The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  Sorie was questioned by Bambay Kamara and by the two men who had arrested him, Francis Ngobeh and Seth Amadefu. He protested he was merely an agent for the company and was in Freetown for the purchase of a rice-threshing machine. After six days he was taken to Pademba Road. On 27 September his detention order was signed by the president. He was taken from the cell he shared with two other men and placed in solitary confinement. The prison officer in charge even took away his blankets, and he lay shivering on the floor. They seemed to delight in tormenting him, cutting his rations, soaking the floor of his cell with water so that he was forced to stand up or huddle in the corner. He remained in jail for five months; when he was released the trial had just ended.

  Later I pored over my notes, trying to fit the pieces together. Sorie Dawo spent the whole of the day with my father. That put our tennis game with Miss Dworzak later in the evening, when he had finished work. That would figure. My father had stopped briefly on the way home and bought a bottle of brandy at Lami Sidique's supermarket – Lami Sidique himself had told me so, although I didn't remember. Of course, I had been unwell.

  It was later the same evening that the injured man had been brought to our house in Kissy. This had occurred around seven o'clock. I had been lying on my bed reading after supper. Morlai, Santigi and Yabome had all confirmed what I remembered. They were certain of it. Yet the attack on Kamara Taylor's house had not come until four o'clock in the morning, according to all the people who had heard the sound of the explosion itself, and even the police. That part alone made no sense. Although Morlai, Mum and I talked around and around it in the days that followed, we could not account for the discrepancy.

  The afternoon found us at Victoria Park market, where I trawled through second-hand school books. I wanted a map of Sierra Leone, but all that was available was an old Shell map, the kind that used to be issued free of charge from petrol stations twenty years ago. It was the best I could do. The huge undercover market was half empty. Beside the piles of western-style training shoes and T-shirts was the occasional stall selling tourist carvings. I wondered how on earth the stallholder could possibly make a living.

  I had the map in my hand and I was in the act of agreeing a price for it, haggling in a mixture of Creole and English, when I heard a series of sharp cracks, like the sound of burning bamboo splitting in the heat of the fire. The stallholder heard it too. He looked from left to right and without a word he disappeared, ducking out of sight behind his stall. The crackling sounded a second time. Somewhere in the back of my brain I dimly recognised the sound. I had heard it before somewhere. Behind a voice, distantly over a telephone wire. Gunfire!

  The strange thing was how silently we all ran. No one screamed. People rushed up the hill towards State House, young men, women carrying babies; vendors left their display boxes by the kerb, children scattered. A poda poda had lurched to a stop and the passengers burst out of the back doors. One man dived through the passenger-seat window, was momentarily stuck half in, half out, and then scrambled to freedom. I ran a few yards and then veered sharply to my right, down the side of the booths. I saw a hairdresser's shop and headed for the door. I turned to look for Morlai. I caught sight of him running up the street, hemmed in by the crowd, his head turning frantically from side to side as he sought me.

  ‘Morlai!’ Morlai saw me and struggled to break free of the mass. I reached out my hand, searching for his. I grasped his hand and pulled him bodily out of the crowd.

  ‘It's all right! It's all right!’ said Morlai – he was grinning suddenly. The stampede had stopped, people were standing around. I heard laughter. ‘It's the electricity,’ explained Morlai, panting, pointing at the overhead wires. We walked back a few paces and looked down the street. A broken electric cable danced on the road, crackling and sending up showers of sparks like a firework.

  The man who had leapt from the window of the minibus stood nearby. He was young, lanky and dressed in jeans and gold chains; now he looked sheepish. My heart was still beating fast. People began to tease each other, falling about, laughing hard, too hard. A woman next to me in a tight tamula and lappa shrieked at the sight of the map seller as he re-emerged from beneath his stall. Her neck was taut and knotted with veins as she pushed her face forward. Her laugh was shrill and unending, a cascade of discordant notes.

