The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  And so on it went. The second, then the third, and the fourth witness swore they had seen him at Murraytown cemetery issuing orders to soldiers the same night. Bassie Kargbo, an army orderly, insisted that Dr Forna had once proposed a plan to assassinate the president as he left a reception at the Cape Sierra. Saidu Brima, the houseboy at the PZ compound, claimed he had seen Dr Forna at Habib's house in Milton Street in a meeting during which the government's downfall was plotted.

  That the witnesses were planted and coached I had already been advised. Two lawyers – Eke Halloway, who had defended several of the accused, and Serry Kamal, who represented a number of the soldiers during the court martial which followed (Serry Kamal was the same man who had taken my father aside a few months before to warn him he was being watched) – told me a child could have spotted it: the repetition of key phrases, the absence of detail; under pressure the witnesses buckled and declared they could not remember. When that happened the judge would accuse the defence lawyers of harassment and order them to desist. At the end of the day the witnesses were herded into a separate vehicle back to the CID headquarters. After several hours they were transported again to Pademba Road, where they slept together in the same cell. The judge himself was seen going to visit S. I. Koroma each and every evening of the trial.

  One by one the statements of accused men were read aloud by officers of the CID. The statements dramatically compounded the damage done by the witnesses. Habib Lansana Kamara claimed my father and he had met and finalised details of the coup on the day before – the Sunday, the very day we had spent with our father and Nuhad Courban at her beach house. My father was put in two different places at the same time on that day, one clear across town from the other, and neither anywhere near the beach where we had swum and played. On the night of the 29th he was reported in four separate locations. The prosecution lawyers were so confident they couldn't be bothered to take care of the details.

  After the reading of the second statement the defence lawyers asked for permission to see the documents for themselves. Judge Marcus Cole denied the request, described the application as irresponsible and accused the defence, not for the first time, of attempting to obstruct proceedings. That was the way it went. Whenever the defence made an application, no matter how reasonable, it would always be dismissed and the objections overruled. At the end of the prosecution's case lawyer Yilla stepped forward and spoke on behalf of all the defendants and their lawyers. He submitted a plea of ‘no case’. The judge dismissed it out of hand.

  At home we waited in the abandoned house for Mum to come back. She left every morning by eight. Often she was not back until nine in the evening. Though sometimes she went alone, most days Sullay drove her to the court building. She came to rely on his silent support when she faced the crowds outside. Sullay was related to our father on his mother's side, and he stayed by us through the trial despite the warnings of his relatives. At the lunch-time recess a woman judge would sometimes provide Mum with an hour of sanctuary, allowing her to wait in her own office, away from the jeering Red Shirts, until the afternoon session opened. The only people who kept company with us still were Mum's trio of girlfriends. There was Auntie Fatu: four foot nought and plump, she giggled compulsively even during the worst of times; Auntie Marian, stately and cerebral; pretty little Auntie Posseh. I would jump up from whatever I was doing to run outside every time I heard the sound of an engine. Almost always it was one of the aunties, delivering a covered dish of plassas, fried plantains, or a basin of pap, coming to check on Mum to see how she was coping.

  One afternoon Mum came to us. She said she was going into the prison to see our father.

  ‘Can we come?’ we asked.

  ‘No. Only one person can go in. But you can write letters, I'll take them with me and make sure he gets them.’

  ‘Can you take a present? Wouldn't Daddy like a present?’

  ‘Yes, but just one each. And it will have to be something small.’

  It was agreed. The next day was Saturday and we would go into town, for the first time in weeks, to choose our gifts. I remember how I sat in my room that afternoon, chewing the end of my pencil, trying to work out what to say in my letter. I decided to begin by decorating the piece of paper. I drew flowers on the border with a red pencil. Red petals and a yellow centre. Yellow petals and a red centre. I added more, bluebell-shaped flower and then a huge sunflower in the bottom corner. Gradually I began to fill up the paper entirely, leaving virtually no room to write. I stopped. I crumpled the piece of paper up and threw it into the bin. I took another of the sheets Mum had given me and I wrote, ‘Dear Daddy.’ I paused. What should I say? What I wanted to do was to ask the horde of unanswered questions that played in my mind, which I hadn't even managed to formulate into thoughts, never mind words, or even sentences. I wrote: ‘I hope you are well.’ I stared at the sentence. I started all my letters the same way, but now I was struck by how silly it sounded. I went back to Mum to fetch another sheet of paper and began again. This time I stuck to facts. I began to describe how I had trodden on a snake one day, and how the local people burned the scrub until they flushed it out. Actually, I had been horrified at the time. A snake was seen as a bad omen. The mob caught the snake and skinned it alive as I watched from the balcony; all the while I held myself responsible for the creature's agony. An afternoon or two before, I had felt the movement underfoot, glimpsed the flash of scales through the bushes as I wandered back from the slaughterhouse stream. I went there all the time, now there was no one to stop me. Later, I had told Morlai about the snake. For the rest of the afternoon after the killing the snake's corpse lay on the side of the road, glistening pinkish in the sun, next to the smouldering scrub. Even the vultures wouldn't touch it.

