The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  Albert was more or less forgotten. He said nothing. Instead he gazed out of the window at the yard at the back of the house, an ordinary patch of bare earth separated from the next house by a low wall. There was a small hut where the women washed and cooked. Not a soul was in evidence; Habib's family had either been arrested or fled. He noticed something about the yard, something significant.

  ‘There was no banana tree there.’ He spread his hands palm up on the table. ‘Not a single tree. I tried to use that fact later, so as to prove my statement was falsely given.’

  Albert Tot Thomas, Bai Bai Kamara, Abu Kanu: they had the same air about them. At first I mistook it for a curious indifference, but it was – I came to understand much later – simply a lack of expectation. They weren't looking for sympathy or understanding. They told their stories, while I prodded them onwards, checked for inconsistencies, interrupted with questions. In return they asked me nothing. They had waited for me for half a day for the opportunity to be heard, it seemed, and no more. I pondered how peculiarly western was my search for the truth, as though it were there to be found at all. Would I have that confidence if this had really been my country, where arrests, detentions and beatings had become as common as ant tracks in the dust? Perhaps if it had been I might feel their loneliness in the face of fate. Perhaps, if I were Unfa Mansaray.

  Unfa Mansaray was a cook who worked in the Patterson Zochonis employees’ compound next to the Wilberforce barracks. He knew a few of the soldiers, who from time to time would come over to his kitchens to gossip, and perhaps be given something to eat. There was a lot of rebellious talk at that time, he said, especially among the Mende officers who were his friends: they wanted something to be done about the APC; they wanted David Lansana brought back as head of the army. From his house next to the barracks Unfa heard the explosion at Kamara Taylor's house on the night of the 29th. The next day Unfa went to a funeral and then worked until late in the evening. He arrived home to discover men from the CID were looking for him. He left straight away and caught a poda poda down to the CID headquarters, where he presented himself to the officer in charge. The desk officer asked if he was Baba Mansaray from Kambia and showed him a photograph of the wanted man. Unfa said no, he thought it was a simple case of mistaken identity. They kept him a week in the public pen. Soon afterwards they took him into a room to begin his ‘interrogation’.

  It wasn't until Unfa Mansaray appeared in court and heard his statement read aloud that he discovered he had ‘confessed’ to holding meetings in the PZ compound, to being present at a meeting of the plotters at the house in Milton Street and reporting on the progress of the scheme to my father at his office in Walpole Street – this last in the company of Saidu Brima, a steward at the PZ compound and one of the chief witnesses for the prosecution.

  ‘You didn't write your statement, then?’ I confirmed, glancing up as I jotted down his words.

  ‘No, madam,’ he replied, meeting my gaze.

  ‘Didn't you read it?’ I asked.

  He shrugged and gave me a look which seemed to suggest the question was not worth asking. ‘Well, I can't read, madam,’ he replied quietly. Unfa Mansaray held himself as straight as a palm, his expression was as serene as a drifting river. There was an air of dignity about him that made this fact somehow surprising – that and his flawless English. Of course I knew barely a tenth of the population in Sierra Leone could read and write. If Unfa had been literate he certainly wouldn't have spent his life as a servant. No one had read his statement back to him. When they had finished, they dragged him to a table and pushed his thumb into an ink pad and then onto the bottom of the piece of paper.

  41

  I saw a photograph of my father. It was printed on the cover of a newspaper pull-out section headlined TREASON TRIAL SPECIAL published by the Government Information Services. I found it on a chair on the back veranda of our house. I stopped what I was doing, sat down and stared at it.

  The picture was taken from above and showed my father on his way into the high court building at the start of his trial. He was striding purposefully, alone. I peered closer and studied his features. His beard had grown back unevenly, his hair looked knotted and uncombed, he was dressed in the same short-sleeved suit he had been wearing the day he was taken away.

  My stepmother's cousin Auntie Binty, who we had known in London, had come to stay with us for a while from Nigeria, bringing her children Edward and Elizabeth. She walked onto the veranda. Too late, I looked up. ‘What's so interesting?’ she asked, smiling forcefully.