  Two days later the city was in uproar over the semi-finals of the African Nations Cup, Nigeria versus the Cameroons. Many people supported Nigeria, the leaders of the West African peacekeeping force who brought an end to the rebel invasion in January one year ago. By inference anybody who supported the Cameroons must therefore be a rebel. The match was shown all over town: anyone with a television put out a few chairs, posted a hand-drawn flyer and charged a few thousand leones admission to an open-air viewing. The match had ended in controversy when a ball kicked by a Nigerian forward hit the crossbar of the Cameroonian goal before bouncing down onto the ground. The umpire disallowed the goal, but the action replay showed the ball had bounced just inside the goal line.

  Outside the New Citizen newspaper building a gang of open-shirted young men were locked into a shouting match, arguing and gesticulating in the middle of the street. I had witnessed the same scene replayed all over town: in the streets, down at Government Wharf market, outside the law courts, where I made my daily pilgrimage to Thomas Gordon's office. Dura sounded the horn to pass by, and though they acknowledged the car, and began to drift to the side of the street, the argument raged on.

  We made our way to the Commercial Bank building, located within the two streets that passed as the business district of Freetown, to meet Bai Bai Kamara. I had been told he was now a director of the bank, but when I telephoned they had been unable to contact him for me. So instead Simon, accompanied by Morlai, went out to the last address we had for him, the place where Bai Bai Kamara was living at the time of his arrest: 70 Kissy Bye Pass Road.

  The address turned out to be a three-storey block on a busy road. The flat on the second floor was Bai Bai's, but at a glance it was evident no one lived there any longer. Fingers of black soot stretched upwards from charred window frames; the apartment inside was a hollow ruin. Strangely neither the flat above nor the one below had apparently been touched by the flames. Whole families had made their homes in the stairwell. Bai Bai Kamara had indeed lived there, until January Sixth. Someone supplied the name of another street where Bai Bai might be found and there Simon and Morlai asked again at a local shop. The shopkeeper nodded and pointed to an elderly man sitting on the kerb, wearing a grubby woollen hat and a dusty jellaba. Simon approached him, presuming this must be someone who could point out the house where Bai Bai lived. The man turned out to be Bai Bai himself. In the poorest country in the world, being on the board of a bank didn't necessarily amount to much.

  I turned up at the bank building to meet him two days later. The security guard was clearly expecting me. He chatted while we waited, asking after my family and even my husband. He seemed to know a lot about me. Bai Bai Kamara appeared, a slim, dark-skinned man, dressed this time in a faded green safari suit, wearing an embroidered skull cap and carrying a briefcase, badly worn around the edges. We travelled to a nearby restaurant, where I had arranged a private room for our talk.

  We faced each other on opposite sides of a desk. Bai Bai waited with his hands folded on the table in front of him, while I produced my notebook, pens and tape recorder. I unwrapped a fresh cassette and loaded it carefully. I checked the recording levels. At length I was ready to start. My intention was to conduct this interview just as I would have any other in my years as a professional journalist. It was an obligation I held myself to. I never talked about ‘my father’ only ever ‘Dr Forna'; I did it to encourage people to respond to me as a more or less impartial enquirer. It seemed to work. It never failed to surprise me how easily people appeared to forget who they were talking with. Even in my personal notes and transcripts I eschewed the familiar and used my father's full name instead. There were reaso
ns I needed to impose this facade of control. It unnerved me to delve into the past, to ask questions without knowing whether I might hear something in reply I would find hard to accept. It would have been easier to stay in London, never to have come here at all, to leave matters undisturbed as they had lain for decades. I had found a way to live with the past, and I was aware I was now jeopardising that.

  Bai Bai Kamara had been politically active for most of his career, he told me. First through the SLPP, then in 1970 he had joined a new party called the National Democratic Party, which soon merged with the UDP. He had been thrown into prison under the emergency laws and held, without charge, in the detainees’ wing, Clarkson, at the same time as my father.

