between the two of us. I bought a book on the countryside and the four of us went walking in the hills, where I laid down bait to attract badgers in the bushes, planning to climb up there and wait for them after dark one night with a torch. With our father we planned a holiday in France at the end of the coming summer, so we could practise our French and our father could learn it. ‘Seasons in the Sun’ was top of the charts – it was our favourite song and we knew all the words by heart. At the end of April we flew back to London, where we went shopping for Sheka's school wardrobe for the coming year and bought new shoes for my ever-growing feet. We watched a movie, Where Eagles Dare, in a cinema where it played on a loop. Fleeing the rain we mis-timed our arrival so that we saw the ending first and then sat through the film again from the start. Our father gave us each a Timex, my very first wristwatch, and we finished the holiday eating together in a second-rate Chinese restaurant close to Victoria Station before we caught the train to Horley.

  I later learned that in London our father also called on Sir Banja Tejan Sie at the house in Cricklewood where the former governor-general lived exiled from his country. Sir Banja dreamed of his lost position and of being, once again, at the centre of politics in Sierra Leone. Years later I trod the path to the same house myself. By then Sir Banja was almost ninety. He sat in a high-backed chair at one end of the front room of a 1930s semi. The rest of the chairs in the room lined the walls in a deferential semicircle. The former governor-general had telephoned my office after catching a political report I filed for the BBC and asked me to visit him at his home. At the time I had no idea who he was, but out of curiosity I accepted. I told Memuna and Sheka about his call and suggested they come along too. Sir Banja dominated the conversation, alternating between long-winded speeches and bouts of flattery. He complimented me on my abilities as a reporter and had even memorised sections of the report's commentary; he seemed to be trying to discover whether I had any political ambitions. But the moment he laid eyes on Sheka, who arrived a few minutes late – the image of our father and his eldest son – he appeared to lose interest in our conversation and turned his attention to my brother instead. A few weeks later he sent me a set of gilded invitations to Westminster Abbey to watch him receiving his latest set of honours from the queen.