The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  Sorie Dawo had a dream, you see. He had seen me dressed in white, at the top of a Christmas tree, he said, like a fairy. I was talking. There were hundreds of white people gathered around the base of the tree listening to what I had to say. Sorie Dawo went to his Alpha, who divined the dream. The woman at the top of the tree will one day be very successful, said the Alpha, and many people will listen to what she has to say. But in order to ensure my luck I had to make an offering: ‘A male sheep. White. Seven white cola nuts. One piece of white shirting,’ Sorie Dawo repeated.

  Mum had determined to perform my sara, even before Auntie Memuna, on a visit to the house, told us my father had received the same sara. He hadn't carried out the ceremony for good fortune by the time he was arrested. After that I found Sorie Dawo's warning hard to ignore. What harm could it do, I told myself, to go along with it all?

  Later, in the evening, we sat on the balcony, the sound of the crickets overtaken by the hum of the generator. On the days when there was mains electricity the evenings were noticeably more peaceful. The streets had begun to empty as the curfew approached; most people had already arrived back home.

  The sara sheep was gone. Yabome told me her sister had promised to go to the market on Saturday and look for a white ram. Presently she spoke: ‘You know what happened to them all, don't you?’

  ‘Who?’ I said, knowing full well.

  ‘These people. All of them. Every single one.’ I knew what was coming next. For a lot of people here it was enough, but not for me. Yet who could fail to be impressed by the dramatic irony in Bambay Kamara's final moments, summarily executed without trial by the NPRC in 1992, accused of plotting against the new military government – from his cell in Pademba Road Prison. The soldiers took them all down to the beach early one morning, tied them, blindfolded them and shot them. The charges were trumped up, of course. Even those who hated Bambay believed he was murdered. But, live by the sword . . .

  ‘S.I. paralysed.’

  ‘Paranoid, do you mean?’ I asked.

  She caught my drift. ‘Paralysed and paranoid, both. Away in his house, for a long time he was like that. He wouldn't let anybody see him.’ S. I. Koroma died convinced Siaka Stevens was trying to kill him. He had suffered a gruesome car accident in a Mercedes loaned to him by Stevens. The accident had happened at a village on the way to Magburaka, where S.I.’s convoy was headed during the violent election campaign of 1977. Makari was the seat of one of the men who had stood trial alongside my father, Chief Bai Makari N'Silk. Months later, following medical treatment in Germany which was only partially successful, he struggled back to work, desperate to hold on to his position. Stevens liked to make jokes at his vice-president's expense. All man de fom sick for no dae cam wok, S.I. dae fom well for cam wok. Most people pretend to be sick to get out of work; S.I. is the only person who pretends to be well so he can come to work. Stevens snubbed S.I.’s years of faithful devotion, electing the dull-witted Joseph Saidu Momoh as his successor instead. S.I. suffered a stroke and retreated behind the walls of his home. Mum had seen him just once, sitting in the back seat of his parked car outside Choithrams supermarket, drooling from the corner of his mouth while people gazed in at him through the window.

  And Christian Kamara Taylor? He died in the provinces after a long illness, a public death painfully lacking in dignity.

  ‘Can you imagine lying like that, in the back of a truck, without even enough money to get a car to take you to a hospital? People coming to stare at the corpse in the rain. Look at Kamara Taylor!’ Yabome snorted and sat back with a look of grim satisfaction.

  ‘I don't suppose he knew much about it,’ I commented. Although perhaps, I thought, if Sierra Leone had even the most basic medical care he might have made it. Those who could afford it flew out of the country to hospitals in Europe. Kamara Taylor was evidently down on his luck. He had gone to a traditional healer, too late. The truck hired to carry his body to Freetown had broken down.

  ‘People here believe nothing happens for nothing,’ concluded Yabome emphatically.

  It didn't end there. N. A. P. Buck, the government prosecutor, lost his mind a few years later and was seen wandering the streets. Marcus Cole's son died in a car accident. The judge himself was killed ten years on, when the car in which he was travelling collided with a stolen vehicle and overturned on the road from Gatwick Airport into central London. The whispers reached me then and had never stopped. You see, you see, the believers murmured quietly. Hakeh. Divine justice: it catches up with everyone in the end.

