The ferry was gone, sunk. So we completed the final leg of the journey to Freetown by helicopter, landing at the far end of Lumley beach. The heliport was close to the army headquarters, and as our cumbersome passenger helicopter touched down I saw one of the sleek killing machines on loan to the Sierra Leone army take to the air. Manned by mercenaries, the attack helicopter flew low, almost skimming the surface of the water, guns prominent, elegant as a hovering mosquito.
My stepmother was waiting for us on the other side of the barrier. We hugged each other, loaded the car with our bags and the extra suitcase we had brought full of all the items that could not be easily bought in Freetown. As we turned out of the gate the driver began to turn to the right, the shortcut into Freetown. I sat forward: ‘Do you mind if we take the beach road?’ I asked. ‘Would that be all right?’
‘Of course not,’ my stepmother replied. She passed the instructions onto the driver.
I turned to Simon. ‘It's the most beautiful beach in the world,’ I said. ‘It's two miles long.’
37
I remember the first time I heard my father had been charged with treason – not who told me or how or when, I don't remember that at all. Instead I remember what I thought about it. The word spoke to me of olden times, of history lessons at school, of Lady Jane Grey, of the young Elizabeth I sitting outside Traitor's Gate, or Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth's fallen favourite, of Joan of Arc engulfed in a halo of flames. I thought of Guy Fawkes surrounded by kegs of gunpowder below the Houses of Parliament. I didn't realise people could still stand trial for treason, and I couldn't see what it had to do with my father.
In London, in 1999, quite by chance I had been given the name of a lawyer from Sierra Leone. I didn't know what he might have to tell me, but I had learned that he worked in the attorney-general's office in Freetown at the time of my father's arrest. So I drove to Stratford in the east end of London, looking out for a pub called the Rising Sun – the landmark he had given me – which was on the corner of the road where he ran a legal advice centre. We met at the end of the day, when the dark was closing in. I parked the car and walked towards his office. The wind was bitter and it had started to rain. I rapped on the glass door and a genial-looking man approaching sixty emerged from behind a screen in the open-plan office, released the latch and let me in.
My conversation with Tejan Savage was a turning point for me, though he didn't know it and I was a stranger to him. In the last quarter-century a silence had descended over our family. We rarely spoke of the past. In our teens and twenties Memuna and Sheka and I used to swap whatever information we had – information gathered from our compulsive rifling and eavesdropping: fragments of the truth. Even then we talked in secret, always in secret. I remember us in a smart wine bar in Covent Garden sometime in the 1980s, muting our voices so no one would hear us, unable to break the conditioning of our childhood.
When I made a new acquaintance I did not tell that person my story. If the same person became my friend I might volunteer no more than the barest facts. People are bored or dismayed by African politics, there is no glamour in the association, just shame – a collection of failed states which have never learned to govern themselves – the subject just made people uncomfortable. But partly I did not volunteer any information because, well, I didn't have much to give.
That day after my conversation with Tejan Savage I drove back to my house through the dark and the rain, music playing on the car radio. I didn't feel elated exactly; instead I felt gratified. I had broken the years of self-imposed censorship: I had spent an hour talking about events that had shaped my destiny. I had broken the restraints for good.
Tejan Savage had been working as a state's counsel in the offices of the attorney-general in August 1974 when the Criminal Investigation Department sent over several boxes of documents: the results of their investigation into the explosion at Kamara Taylor's house. It was the job of the attorney-general's office to assess the facts and the possible charges. In the morning all the state's counsels were summoned to a conference. By the end of the morning they had concluded there was no case to answer.
‘We decided by a clear majority,’ Tejan Savage explained, slowly and with a lawyer's precision. ‘The evidence conflicted over whether Kamara Taylor was at home or not. He said he was, but then there were at least four witnesses who said he was not. All the evidence was circumstantial. There were meetings at Murraytown. One witness said Mohamed Forna was present, at a time when he himself said he was up-country. There was nothing there that would amount to treason under the Treason and State Offences Act.’
