The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  ‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I'm your cousin.’

  Many of my aunts and uncles, along with my numerous cousins, now lived together in a large compound on the outskirts of Freetown. They had fled Magburaka in the last year, after the rebels captured the town. Magburaka and Makeni were now the twin capitals of the rebel stronghold in the north, under the control of the notorious RUF commander Colonel Issa and his men. No one had dared to return.

  Adama, the most senior of my aunts, came out to greet me. Her eyes were as blue and hazy as an overcast sky. Cataracts, I realised. Her deep, matt complexion was lined by the sun and the wind; she looked as though she had been sketched in charcoal. Although she was over eighty, it seemed to me her beauty had barely diminished. Increasingly I found some faces were imprinted on my memory, while others faded. I remembered Adama well from our visits to Magburaka. She hugged me hard and looked into my face. ‘Seke,’ she said. ‘Seke, Aminatta.’ In the air between us hung twenty-five years, two continents and a war.

  The compound teemed with children. There seemed to be hundreds of them, swooping like herons over a shoal of fish as they raced after a football. A woman washed clothes at a stand pipe in the corner; several children swirled sticks around the muddy puddle beneath. A small boy sashayed towards me, swinging his hips in a mock effeminate walk. On the bench next to Adama an older boy sat hunched, feet dangling loosely above the floor. His lids were half-closed, his head rocked back and his mouth hung open.

  ‘He's backward.’ A woman wiped a trail of saliva gently from the sides of the boy's mouth with a cloth. ‘Mentally and physically.’

  ‘Was it something that happened at the birth?’ I asked her. She shrugged and smiled slightly. It wasn't that she didn't think it was important, I knew, just that his condition couldn't be changed. It was the way people thought: what you couldn't do anything about you learned to accept.

  We sat together, the three of us, on the small porch in front of Adama's house: Adama on a low chair, I on the end of the bench, Morlai squatting on his haunches with his back to the wall. The woman I had spoken to carried through plates of rice and plassas, heavy with palm oil, and glasses of tepid water. While Adama spoke in Temne, Morlai translated into English, though Adama's eyes stayed on me throughout. As she talked the boy swayed, ever so slightly, to the cadence of her voice.

  In Magburaka the rebels had ransacked the town and looted their homes. Terrified parents had hidden their children in the bush, in latrines, in the roof – anywhere they might be safe from capture by the invaders. Later the Fornas had fled, first to the old village of Rogbonko, where they hid concealed by the tall trees of the forest. Not daring to travel to nearby towns for food, they were forced to make do with whatever they could forage, fish or grow. During one of the short-lived ceasefires they decided to leave, carrying bundles of their remaining possessions, journeying by foot along the bush paths, hiding from rebel patrols and sleeping for only a few hours at a time. Memuna, my father's only full sister, had arrived in Freetown at my stepmother's door almost half her usual weight, exhausted, blighted by sickness. When I heard the news in England it was the first time in over a year that we knew she was alive.

  I explained why I had come back to Freetown. Adama nodded. Ismail, my uncle, had left Sierra Leone after 1975 and had never returned. She thought he might be either in Liberia or in Guinea – so many people were displaced it was hard to know. Uncle Momodu was in Sierra Leone. He was the only member of the family still in Magburaka, where he lived in the house built by my father. How, I asked, had Momodu fared during the war? I waited as Morlai translated.

  ‘Momodu has two sons in America,’ Morlai said, holding up two of his fingers. I understood immediately. The more people I spoke to, the more I realised that this had become the new measure of wealth in Sierra Leone: not land, or goats, or wives, certainly not leones. No, a son or a daughter who had successfully emigrated to the west was all that mattered.

  We went from house to house greeting the family: Salamatu, Dura, Sorie, Hassan, Osman, Abass – the list went on. I had never met most of my cousins, especially those who were younger than me. Everywhere I walked I was followed by an ever-growing band of people, children mostly, some related, others not. Two of my uncles, Aruna and Morlai, sons of one of Pa Roke's younger wives, led the way. Our shadows had shrunk to pools of black by the time they walked me back to the car. Someone helped me with my bag. We walked four abreast, taking slow steps, drawing out the time. At the car door we shook hands many times.