  I didn't argue with Yabome. The truth was I didn't care what happened to those people. It wasn't enough for me. It would never be enough for me. My preferred justice was of a different kind, a more worldly justice altogether. What about all those ordinary people in this country who lived and died in prosaic and yet unimaginable poverty? They had done nothing to deserve their fate except to be born in the wrong country in the wrong class.

  And what of Siaka Stevens, the master of it all, who died in his bed and whose obituaries, full of praise, were published in the British newspapers?

  43

  There are those times when people hide something, or put some precious object away for safe-keeping or perhaps for discretion's sake, and then forget where they have hidden it. Sometimes people forget about whatever it was entirely; then you hear how their children or grandchildren unearth the same item years on: a note folded into the pages of a book, a photograph tucked behind a mirror, a heart-shaped stone in a jar full of odds and ends. Memory, I discovered, works the same way. For years Yabome had hidden her thoughts from the world, at a time when talk was perilous. She had taught herself to forget. Now she was being forced, by me, to remember. I was her listener, hungry for every detail, but the hardest challenge for us both was to brush away the layers of secretiveness and unlock her memory.

  One morning Yabome came through and took a chair next to mine on the veranda. She offered me a cup of tea, pouring water into a china cup from the red flask the cook filled with hot water and put out in the mornings, alongside the Lipton teabags and the powdered milk. She sat down. After a few moments she began, as though apropos of nothing in particular: ‘There was this one time.’

  I put down the book I had been reading. This was how the memories came, one by one.

  More than a year after the trial ended Yabome had paid a visit to the offices of a family friend, a man by the name of Mohammed Swartaka Turay, recently appointed solicitor-general. He was someone who had stood by us, one of the few of her former acquaintances who didn't cross the road when he saw her coming. Yabome and he were talking, small talk, nothing more, when his secretary put her head around the door. ‘She said she had three boys outside, who were asking to see him. He asked who. She came back with the names, saying they were witnesses at the treason trial. Mr Turay made like this – ‘ Yabome put her hand down to her side and made a motion, as if to say ‘stay back’. ‘He told her she should let them enter.’

  If we talk fine, when de trial don, dem say dem go send we all overseas. This was what the boys had come to say. They did not recognise Yabome; she sat on the opposite side of the room and kept her eyes fixed on the view from the window. They had come to ask Mr Turay to prevail upon the authorities. No one else would see them, neither the attorney-general, nor Bambay Kamara, nor the vice-president. If we talk fine, when de trial don, dem say dem go send we all overseas. When the trial is over, if we performed well, they said they would send us all abroad.

  Morlai Salieu, the chief witness, had been among them, Yabome recalled. Some years on she was working in the personnel department of Sierra Fisheries. A new secretary arrived. One of her staff there whispered to Yabome that this woman was married to a man who had given evidence against her husband during the trial. Time had passed, and the girl was young. She would only have been a child at the time of the trial. Yabome left her alone. Just once the young woman, Isatu, had remarked cryptically, ‘My husband knows you,’ but then volunteered
nothing more. Morlai Salieu, though, never once showed his face at the office. Yabome thought she knew where Isatu was working now. If we could trace her, she might lead us to Morlai Salieu.

  A few afternoons later we met Isatu in the underground car park of an office block in Gloucester Street. Dura had been sent there with a letter and instructions to wait for a reply. Yabome's note had not indicated what it was we wanted, and the girl who faced us was clearly apprehensive. She was about the same age as me, neatly dressed in a fawn skirt and a blouse with a bow at the neck.

  While Yabome spoke, her voice soothing, quiet, I remained silent. I had made a decision to let my stepmother handle the conversation. I could hear a little of what she was saying: she was reassuring the young woman, telling her it was all history now, we were just family who wanted the facts, nothing more. By the time her lunch break ended Isatu had been persuaded to ask her husband to come to our house the following Saturday between nine and ten o'clock to meet me. That was all she could promise to do, but it was something.