  I didn't reply; instead I tried to push the newspaper back where I had found it, tucked into the back of the old, broken armchair.

  Auntie Binty leaned across, pulled it deftly out from underneath me and gazed at the cover. ‘You don't want to be reading that,’ she announced, still smiling, holding onto the newspaper. ‘Why don't you go outside, find the others? Go on.’ She tucked the newspaper firmly under her arm.

  The trial of Mohamed Forna and Fourteen Others had opened at a special session of the high court on 10 September, two days short of Sheka's thirteenth birthday. Sheka had already flown back to England to begin at his new school. Mum had decided Memuna and I should go back to school late. We were staying on a little longer in the hope we might be able to win a little public sympathy for our father. I felt proud and unkindly I boasted to Sheka, one day when he had upset me, that I was staying to help our father and he was not.

  Our father stood accused of attempting to overthrow the government of Sierra Leone, of conspiring to kill the minister of finance, Christian Kamara Taylor, the vice-president, S. I. Koroma, and the force commander, Joseph Momoh. Stevens himself had been on a state visit to Rome at the time. Our father was also accused of planning to attack, seize and take over the magazine at Tower Hill and the telecommunications exchange at Wilberforce. Standing alongside him in the dock was Ibrahim Taqi and his former adversary and army boss David Lansana. The fifteen comprised a diverse range of men: a former paramount chief, two ex-ministers, a former brigadier, a tanker driver, a shopkeeper and a cook; Temnes, Mendes and Creoles; SLPP, UDP.

  I was sitting at the dining table in my stepmother's house when I came across that image of my father again. The picture was not exactly as I had remembered it. When I looked at it again two and a half decades later I saw he was not by himself. There were other people in the picture, surrounding him: armed men in helmets and battledress. I counted eleven of them. Eleven soldiers. Yet they seemed to be keeping a slight distance between themselves and their prisoner. The overall impression, despite all the people around him, was that my father was alone.

  Behind me a fan pushed humid air around the room; assorted documents in front of me stirred, as though rifled by unseen fingers. Besides the newspaper cuttings, there were also seven thick bound volumes of typed manuscript on the table. The covers were dusty and brown with age, the staples that held the pages together rusted. These were the transcripts of the trial, obtained, finally, from one of the lawyers who had defended several of the other men.

  Mum's search to find somebody to represent our father had taken weeks and ended the night before the trial opened. Old lawyer Yilla, whose main qualification was his willingness to accept the brief, had demanded cash up front. Shineh Taqi, only just qualified as a lawyer herself, was part of the team representing her husband and some of the other defendants, and she alone among the lawyers had managed, just once, to see the men in prison. Using her every resource she had wrung a court order out of a judge to grant her access. Even then the director of prisons refused to allow her inside the gates until he had direct authorisation from the president himself. He had even threatened to have her arrested. That's how the law worked in Sierra Leone. Stevens controlled everything; nothing happened without his sanction.

  In the days that followed the announcement of the charges Mum and Auntie Shineh went from one set of chambers to another trying to find someone to represent their husbands. Suddenly every lawyer in
the city was unavailable – too busy, they said, or else about to take a last-minute vacation in Europe. One evening the two women drove together to the Sierra Leone Telecommunications Office, behind the bus depot in downtown Freetown, where they placed a long-distance call to a senior Sierra Leonean lawyer, the former attorney-general under Albert Margai, now living in the West Indies. Berthan Macauley had even successfully defended himself against charges of treason arising out of the fiasco of the 1967 election, at a time when there was still some semblance of judicial independence. He remained unafraid of the APC. He agreed to fly to Freetown and take the case. My stepmother and Auntie Shineh left the SLET offices relieved, jubilant almost, unaware that an operator had eavesdropped on their call and the information was already on its way to powerful men in the government.

  Berthan Macauley arrived in Freetown a few days later and checked into the Paramount Hotel in the centre of town. Shortly after his arrival he was visited in his room by S. I. Koroma. S.I. knew that Berthan Macauley was related by marriage to Adelaide Dworzak, who was still detained at Pademba Road. He proposed a deal: Adelaide's freedom in exchange for the lawyer's promise to drop the case and leave the country.