  Just as I prepared to climb into the back seat I glanced back up at the sloping road, the way we had just come. Someone was coming after us. The man had his back to the sun. I couldn't make him out properly. A man wearing a skull cap and a traditional shirt. He was in a hurry but by the way he moved, rocking from side to side, treading cautiously on the uneven ground, I could tell he was not young. Uncle Alhaji. He was the most senior of my uncles, someone who had always been close to my father. He had lived for a while in Koidu when we owned the clinic. After the detention years he had helped out starting up the rice business.

  Uncle Alhaji stopped in front of me, puffing hard, chest heaving, waving a piece of paper. Wordlessly he pushed it in front of my face. I reached up and took it from his hand. It was an old photograph. A photograph of my father. He was standing on a football pitch, dressed in shorts and an open-necked sports shirt. He looked impossibly young, younger than I did, almost – the thought occurred to me for the first time in my life. The picture had been taken in 1968 during an old boys’ match at Bo School when he was a cabinet minister.

  Fate. There it was, it hung in the air for a fraction of a second, before the diviner's stones scattered in the dust. My father lost his mother. Missionaries turned up at the village and the chiefs ordered each household to send one male child to their new school. My uncles stayed at home and were taught by the Imam. There was the fork in the road. There had been twists and turns along the way, but that was the deciding moment when their futures, and mine, divided. One to the west, the others into Africa.

  * * *

  The sun beat through the windscreen. I shifted on the plastic seat. I could feel the sweat sliding down the backs of my knees. The car did not have air-conditioning. I wound down the window but there was no breeze, the air was hot and coarse with fumes, the clamour from the street swept in. Horns sounded constantly, Lebanese pop music strayed from open shop fronts. Despite the shortages of almost everything there were still traffic jams and crowds in the East End and we were caught behind a long line of cars.

  A small child crossed the road in front of me, leading another, even tinier child who kept hold of the other end of a stick as they wove their way through the cars. A man was standing at a pavement stall. Where both hands should have been, there were bandaged stumps. He clamped his purse to his chest with one arm and attempted to wrench it open with his teeth. I noticed nobody offered to help him. I looked at the stall keeper. I couldn't read her expression, whether it was patience or indifference. A moment later, when I looked back, the man was walking down the road away from me, holding a bag of tomatoes balanced between his chest and his forearms.

  At Abu Kanu's building I climbed the unlit stairwell from the street up to the third floor, emerging into a corridor so dark I could hardly see where I was heading. I barely remembered my father's accountant, but I was apprehensive about our meeting. I had no idea what to expect. I knew only that many people had betrayed my father at his trial and Abu Kanu had been one of them.

  I knocked on the nearest door and the man who answered said he would fetch Abu Kanu. So I stood and waited by the stairwell, hands gripped around my bag containing my tape recorder and notebooks.

  Somewhere a door opened and closed. Footsteps sounded at the opposite end of the hallway. Abu Kanu appeared out of the gloom, a tall, well-built man with a round face and a receding hairline.

  ‘Aminatta Forna?’ I nodded and extended my hand towards him. Abu Kanu didn't appear
to notice the gesture. Instead he embraced me and began to cry.

  Minutes later we sat facing each other in a small room, equally poorly lit. A desk and a single chair faced the wall. Someone had brought an extra chair. The walls of the room were densely coated in glistening blue paint, unadorned save for a single calendar which was several years old. Beyond the orange check curtains a small veranda overlooked the street. Abu Kanu sat down, wiped his eyes and apologised.

  Abu Kanu was the first person to be arrested. He was picked up the morning after the explosion at Kamara Taylor's house, as he returned from collecting his car from the mechanic's shop. On the way back towards the city Abu Kanu had offered a lift to Sorie Dawo, a young man employed by one of their rice agents in Blama. Sorie Dawo was in town to help complete the purchase of a rice-threshing machine. He had spent most of the day before with my father at the factory showroom. Abu Kanu had just pulled up outside the store at 60 Kissy Road when the two CID men accosted him. He handed his watch and spare cash to Sorie Dawo, for safekeeping. Moments later Sorie was arrested, too. Abu was held alone in a cell for several days before he was taken to Bambay Kamara.