The attorney-general was due to present his opinion to the president the next day. But there had been a leak from within the department to the offices of the vice-president, S. I. Koroma. Tejan Savage did not say how he knew this. But I already knew it was S.I. who had personally given the order to have my father arrested. That afternoon, at four o'clock, an unscheduled emergency cabinet meeting was called. An immediate reshuffle was announced. One member of the government was moved from his post: Luseni Brewa, the attorney-general. He was replaced by another man, N. A. P. Buck. Buck lost no time at all in publicly announcing charges of treason. And he eschewed the talents of his own department, bringing in instead an external lawyer of his own choosing.
The Monday after I arrived in Freetown we drove into the city centre, slowing every few hundred yards to pass between army checkpoints. Some were manned by UN soldiers, their blue helmets visible behind a wall of sandbanks, weapons aimed at the passing vehicles. Others were guarded by soldiers from the Sierra Leone army – the SLA – sullen-faced and sleepy. I felt unaccountably nervous, uncertain of whether to nod to the soldiers or feign indifference. As though my uncertainty was as visible as a flag, the very first time we passed through a checkpoint the soldier waved our car to a halt and insisted upon searching the boot before allowing us through.
The city was swamped with refugees living in makeshift camps. Around the Cotton Tree beggars reached into the windows of passing cars, imploring us for a few leones. Here and there among the crowds on the pavement I saw several of the amputees, bandages carefully wrapped and neatly folded, pinned around the stump of arm where their hands had once been. The roads around State House were surrounded by army cordons. The president and cabinet had decamped to a lodge up in the hills above Freetown. Many of the government buildings had been razed and they were operating out of temporary offices.
I had never read an account of my father's trial and I wanted a copy of the court transcripts, but from early on I realised even this simple task was not going to be straightforward.
Sierra Leone had not experienced proper, working government for decades and finally descended into anarchy by the close of the twentieth century. Joseph Momoh, who was handed the leadership by Siaka Stevens, ruled as a puppet of his own ministers for seven years. The people nicknamed him Josephine Momoh or Dandogo, meaning ‘fool’ in his own Limba language. During his years of rule he never devised a coherent policy on any single issue; instead he allowed his ministers to run their departments unchecked, typically as they had done in the past – for personal profit. Freetown gradually slid into deepening chaos. Civil servants, teachers, doctors and nurses went unpaid not for months, but for years. Blackouts became the norm rather than the exception; the water from the taps trickled, slowed and dried; petrol was in short supply, abandoned cars littered the streets; bands of stray dogs feasted on growing mountains of uncollected household waste. Government workers stopped going to the office or were forced to take additional jobs to feed their families; whole ministries were emptied as discontented employees pilfered and sold the office furniture.
On 29 April 1992 a band of young soldiers drove a truck down Tower Hill and along Independence Avenue, where they rammed the main gates of State House. Momoh cowered inside his official residence before fleeing by helicopter to Guinea. Valentine Strasser, a handsome, twenty-seven-year-old captain, took to the public airwaves a
nd declared himself Sierra Leone's new leader. None of the members of the new National Provisional Ruling Council was more than thirty years old, and none had any experience of government. Most had just been recruited into the army to deal with increasing disturbances along the Liberian border. For the first time in years the army had been issued with weapons, and they used them to seize power. Strasser was chosen as leader for the sole reason that he alone spoke English sufficiently well to broadcast their communiqué to the world.