  On his release Bai Bai had failed to keep a low profile, continuing to campaign, to hold political meetings and to tour the provinces, in defiance of the state of emergency that persisted. In due course, at the end of 1973, he moved back to Freetown, where he was in touch with a man called Habib Lansana Kamara. Habib was an ex-soldier who had been in prison at the same time as the rest of the men, though he had never been connected with the UDP. He had been accused of being part of a military plot. Stevens's paranoia was increasing and he was especially nervous of rebellion from within the ranks of the army. After the killing of John Bangura he made liberal use of his increased powers to carry out frequent purges. The prison was crammed with three times the number of prisoners it had been built to hold. Habib was an outspoken type of character, and when he was sacked from his army post as a storekeeper, to anyone who cared to listen he would denounce Stevens and the APC government who had robbed him of his freedom and lost him his army career. No one took him particularly seriously but, said Bai Bai, he had heard my father once warn Habib to take care, everyone was being watched. Habib came from a rice-rich region called Wallah, and after the prisoners were released my father offered to buy rice supplied by Habib for his business. Habib lived most of the time in Wallah, travelling to Freetown from time to time, to deliver rice to the Kissy store managed by Abu Kanu.

  At the time of the explosion at Kamara Taylor's house Habib had been in Freetown with one of his wives, at a house he kept in Murraytown. When the arrests started in earnest he fled across to Lungi, where he hid in a village until his capture two weeks later. He was brought across the water in a boat one morning in August, handcuffed, beaten and bowed. The CID accused him of being at the centre of the alleged plot to overthrow the regime, and Habib's subsequent statements had implicated everybody, including Abu Kanu, Bai Bai himself and my father.

  Bai Bai in turn was arrested and subjected to the CID's interrogation technique. He leaned across and showed me the inside of his forearm: on the skin was a constellation of precise, round, hard scars. Half a dozen officers questioned him, throwing questions at him from all sides. After several hours Bai Bai was worn down; he started to talk, agreeing with whatever they put to him. In the time I had spent with Abu Kanu, a few days before, I had sensed Abu still resented Bai Bai for this betrayal. Abu Kanu had held out longer than anyone. Bai Bai caved in quickly. In the end, though, Habib, Bai Bai and Abu Kanu had all implicated each other. Their statements, read to the court, described a trip to buy dynamite in Lunsar and test it on the Mange river, dynamite supposedly paid for by my father and delivered in crates to his office afterwards.

  The man opposite me told his story deliberately, precisely, with neither apology nor shame. At the trial he recognised only one of the four witnesses who gave evidence for the state against the fifteen men: a former private in the army by the name of Morlai Salieu, who had been in Wilberforce block at Pademba Road. Habib Lansana Kamara had also been in Wilberforce. In 1974 Bai Bai had met Morlai Salieu, quite by chance, it seemed, waiting for a bus into town. Bai Bai explained:

  ‘I met him one morning at Kissy Bye Pass. He was stranded and wanted to come to town, so I offered to pay his fare. He wanted to see Dr Forna, that's what he told me. I asked him why. He said he wanted help with a job. He had been forced to leave the army and had no work. Then there was some trouble about a court case. I directed him to Walpole Street.’

  Bai Bai and Morlai rode the poda poda together into town. Morlai Salieu got off first. When he was out of sight a passenger behind Bai Bai leaned forward and whispered a warning in his ear, that the man he had been sitting next to was an informant to S. I. Koroma. Bai Bai listened, but in the days that followed he put the matter out of his mind. He did not see Morlai Salieu again until the first day of the trial.

  It was the end of February and hot as hell. I was sweating, streaked with dust and tired when I stepped back into the same restaurant to meet my stepmother. It had been a long, long day. Everything in Freetown took three times, four times as long as it should. I had commandeered the whole family – Simon, Morlai and Yabome – into helping me in different ways every day. I found my stepmother waiting at a table with three men. I recognised one as Bai Bai Kamara, but the faces of the other two men were new to me. Empty soft drinks bottles and glasses were stacked on the table and the restaurant was completely empty.

  The men at the table gave their names: Albert Tot Thomas and Unfa Mansaray, both former defendants from the treason trial. Bai Bai had brought them to meet me. Not having a telephone himself and not knowing how to contact me otherwise, he had come back to the restaurant where we met. The restaurant owner, a good friend of the family, allowed them to wait. That had been at lunch time, almost five hours ago.