  ‘I'd like you to help me,’ was what the deputy chief had said to Abu Kanu. I'd like you to help me.

  Bambay Kamara told Abu Kanu that he was young, and he'd been used. If Abu agreed to tell them what he knew, he would be spared, perhaps even become a witness in the trial. In turn Abu Kanu insisted that he had only worked in Dr Forna's business. Bambay Kamara continued to speak softly to him for a while, persuasively. He asked him about a meeting at the store in Kissy Road. Abu Kanu agreed that he had seen two men come to visit the doctor, but he had not heard what was discussed: they had spoken for no more than a few minutes. Bambay Kamara nodded. He indicated that Abu Kanu should be taken back to the cell. This time he was put into the general holding cell, where he waited. A few minutes later he was fetched and brought back to the interrogation room.

  ‘This time the room had completely changed around.’ He looked at me. ‘There was a chair and a rope, hanging above it.’ This he demonstrated with his hands. ‘Bambay told me to sit down.’ Two other men were in the room; one, he learned later, was Newlove. ‘I'll see you, Abu,’ said Bambay Kamara. He picked up some papers and left the room.

  Someone placed a blindfold over Abu Kanu's eyes, his hands were tied behind his back with the rope suspended from the ceiling. The chair was taken away. Three hard slaps across the face – he sensed it was Newlove who had dealt these. He staggered, momentarily dazed. A kick landed at the base of his spine, then they started with the lash. After a few strokes Abu Kanu shouted: ‘Before you kill me, just tell me what you want me to say.’ He had an idea there might be a tape recorder in the room. A thought filtered through the pain – that perhaps later he might be able to retract. He shouted again, more loudly this time. He felt sure they backed off just a little then, unnerved by the amount of noise he was creating.

  Bambay Kamara entered the room again and made a show of bringing the beating to a halt. The blindfold was removed. Bambay pulled up a chair and showed Abu Kanu a pile of statements, including those made by some of the key witnesses and a man called Bai Bai Kamara, whom Abu Kanu knew slightly. ‘You see what people have told us about you,’ Bambay Kamara said. He shook his head; he didn't want Abu to die for someone else's crime.

  Abu Kanu was taken to Pademba Road Prison. A few days later they brought him back to the CID. As he passed one of the interrogation rooms the door was opened, deliberately, to reveal a tableau within. He saw his wife sitting on a chair; she was weeping. Their son, who was three months old, lay face down on the ground at her feet. He was motionless. The door was pushed shut.

  Abu Kanu neither wrote his statement, nor was it given to him to read. He signed it, not knowing whom he had implicated. This was the way the CID worked: in the morning they would bring in a fresh round of suspects based on the ‘confessions’ of Abu Kanu and others.

  Before I left Abu Kanu told me where I would find Sorie Dawo and hazarded a guess at the whereabouts of some of the other defendants. He didn't have any of their addresses, just an idea of where they might be. I might have to ask around a bit, he explained. None of them spoke to each other much any more, he told me. After twelve years together in prison there wasn't a great deal left to say.

  I stepped out of Abu Kanu's building into the noise and heat of the street. I stood there for a moment feeling disorientated after the darkness and stillness of the interior room, where I had spent something over an hour. I looked up and down for Dura. There he was, standing by a stall on the other side of the road. He saw me and hurried across, searching for the car keys in his pocket.

  Out of the recess of a nearby building a man approached me. His hair was matted into short, thick dreadlocks, his clothes were wretched. He was saying something I couldn't make out, and as I climbed into the car he leant in after me. I glanced up at him and noticed how young he was, in his teens, no more. I tried to hear what he was saying. Dura rushed around and shooed him away before climbing in himself and slamming the door. I stared at Dura: he was normally the gentlest of souls. He almost always found a few coins for a beggar.

  ‘One of these rebel boys,’ he muttered angrily.

  ‘He's a rebel?’ I glanced at the beggar and back at Dura.