Up-country the Liberian guerrillas who had been conducting cross-border raids on villages in Sierra Leone were joined by a new outfit calling themselves the Revolutionary United Front and led by a Sierra Leonean former corporal called Foday Sankoh. The RUF drove through the countryside, abducting children and adolescents, forcing them to kill and dismember their own families, using drugs to urge them into battle, crudely amputating the feet of any who tried to escape. Sankoh, who in his satellite telephone interviews with the BBC World Service swore revenge on the corrupt politicians in Freetown, vented his hatred instead on the country's poorest and most helpless, people living in villages hundreds of miles from the capital. Meanwhile in Freetown the NPRC elite were living up to the reputation of their APC predecessors, driving smart cars, living in luxury homes, partying loudly into the night and reportedly flying to Europe with pocketfuls of diamonds to sell.
In the countryside soldiers of the SLA went on the rampage, looting, raping and killing, determined to enjoy the fruits of power in the way their bosses in Freetown were doing. Some of these bands of soldiers met up with RUF rebels to wage joint campaigns – people called them ‘sobels’, soldier-rebels. At the end of 1995 Strasser was overthrown by his own vice-chairman, left the country and enrolled as a law student at a university in England. His only contribution to the country had been to introduce Cleaning Saturdays, when everybody, man, woman and child, was obliged to take part in a joint effort to clean the streets on the last weekend of every month. As it happened, Cleaning Saturdays had considerably outlasted the NPRC, and as I drove through the residential areas of Freetown I noticed the streets were undeniably tidier since the last time I had visited, just before Strasser's takeover.
The new NPRC chairman, Bio, determined to halt the elections scheduled for the spring of 1996 under pressure from the international community and banking organisations. At the polls the soldiers fired rocket grenades into voting lines, used their bayonets to tear the ink stamp from the hands of voters, careered through towns and cities firing into the air, seizing ballot boxes at gunpoint. The people refused to be deterred. Groups of women took to the streets and faced down the soldiers. My stepmother was among them. On the morning of the election, while armed soldiers roamed the streets firing at random to intimidate would-be voters and most people remained locked in their homes, she left the house on foot, joining her colleagues, collecting each woman, one by one, from her home on their way to man the polling booths.
But the newly elected president could not halt the turmoil outside the capital. Freetown had become a city under siege. Convoys of refugees arrived every day with tales of carnage, bearing the scars of horrible mutilation on their own bodies. New factions began to arise. The West Side Boys, who favoured Tupac Shakur T-shirts and mirror sunglasses, terrorised the outlying villages around Freetown. In the south a militia of traditional hunters arose to guard their own villages. The Kamajors decorated their costumes with charms and mirrors to deflect enemy bullets and they were victorious in their clashes with the RUF. Thousands flocked to join them. Sierra Leone had a second armed force and this one answered to the Mende defence minister alone, a certain Hinga Norman – the man who had stepped forward and stopped my father's swearing-in ceremony back in 1967. In Freetown the newly elected President Kabbah and his cabinet floundered. People who had risked their lives to vote were bitterly disappointed – ‘Momoh way don go school‘ was the comment on the street; a Momoh who just happened to have an education.
On 25 May 1997, a date etched on the memory of every person in Freetown, soldiers stormed Pademba Road Prison and freed some of their officers who were being held there. The soldiers invited the RUF to join them in a coalition government, and for one terrible week the two forces went on a looting spree across the capital. They were like deranged, murderous children let loose in a sweet shop: anything they wanted, they seized, anyone who stood in their way they slaughtered. When soldiers appeared for the third time at her home, threatening to kill everyone, demanding money and alcohol, my stepmother fled.
After enduring two days of shelling and gunfire at the Cape Sierra Hotel, my stepmother was airlifted out by American GIs who landed helicopters on Lumley beach in defiance of the blustering rebel army. She arrived in Britain as a refugee, landing at Stansted in the middle of the night with nothing but a borrowed handbag. She lived in Britain for a year before we deemed it safe enough to return home. In Freetown Nigerian troops had been brought in as part of an international deal to retake the city by force and to halt the spread of anarchy which was beginning to threaten the whole region. The government in Sierra Leone issued assurances that they were back in charge, occupied only with wiping out a few pockets of resistance around the diamond fields. Early one dark October morning I drove Mum out to Terminal Three at Heathrow Airport, where I waved her goodbye. I watched her hurry through immigration, chatting to a friend she had met who was on the same flight. She forgot to look back at me; she was happy to be going home. Outside the rush-hour traffic was building: the drive home would take hours, so I walked up to the viewing gallery, where I searched for her plane among the flock of aircraft lifting into the sullen sky.