  At seven thirty on Saturday morning I left my bed. It was just becoming light. The generator, and consequently the air-conditioning, had been turned off at midnight. And though the room usually stayed cool for a few more hours, gradually the temperature climbed. Fear of crime was now so acute in Freetown that every household slept with the windows locked. Nobody dared sleep, as we used to, with the windows flung wide open to the skies, nothing more than a mosquito net draped over the bed. As the sun rose, the room became unbearably hot. I gave up trying to sleep.

  At breakfast the cook laid an omelette in front of me, but I found I had little appetite. It was eight fifteen. Morlai Salieu might arrive within the hour. I had no idea whether he would show up, or what I was going to do if he didn't. He presented my most solid lead so far. He was the first witness the prosecution produced and he had provided the key testimony at the trial. Was he prepared to be honest with me? I had spent the evening before at home: I declined an invitation to go out. Instead I trawled again through the pages of my father's testimony, in which he disputed Morlai Salieu's claims. I returned to my room, showered and reviewed my notes for the third time.

  It was nine thirty. There was no sign of him still. I took a cup of coffee and stood on the balcony and looked out over the street. All was quiet. The houseboy in the house opposite was sweeping the step with an old-fashioned switch broom, flicking water from a bucket across the tiles to dampen the dust. The rhythmic whisper of the broom above the background of the low rumble of traffic on Wilkinson Road was the only sound to reach my ears.

  At nine forty I spotted a lone pedestrian walking up the empty street in the direction of the house. Was this him? Part of me prayed it was not – I dreaded meeting him. I had begun to tell myself he wasn't coming. This man was slim, grey-haired and in his fifties – about the age I reckoned Morlai Salieu to be – dressed in a short-sleeved grey suit and ankle boots and carrying a man's leather bag, the strap around his wrist. He stopped at the gate. The dog shoved its snout under the gate and barked. I called to the watchman to let the visitor in.

  Morlai Salieu showed no sign of nerves or reticence. Amie, the housekeeper, offered him tea or coffee. ‘I never drink tea,’ he replied shortly, ‘so bring me coffee.’ When she returned he took the cup from her without thanks and loaded it with sugar from the bowl. We had not shaken hands, but I had nodded to him, introduced myself and also Yabome, who by now had joined us on the veranda. Up close I observed how shabby his attire was: the bag was battered, the boots badly trodden down at the heel; the pinstripe print on his suit had begun to wear away in patches. I began to explain why I wanted to talk to him but he cut across my words:

  ‘None of it was true,’ he began. ‘Nothing in that statement was true.’ He had clearly arrived in confessional mode. Within moments he was talking of torture, how he was forced into his role, his unwillingness to become a witness. I hadn't meant us to start immediately, but I wasn't going to stop him. I rushed to fetch my tape recorder and notebook. I wanted this for posterity.

  When I returned he continued, but his tone had altered. His voice was strident, indignant. He complained that the politicians had reneged on the deal they had made with him. So much had been promised and he hadn't seen a cent of it. ‘Not one penny,’ he insisted. He slapped his hand flat down on the bench. They were rogues who had used him and his colleagues only to discard them later. I made no move to take my tape recorder from the case, I dared not interrupt. Morlai Salieu cast around, sipped noisily from his tea cup, holding the saucer up under his chin. He glanced from Yabome to me and back again, waiting for us to say something. He seemed genuinely to expect our sympathy.

  Morlai Salieu talked for an hour and a half. On the tape recording his voice is slow, pedantic, unusually deep, monotonous; it sounds almost as though the batteries are running low. He ignored my first question and started by giving me an account of his life instead. ‘My name is in the history of Sierra Leone,’ he declared, jabbing the desk with his finger. ‘I overthrew Juxon Smith on the seventeenth of April. I was the particular private.’ He was referring to the Privates’ Revolt of 1968. It was true he had been one of the rebellious juniors who locked up their officers in Daru demanding more money. I would later come across his photograph in one of the files I had copied from the US State Department, a young man with a hat pulled down over his eyes, holding a machine-gun across his chest in a pose of pure bravado – an unexpected forerunner of the current images printed in the foreign press of the young boys who fought on both sides of the war, posturing for the camera with their weapons. As he recounted events Morlai Salieu rewrote the history of the country with himself at the apex. He claimed to have gone to Guinea to meet the APC politicians in exile there, including Mohamed Forna and Ibrahim Taqi. Ibrahim Taqi, I knew, had never gone to Guinea. ‘Ibrahim Taqi? Are you sure?’ I checked.