  ‘After January Sixth,’ said Dura, ‘some of these boys just lost their minds.’ He tapped his skull with his forefinger. ‘Because of all the evil things that they did. Their families don't want them back any more. So they come and beg on the street.’ Dura's mouth was turned down. He looked in the rear-view mirror and changed gears as though he didn't plan to waste another breath on the subject. His house, his two wives and his children were in eastern Freetown, which had taken the brunt of the invasion on that day. As we eased out into the traffic I let the matter drop.

  Freetown was full of living ghosts: amputees, deranged rebels. And then there was me: I was beginning to feel like a revenant. A day before I had been downtown by the old City Hotel taking photographs for my journal. Yabome was chatting to some of the sellers in their booths. One of them, a woman in her fifties, advanced upon me. She was tall, well dressed, with carefully coiffed hair. She embraced me with tears in her eyes, just as Abu Kanu had done, only she clung to me for so long people around us had to persuade her to release me. I was used to the effect my name could have; the recognition that so often accompanied it. But such displays of emotion, after so long? I put it down to the war. People looking back, remembering how things once were, imagining how they might have been different.

  40

  A few mornings later Morlai turned up at the house sweating, his breathing laboured. He was limping badly, swinging his leg out awkwardly as he walked. It had taken him nigh on half an hour to walk up Lower Pipeline Lane to the house, he told us. Yabome rang the doctor and Simon and I drove him there, waiting two hours outside the reception room until the doctor had a chance to see him.

  The receptionist was curious about us. ‘Who are those people to you?’ she asked Morlai, every time Simon or I stepped back inside and asked how much longer it would be.

  ‘This is my cousin and her husband,’ answered Morlai. The woman looked him over with a dubious eye. By the time we reached Sorie Dawo's house we were two hours late for our meeting. I expected him to be long gone, but he was still waiting for us.

  Sorie Dawo sat on the plastic-covered sofa, cupped his hands over his face and wept. At first we let him. There was no shame in it. But Sorie Dawo cried on and on. He turned to Simon to explain, and despite Simon's murmured protests Sorie Dawo persisted.

  ‘He used to call me “namesake”, you see. Namesake. Because I was Sorie. He was Sorie.’ Abu Kanu had said my father used to call him ‘little brother’. Santigi too described how he called him ‘kinsman’ because Santigi was a Loko and Pa Roke had been born a Loko.

  Sorie Dawo told his story at great length. He spoke loudly and slowly, in heavily accented though otherwise go
od English. ‘My name is Sorie Dawo,’ he began, as though he was giving evidence. ‘I lived in Blama District. I worked for International Commercial Enterprises.’ He determined I should write down every sentence, and if I paused at all he would jab his forefinger at my notepad. Try as I might it was impossible to hurry him on, although I assured him the tape recorder was running, recording his every word. And so I gave up. Sorie Dawo explained how he was related to our family on his mother's side; how he worked for Manu Dawo, his uncle, who was the Commercial Enterprise agent in Blama; how he was trusted to carry the profits from the rice sales back to head office in Freetown; how he secured deals for hundreds of bushels of rice in various parts of the country; and how he had helped in the purchase of the company's first rice-threshing machine in Bo.

  It took us two hours to reach the relevant part of his story, by which time Simon had gone, Morlai had fallen asleep, twisted uncomfortably in his chair, and my wrist and fingers ached from writing. On Monday 29 July he had met my father at the Walpole Street offices and they had gone together to College Road to view a German-built rice-threshing machine – he called it a ‘wallah’ machine. This one was to be based at Blama, at the Old French Company stores, where the rice would be husked and boiled on site. The negotiations took the better part of the day, and it was early evening when they parted.

  The next morning Sorie returned to the office to collect a cheque for the machine and to organise its transport up to Blama. My father gave him a couple of leones to catch a poda poda to our house in Samuel's Lane and get something to eat. On his way back to town he encountered Abu Kanu at Blackhall Road. Abu Kanu was on his way to collect his car from the mechanic and then he was going to Walpole Street: if Sorie didn't mind accompanying him to the mechanic's shop he would give him a ride. They were driving down Kissy Road in Abu's car when they were pulled over by two men who had been travelling in the vehicle behind.