On 6 January 1999 the RUF invaded Freetown for the second time. They called their onslaught ‘Operation No Living Thing’: they sacked the city, killed and maimed hundreds, possibly thousands, of people, forced civilians to march ahead of the advancing troops as a human shield. Those who hesitated or refused were burned alive. The images: dogs feeding on piles of corpses in the streets, terrified civilians caught in sniper crossfire, child soldiers brandishing AK 47s filled the television screens of viewers all around the world. Rebels and Nigerian-led peacekeepers alike were shown casually carrying out summary executions. Bizarrely, through most of it the international lines kept on working. I spoke to my stepmother from my own sofa, a soap opera flickering on the television in the corner, while over the lines came the sound of shelling and gunfire drawing closer to the house where she sat with the doors bolted and the lights switched off. I clung to the receiver, and it seemed to me so did she, touching fingertips across the thousands of miles, drawing out the conversation. I tried to think of something remotely useful to say. I felt hopelessly inadequate. In the end there was nothing left to do.
‘Mum, I'd better go. Goodbye,’ I said.
‘Goodbye, Am,’ quietly.
‘I'll call again, I promise.’ Another shell went off. Somebody in the room behind her shrieked. ‘Goodbye,’ I repeated. I didn't replace the receiver immediately; I waited to make sure she had gone. Sometime in the night a shell landed on the telephone exchange. I didn't get through again for another week.
Since that day the invaders had been repelled. And a year on hundreds of UN troops and several contingents of British troops patrolled the streets. But the city remained in a state of shock and nervous unease. Sierra Leone was a ‘collapsed’ state, the term western diplomats and agencies used to describe a nation effectively without a working administration. Left to its own devices the government was incapable of running the country.
I climbed the stairs of Roxy building, where the Court of Appeal registrar was housed. The name I had been given was Thomas Gordon, the clerk in charge of the archives, whose office was on the first floor of the building. Morlai waited outside while Mum and I went in. The staircase was dark and littered; down the central well of the building water leaked continuously and green slime streaked the walls. At the bottom was a pile of debris thrown from the open windows, soaked and
rotting. Along the corridor which led to the clerks’ offices the smell from the latrines almost made me retch. I held my breath and hurried on.
Thomas Gordon, we were informed, was not in yet, but on his way from home. So we sat down on a wooden bench next to his desk. A man lay slumped across the desk on the opposite side of the room, fast asleep at eleven o'clock in the morning. Nobody in the office where we waited or in the adjoining offices, where we could hear the woman who a few seconds past had shown us in chatting to her colleagues, actually seemed to be engaged in doing any work. The desk in front of me was empty save for a large old-fashioned black telephone. Heaped on the floor were dozens of documents thrown in haphazard heaps. I could see they were trial transcripts, originals and probably irreplaceable. We waited there for an hour. I had already started to lose patience, but at Yabome's urging I managed to hold on.
Some time after midday the man at the desk opposite woke up. He wiped his face and gazed at us. ‘Can I help you?’ he said.
‘We're waiting here for Mr Gordon.’ My stepmother smiled urbanely, becoming newly occupied with the contents of her handbag. She didn't appear to want to venture much more.
‘And what is the nature of your business?’
‘We're here to collect some transcripts,’ I butted in.
‘What is the name of the case?’ he asked. He opened an exercise book on his desk and picked up a stub of pencil. I thought we might be about to get somewhere.
‘Mohamed Forna and Fourteen Others.’
The Devil that Danced on the Water Page 33