  Macauley telephoned Shineh Taqi in her office. She listened to what he had to say; she could not advise him. Her disappointment was acute, but she would understand, she told him, if Adelaide was more important than the case.

  By then Adelaide had been in the women's block of the prison for six weeks. In all that time she had neither washed nor bathed, except with an occasional bucket of water. With no idea what was happening beyond the door of her cell, she received the news of her release without warning. This is what she told me. She was led to the prison gates; her blouse was filthy and torn under one arm, her hair was matted. Her bra had been taken away and not returned. For most of the time she was held in a cell too dark to even see the plates of food pushed through the door. Blinking in the sunlight, she found herself being driven by Berthan Macauley directly from Pademba Road Prison to S. I. Koroma's Freetown residence at Hill Station. S.I. himself greeted her, offered her a seat and opened a bottle of XO Cognac. He held the bottle up to her; she accepted and he poured her a triple, murmuring words of consolation. They sat together while he appraised her and made meaningless small talk. Only then did he permit her to go home. Less than a week later Berthan flew with Adelaide out of the country.

  At some point, not all that long ago, I learned to be careful of people who said they had been great friends with my father: people whose faces I didn't recognise, whose names I had barely ever heard. It took me a while to analyse the suspicion that flared with the sound of those words. In time I put my finger on it. There was a difference between the way those who claimed friendship spoke about my father, and the way his true friends talked about him. Or, to be more precise, it was the fact that his real friends, in conversation with me, spoke of him. The others talked about themselves.

  ‘I was great friends with your father,’ declared Berthan Macauley the day I telephoned him at his offices in Kingston from my home in London in 2000.

  The lawyer, who still practised despite his advanced years, denied the rumours that had persisted through the years: that Adelaide Dworzak's freedom had been traded in exchange for an assurance to the vice-president. S.I. had released Adelaide quite by chance, he said. The visit to his hotel room, the curious audience with Adelaide, none of these things had any bearing on why he had suddenly lost interest in the case. We spoke for a few minutes and I kept him on the line with questions. He sounded as though he was in a hurry. Gradually, the irritation in his voice became plain. He thought I was impertinent, that much I could tell. I asked him straight: ‘So why did you pull out then. If it wasn't because of Adelaide?’

  Way down the line from Jamaica the pitch of his voice rose suddenly. ‘I didn't defend your father because he had no money. They hadn't paid me a single penny. I even paid my own hotel bills. I had taken time away from my work, flown all the way from Jamaica. I'd been in the hotel three nights and then I discovered nobody had any money to pay me!’ It was all delivered in one indignant rant. I waited. Then he said: ‘Your father was an old, old friend of mine.’

  ‘Then why wouldn't you help him out?’ I asked. ‘I mean, if he was such a good friend you'd want to help, surely?’

  He didn't reply. Instead he moved on: ‘S.I. was surprised I wasn't taking the case, especially as Adelaide was a girlfriend of your father's.’ I wondered if this was calculated to throw me off, if he thought perhaps I didn't know. ‘And I was a good friend of your father.’ He was beginning to repeat it like a mantra.

  I'd had enough. ‘Please would you stop saying that. Just stop saying that,’ I said. I didn't wait for a reply. I said goodbye and put the receiver back on the hook.

  When I called Berthan Macauley I believed some kind of deal had been done to win Adelaide's freedom – even Adelaide herself had said so. As I sat at my desk afterwards I pondered our conversation, wondering what on earth had motivated Berthan Macauley to change the story, if that was indeed what he had done. What would make a man think it was better to say he had failed to defend a friend because that friend couldn't afford to pay him than to admit he had been placed in an impossible situation? Yet there had been in his voice no hint of sorrow or of regret, no evidence of a sense of duty, professional or personal. It was as though our whole conversation had taken place in a moral vacuum.