  I didn't tell him any of that. Or how we thought we'd lost Pusu, the kitten we had named after Musu, and how Memuna went out into the rain crying and didn't reappear for hours, by which time everyone was searching for her. Instead I wrote about our visit to the Van der Weydens, schoolfriends of ours whose parents were newly posted through the British high commission. Mum dropped us off in the morning and I'd been really looking forward to it. With the trial on it had taken a long time to find a day when we could go. But the visit hadn't gone well. Exactly how or why I can't recall now – just a memory of blonde Mrs Van der Weyden and how she seemed to stare at us. At the end of the day Mum turned up, late, looking tired, and Mrs Van der Weyden called us down from Jeannie and Diane's room and said goodbye as if she was in a hurry. We weren't invited back. I told my father about how much fun we'd had. I kept my letter deliberately bland, filling up the rest with an imaginary trip to the beach and a catalogue of which tunes I had mastered on my recorder.

  The next morning we went to town. I took fifty cents from my dressing table. The money had stayed there through the constant raids and searches by the CID. I kept the five ten-cent coins deliberately within view, just waiting for one of the invaders to steal it, then I would have something else to hate them for. We didn't go to PZ this time; instead we browsed among the smaller Lebanese stores. What would be right? Not socks or a tie or anything like that. Over on a shelf, behind the imported refrigerators wrapped in plastic, I found a miniature yellow and red fan. The shopkeeper found some batteries and showed me how it worked: he placed it on the counter, tilted it upwards, so that the air blew into my face. Memuna and Sheka were equally entranced. We checked with Mum whether the prison cells were hot. Very hot, she said. So in the end we bought three, one from each of us, imagining he could place them all around his cell for maximum efficiency. I discovered later, much later, that the cells at Pademba Road are cold.

  Mum wasn't allowed to carry anything into the prison, as it turned out. She spent twenty minutes waiting in the visitors’ reception. When our father was brought in they were forbidden from touching. They sat opposite each other at a table. Two guards remained close by for the duration of the thirty-minute visit. Our father had lost weight, and he was unwashed and
unkempt, but his spirits were good. Mostly they talked about us, not the trial. Mum needed money for our school fees and the trial was costing everything we had. When they parted he told Mum to cheer up. Things may not be as bad as they looked, he had said. He had not entirely lost faith in the judiciary, who still had time to demonstrate their independence from the government. It might yet all come right.

  My father was on the witness stand for three days. It was the talk of the town. Three whole days, and Tom Johnson, special prosecutor for the state, never succeeded in making him contradict himself once. He even resorted to using my father's old resignation letter to try to prove he had a grudge against the government. My father described how Morlai Salieu had visited him in his office several times, starting in March, each time begging for money or for help. He said he'd been to Milton Street twice, once to check on a rice consignment and another time to drop off malaria pills for Habib Lansana Kamara. The second time he had been accosted by a man called Kemoko Suma, who claimed to have known him during the APC's period of exile in Guinea. Kemoko had a sick child. My father gave him fifteen leones for medicine. Kemoko was one of the people whose statements were read to the court: he claimed the money was given to buy arms. Kemoko Suma was with Bassie Kargbo when they approached my father at his office in July. Bassie was a Temne and, assuming him to be on a visit from up-country, my father had asked them all to wait for him at Abu Kanu's flat above the store in Kissy Road. Bassie and his colleagues, three young privates, had indeed spoken of a coup and tried to canvass his support. My father warned them off and sent them away. They had not returned. All the other accusations he refuted, and he flatly denied being anywhere near Murraytown graveyard on the night of the 29th.

  Tom Johnson asked whether he trusted Habib Lansana Kamara.

  ‘Habib has always been honest with me,’ my father replied. Tom Johnson read out the section of Habib's statement which implicated him, and asked if it were true.

  ‘No,’ replied my father.

  ‘Have you no conscience to say that your loyal and trusted business agent is telling a lie against you?’

  ‘I have a heart and a conscience, my lord,’ replied my father. In the same way he refused to condemn Abu Kanu or the other men whose words were used against him.

  Lawyer Yilla called no witnesses in his client's defence. Nuhad was gone. Adelaide, who might have been able to provide who knew how many alibis, was far away in the West Indies. Sorie Dawo, who was with him all day on Monday at a time when the prosecution claimed my father was in various parts of town finalising details of the night's coup, was lying in a cell in jail.

  Then came the turn of the fourteen other defendants. Abu Kanu had protested bitterly as his statement was read to the court. Judge Marcus Cole ordered a trial within a trial. Francis Ngobeh, the officer from the CID who had written Abu's statement, was called up to the witness stand. Abu Kanu, he insisted, had cooperated of his own free will. Next Abu Kanu took the stand and graphically described his suffering at the hands of the CID officers. His evidence runs to five pages. At the end of it, on the bottom of page four hundred and sixty, are the judge's findings: ‘In all circumstances I am absolutely justified beyond reasonable doubt that the said statement Exhibit L of the Sixth Accused was made voluntarily. Objection overruled.’