  I ordered a bitter lemon from a waitress, tried to gather my wits and listen to each of their stories. I searched for paper and a pen. Albert Tot Thomas was the first to speak. He was a small man, with a domed forehead. His face was a pattern of vertical and horizontal lines: a straight, unsmiling mouth, deep grooves that ran from his nose to his mouth, his forehead cross-hatched with lines. His manner was earnest and sincere.

  Back in 1973 Albert Tot Thomas had been a small-time businessman, buying and selling on commission. He had also been acting editor of the SLPP paper Unity, which was being targeted and threatened with closure by the APC government. Albert had written and published an article asserting that the APC were planning to rule Sierra Leone through a military commission, and as a result he too found himself detained without charge at Clarkson wing, along with a fellow journalist, Dwight Neale, who worked as a stringer for the BBC World Service. He was freed shortly after the elections the same year.

  Before then Albert had known my father only by reputation. ‘I only met him one time. That was when some of the police had arrested one of our people in Kambia. They were holding him, refusing to charge or release the man. Some of us went to see Dr Forna at his office, to petition his help.’ Stevens was out of the country and my father was acting prime minister for a few days. He secured the man's release from the police cells. A year later Albert Tot Thomas and Mohamed Forna found themselves in prison together.

  In 1974 Albert was occupied with setting up a fishing business and went to Murraytown, a part of Freetown, once a fishing village, where most of the fisherman who launched their boats at Lumley lived in a grid of narrow, quiet streets. He was looking to buy lead weights for his nets. Knowing Habib Lansana Kamara he briefly stopped by his house in Milton Street to ask where he might locate some weights to buy. On the first visit Habib was not at home, so Albert went back on another day. He told me he reckoned that Habib's house must have been under observation, because after Albert was arrested in early August Bambay Kamara questioned him about the purpose of his two visits.

  The CID chief had ordered Albert's arrest, and he wanted to know if Albert had seen Mohamed Forna at Habib's house. Albert said no. Bambay asserted that Albert had been seen there with Mohamed Forna on the night of 29 July. Albert wasn't sure if that was even the night he had been to Habib's house in Milton Street, but he was confused and Bambay Kamara was insistent on the date. Albert said he thought there might have been some people standing at the back of the house, but he hadn't been able to see who they were. It was Mohamed Forn
a, said Bambay, leaning back confidently and slapping the table. Someone else had seen him there along with Ibrahim Taqi, holding a conversation beneath the banana tree.

  The conversation took place in a room where three other men were under ‘interrogation’. Albert recognised Unfa Mansaray from party meetings of the SLPP. Unfa was lying handcuffed on the floor; a CID officer was standing using his full weight on Unfa's chest. Another officer dropped onto his knees on Unfa's chest. Unfa was winded and gasping, unable to shout or breathe. Moments later Albert was presented with a short statement. It said he had seen Mohamed Forna and Ibrahim Taqi at Habib Lansana Kamara's house in Milton Street, talking beneath a banana tree on the night of the coup attempt. He signed it readily, thinking he might be able to hire a lawyer in town and refute the statement later.

  Instead of being released, as he had imagined, Albert found himself lying alone in a cell in Pademba Road. The door was locked and never opened, not even to allow him to wash or exercise. Once a day food was pushed through a hatch at the bottom. He lay in his own squalor, without access to a lawyer or his family, until he heard he had been charged with treason.

  The next time Albert saw daylight the defendants were handcuffed, chained together and herded out of the prison on a series of site visits, to locations where meetings were said to have taken place and the plot hatched. He saw Mohamed Forna for the first time since they were in Clarkson together.

  One of the addresses they visited was the house in Milton Street. The men shuffled into a small room and listened while the officer in charge read a series of statements by witnesses who claimed to have attended meetings where the overthrow of the government was plotted. Albert presumed the purpose of this was to encourage people to confess, and many did: some of the soldiers who had been arrested began to babble, calling names, pointing fingers, contradicting each other, saying anything at all which might save their own skins. It was obvious whose names they wanted to hear. Forna. Taqi. A CID officer noted down each fresh allegation.