  ‘All these politicians. These ones who were arrested for this coup later. Maybe not Ibrahim Taqi.’ He continued undeterred, speaking with assurance. From time to time he threw out dates. Quite a few were incorrect. It became evident he thought I knew nothing at all. I knew how he must see me: a young western woman busy noting down his words. I wondered if he had taken in exactly who I was.

  Once the APC were in power he was offered a diplomatic posting in Canada, but turned it down when Siaka Stevens made it clear he was needed in Freetown. Somehow, though, Morlai Salieu never succeeded in rising above the rank of private. Then, in 1971, he was accused of being part of a military plot, by rivals who wanted him out of the army.

  That was how he ended up in Pademba Road, occupying one of the cells in the block opposite the imprisoned leaders of the UDP, who had resigned because Siaka Stevens wanted a one-party state and for everyone to drive on the right-hand side of the road. I snorted at this, unthinkingly. He stared at me, then stretched his lips into a sort of grimace, as though he had taken a bite out of a dry lime. ‘After we were all released we started visiting ourselves. I was going to Dr Forna, Ibrahim Taqi –’

  ‘Where?’ I interrupted. So far I had mostly let him talk at his own pace.

  He hesitated: ‘Samuel's . . . Kissy.’ A pause. ‘His office at that time was down in . . . in Walpole Street. I used to visit him there. At one time when I went there he told me that they are planning to overthrow Stevens because all what he is doing is not in favour in the nation.’

  ‘Who? Who was planning to overthrow Stevens?’

  ‘Some of the soldiers and some of the politicians. I supported him, but I wanted to know how. How are we overthrowing, what weapons are available? I said I would find out.’

  ‘Was Dr Forna planning it, or had he heard a rumour?’

  ‘A rumour. A rumour.’

  So Morlai Salieu sought out his army contacts, naming two of the men who were later court-martialled. I noted down their names: Regimental Sergeant-Major Kalogoh and Sergeant Davies. They confirmed a coup was being planned. But Morlai Salieu wasn't satisfied that they had
sufficient by way of weapons, so he went back to Dr Forna, who assured him Abu Kanu had just purchased a quantity of dynamite. Morlai Salieu remained unconvinced and offered his counsel. ‘What I would advise you is to leave everything. Hands off! Stay away from that. Well, in my presence, he accepted.’ Morlai Salieu couldn't remember the date of this or any of the meetings. I pressed. He insisted he didn't know. ‘It was all around that time.’

  ‘What kind of weapons did you want, then?’ I asked.

  ‘This AK 47, GPNG, grenades, mortar bombs . . . ‘ Morlai Salieu told me how he had refused to be part of the plot. Later he found out the plan was going ahead: a band of street boys had been brought in to supplement the soldiers. He warned Dr Forna again that the whole thing was ill advised.

  I watched him as he spoke, fiddling with his fingernails, picking at the soft flesh under the rim, digging out particles of dirt. His nails were rather long.

  ‘Did you find it strange that men like Mohamed Forna and Ibrahim Taqi would organise a coup with some sticks of dynamite and untrained boys?’ Or take advice from someone like you, I thought. He didn't answer or even acknowledge my question. Now we were onto the night of the attack. A friend appeared at his house with the information that everything was on. They travelled to Dr Forna's house, our home, at Samuel's Lane. I would have been there at the time he described; so would my father.

  ‘Dr Forna was not there. We came to his office and he was not there.’ The two travelled to Milton Street. The only person there was Sergeant Davies. They waited two hours. At about eleven thirty Ibrahim Taqi and Mohamed Forna appeared with a third man, a soldier with a badly wounded hand. Morlai Salieu wanted to know what had happened. He was told a grenade had exploded in the man's hand. He gave his advice again: call the whole thing off, he had said. He took a decision to leave there and then. Passing through the East End on his way home he heard the dynamite explosion.