  Every single defendant attempted to withdraw his statement. Habib Lansana Kamara, upon whose statement the prosecution had relied heavily to build their case against my father, declared he too had been tortured. Of all the men, he appeared to have suffered the most. His hands, feet and waist were bound with rope and he was pistol-whipped shortly after his capture at Lungi. When the vehicle that brought him from the docks arrived at the headquarters, officers of the CID fired jubilant shots in the air and taunted him, calling him ‘brigadier’ and ‘colonel’. One of them tripped him up at the entrance to the building and they thrashed him where he lay on the ground. On four different occasions he was tortured, until he begged Bambay Kamara to let them kill him. The judge ordered the jury out of the room while he listened to an account of the interrogation from the officer in charge, who swore the prisoner had been cooperative. In the case of every defendant Marcus Cole overruled the objections of the defence. The statements stood. The accusations against my father were reported every day in the ‘Treason Trial Special’, naturally, but not the protests of the men who had made them.

  The defence switched tactics. Under cross-examination Albert Tot Thomas told the court Bambay Kamara had offered him freedom in exchange for implicating Mohamed Forna and Ibrahim Taqi. There was no banana tree at Milton Street, he insisted. Unfa Mansaray, the last defendant, closed the case for the defence. His statement from the dock was short and simple. He maintained that he had never met Mohamed Forna, and knew him only by reputation as a government minister; nor had he ever attended a meeting at a house in Milton Street. On the day of the supposed coup attempt he had even been at a funeral with Bassie Kargbo, one of the main witnesses for the prosecution. I read through his account twice. It was, in every way, exactly the same as the story he had told me, more than twenty five years later.

  The account I read was not the way 1 had imagined my father's trial at all. I imagined – well, what exactly? That the prosecution's case would have been much more ingenious, more inventive, I suppose. Instead there it was: seven volumes in which the end was written before the start, in which every word demonstrated a contempt for the truth that was brutal, undisguised and arrogant. My father had not been facing one man or even a government, but a system, an entire order, in which everyone from judge to juror knew their role. I understood now why my father only ever cooperated in his trial, no more. Ibrahim Taqi produced several alibis to prove he was somewhere else, drinking with friends in a bar, at the time. And he gave a passionate speech from the dock. But it was useless. There was no law, no justice, just the legal trappings of a corrupt colossus that moved unhaltingly forward, engulfing everybody in its wake.

  One evening I stood, dressed in my shorts and my sandals, on the open road at the front of the house watching for the car bringing Mum and Sullay home. The light was fading fast, turning from yellow to amber. I squinted to see if I could spot the telltale swirl of dust, away down the road beyond the houses. In the distance I could see bats leaving the hills, flying silently, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, towards the city and the sea. Way off I heard the sound of an engine and I listened as it drew closer. I began to walk down the lane towards it. A car came round the corner. Not ours. I stepped back to the side of the road to let it pass. The car slowed and a woman leaned out of the open window. She looked as though she were about to ask me something and so I turned towards her. She drew back her head. I thought she had changed her mind. Her neck snapped forward and a great glob of spittle flew through the air and landed at my feet. The car swept on past me, following the track round to the right, towards Nancy Steele's house, while I stared down at her spit, writhing and shrivelling in the dust like a jellyfish on the beach, changing shape and drawing in at the edges almost as though it were alive.

  42

  I should have guessed, back then, how badly things were going when Mum turned to sara.

  Mum, Santigi, Morlai, Musu and Esther knelt in a semicircle around an Alpha. The Alpha sat with his eyes closed and his palms turned upwards. In the centre of the gathering stood a basket of eggs and a cockerel with its feet bound. The bird's eye, as bright and hard as a marble, darted this way and that. The Alpha's monotonous chants, like the humming of a trapped bee, rolled around the walls of the room, gathering momentum, dropping to a quiet murmur a moment later. I stood still, caught on my way from the yard to my room, not certain of whether to go forward or back. Only Morlai opened his eyes and glanced at me. The Alpha kept his eyes shut, his lips barely moving as he prayed. I dropped to my knees and crept forward. I knew instinctively this ceremony was being performed for my father.

  When the prayers were over the Alpha took the eggs and the cockerel and put t
hem into his bag. Then he took three scraps of paper, prayers written in Arabic script, and bound them in string and cloth. The first of the shebe he tied to the branches of the mango tree at the back of the house, the second he concealed beneath the foundations. The third he said should be buried outside Pademba Road. Morlai agreed to accompany the Alpha to the prison gates. He kept his distance, he told me, as the Alpha, dressed in his long blue gown, approached the tall metal gates. He watched while the man tried to kick a hole into the earth with his heel and drop the shebe into it. But he failed and attracted the attention of the guards. In an instant they seized him and set upon him, then and there, in the middle of the busy street. Morlai slipped away.

  A few days later I found another Alpha in the house. This one was sprinkling holy water in the corners of the sitting room.

  Now we were in a new millennium. Even in Freetown people had mobile phones and e-mail; an Internet café had opened in the centre of town. Yet Yabome had still not relinquished her respect for the traditional beliefs. Earlier in the afternoon I had returned to the house to find a sheep chewing the small patch of lawn at the front of the house. A white sheep with a single black ear. A ewe.