  A moral vacuum. That's what it was like, back then. The day the case opened in Court Number One Red Shirts heckled and spat upon members of the defendants’ families as they made their way into court. The defendants were brought in a prison truck, handcuffed and chained. The stench arising from them was so terrible the courtroom had to be sprayed with disinfectant twice every day, before they arrived and after they departed. Ali Badara Janneh, the social welfare minister, had ordered the removal of all toiletries, combs and toothbrushes from the prisoners’ cells and denied them washing facilities. Back in 1971, Janneh had stood on the platform before the crowd at an APC party convention and said the UDP leaders, then in detention, ought to be shot.

  None of the defence team, who were each representing several different people, such was the dearth of lawyers willing to take the case, had managed to meet their clients. Yet the judge refused their request to do so. When the lawyers threatened to withdraw he tried to forbid it. He granted them an hour. When, at the end of the recess, the lawyers insisted on being given more time the judge accused them of being obstructive. One lawyer walked out. The judge conceded a day. A single day to prepare the defence of fifteen men in a capital case.

  The jury was packed with APC supporters; my stepmother even recognised two of S.I.’s first cousins. The defence used the right of each of the fifteen defendants to challenge a juror, but it was like fighting a Hydra. One government stooge was removed and another rose instantly to take his place.

  One thousand and seven pages, typed on an old typewriter with slightly irregular keys. The trial lasted sixty-seven days. The documents are a crude facsimile of justice. On and on it goes: numbered paragraphs, applications, replies, rulings, submissions and objections litter the pages. The text is interspersed with lengthy legal arguments. The verbosity of the judge is offset by the frequent errors of spelling and phonetic renditions of the court stenographer. There are pages and pages of evidence, descriptions of alleged meetings, volumes of names, some of which I recognised, others which meant nothing to me at all. At first I found myself forced to refer often to the list contained at the front of the first volume to remind myself who was meant by the references to the Second, or Fourth or Seventh Accused, the names of PW3, PW5 or PW12. By the end of a whole day I had begun to memorise the names of the fifteen accused, the eighteen prosecution witnesses, the fourteen defence witnesses, the four defence lawyers and the seven lawyers representing the state.

  Outside the window came a rhythmic knocking, of wood against wet cloth and stone. The women next door were making gar
a, tie-dyeing sheets of cloth to create elaborate patterns, pummelling the finished product with wooden bats to raise a shine before they took it to the market. The women sang as they worked. The occasional horn sounded from the road beyond, as vehicles approached the sharp bend outside our house. The cook laid and cleared the table around me. Ola curtsied on her way to school in the morning, and found me there when she came home in the middle of the afternoon and bobbed again. By then I hardly noticed her. Everything around me receded from my conscious thoughts as I read on, plunging deeper into the trial.

  Day one opened with the testimony of Christian Kamara Taylor, the acting vice-president. He swore he was at home, woken by an explosion in the early hours of the morning. He described how he had collected his children from their beds and fled the house, encountering two of his ministerial colleagues who were on their own way over to investigate the blast.

  Then the prosecution produced four witnesses, one after the other; each gave evidence against my father. They placed him at the centre of the supposed plot to overthrow the government, claimed to have seen him at dozens of meetings inciting soldiers, proposing the assassination of the president, producing wads of cash to buy ammunition and uniforms. Between them they spun a story of a plot, masterminded by my father and Ibrahim Taqi, costing thousands of leones, involving dozens of soldiers and huge caches of arms.

  The lead witness was the former soldier, Morlai Salieu. He swore before the court that he had visited my father's offices and there been given money to plan a coup. On 29 July he had gone to a house in Murraytown belonging to Habib Lansana Kamara. They waited there until the dead of night, when they had travelled to a nearby cemetery and met up with a large group of soldiers in combat clothes. The men were split into groups and issued with sticks of dynamite. The first group, said Morlai Salieu, set off to attack the home of Christian Kamara Taylor with orders to seize the minister and hold him. The second group of men was to do the same at the house of the head of the army, Brigadier Momoh, and the third group of soldiers were given orders to kill the guards at the army magazine and seize the ammunition supplies. Morlai Salieu himself was part of the fourth band, which was dispatched to attack the house of the vice-president, S. I. Koroma. As they departed to carry out their missions, he told the court, Mohamed Forna wished them all luck.