‘All the way from Wilberforce to Kissy?’ I glanced up in surprise.
‘From the magazine,’ he said. ‘The road to parliament.’
His story didn't add up. It had been claimed at the trial that there had been a second explosion at the army magazine at Tower Hill. There were no photographs. No evidence was produced. The defence had disputed the claim. In London I had interviewed the second-in-command of the army at that time; he had been adamant that no army installations were attacked that night. One stick of low-grade dynamite, of a type generally used by fishermen, had been thrown at Kamara Taylor's house. He had inspected the damage for himself.
All of this had taken more than forty minutes. The recorder clicked off. I turned the tape over. So far nothing Morlai Salieu had said differed dramatically from the testimony he had supplied to the court. Apart from his own role, that was. He kept distancing himself from the plot, then describing himself as part of it. He couldn't seem to make his mind up. I let him continue. I noticed his cup was empty – he picked it up and stared into it ostentatiously. Then he replaced it on the saucer.
Bassie Kargbo had given Morlai Salieu's name to the CID. He was handcuffed and suspended from the ceiling: ‘Oh, it was unbearable. They started to take cigarettes. They tortured me – most of the others – you heard shouting, crying, this, that. Blood all over the place. Up to now the mark of the handcuffs is there.’ He stretched forward and displayed his wrists, turning them over. I inspected them. There were no marks there. I frowned. I added the observation in the margin of my notes: ‘NB: I couldn't see anything.’ I wondered what this man's game was. Some details of the story were credible enough, other parts were not. He wavered whenever I asked a question, there were inconsistencies, leaps of logic and downright lies. Later, when I was going over our conversation, plucking out the names of people he had mentioned, I came to the realisation that the only names he had supplied were of people who were no longer around to verify his story. At the time, though, I let him go on.
Following his interrogation Newlove gave him a prepared statement to sign and he was taken to Pademba Road. Two days before the start of the trial two CID officers came with a list of names. The men were called and led up to reception. He said there were eight of them. I asked for their names. He listed five and no more. ‘Go on,’ I said. He changed his mind and told me there were only five men. The prison chief announced they had been selected to escape punishment, provided they were willing to cooperate.
Presently they were taken before Bambay Kamara in his office at the CID. Bambay pressed an intercom and suddenly the voice of the president filled the room. Siaka Stevens told the men they had been selected to help the prosecution in the case. If they did their job well and testified in court according to the statements they had already given, they would be well compensated.
‘How did you know it was the president?’ I asked. I wondered what technology had existed then. Was it speakerphone, a tape recording?
The man in front of me insisted it had not been a tape recording. ‘I know his voice very well. I've been with him so many years.’ And there it was again. The claim to be a key player, always at the centre of events, so close to the president he knew his voice. How many Sierra Leoneans could claim that twenty-five years ago? The broadcasting service was rudimentary and Stevens hadn't been much given to making speeches except occasionally at APC rallies. I noticed, too, that when Morlai Salieu referred to Stevens he spoke in the present tense.
The witnesses were coached by Newlove and Amadefu for seven days until, on the eighth day, Morlai Salieu was able to recite his own statement by heart. Soon after that he testified in court. When he talked about his day in court he spoke with pride. I asked him about one of the other witnesses, Saidu Brima, whose name he hadn't mentioned so far. He seemed never to have heard of him, dismissing my question with a wave of his hand. ‘It was only two of us, Bassie Kargbo and me. We were the two witnesses. I was the main one. Along with Kamara Taylor, we were the ones who gave evidence.’
I remember how I watched him, trying to summon up a suitable degree of loathing. Instead I felt nothing – a vague dislike, contempt. Every now and again I was jolted into an acute awareness of where I was and what I was doing. This is what I had been waiting for. But mostly I just felt tired – exhausted – and strangely emotionally detached, as though I were watching a show of this man and me.
After his release, Morlai Salieu and Bassie went to State House to try and see Stevens as well as to Bambay Kamara, asking for jobs, but they found themselves shunned. He denied visiting anybody else. They were all hypocrites, he went on, who had wanted his help, but then they turned their backs on him. Now he sold Lotto tickets for a living over at Wellington. He railed for a while against the way he had been treated, the hypocrisy – he tapped the table with a matchbox he held in his hand to emphasise the word – and against the one-party state. That's what had brought all the fighting, he sighed elaborately. He himself, for one, had always been pro-democracy. Always. He believed the multi-party system was the only way forward.
I ignored him. ‘So how much of your statement was true?’ I asked.
‘None of it.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘what you've told me is broadly the same as you told the court. So what was different?’
He looked confused. ‘Well, they said Mohamed Forna was the person responsible. He gave so much money. I can't remember it all now.’
‘But from your account you are saying he was involved.’
‘He wasn't involved.’
‘But you told me you saw him at Milton Street on the night of the attack. Did you see him there?’
‘I saw him. He came in with a soldier with his hand damaged. I don't know whether they met on the way . . . ’
‘Was the soldier's hand bandaged?’
‘Not bandaged! Very badly damaged. I saw the blood myself.’
‘And this was late in the night?’
‘Yes. Eleven o'clock. Just before the blast. I was on my way home when I heard it.’
I knew my father had not left the house that night. I also knew the soldier was brought to us in the early evening, no later than seven o'clock. My father had cleaned and dressed his hand; I sewed the bandages myself. I also knew the explosion at Kamara Taylor's house was around four o'clock in the morning. The magazine, if it was attacked at all, was certainly not dynamited before then. So it would have been impossible for him to still be on his way home from the house at Milton Street more than four hours later.
‘There's something you told me that I don't understand,’ I began carefully.
‘What is it?’ He sounded helpful.
‘You said you saw Dr Forna with the wounded soldier at Milton Street on the night of the blast?’
‘Yes,’ he said. I explained why I believed that to have been impossible. He listened, uttered a sound, somewhere between a laugh and a cough. ‘Well . . .’ He dragged the word out. ‘Well, I don't know how you get that.’
I repeated myself. Several people were in the house that night. I had interviewed them all. When he answered, Morlai Salieu began somewhere else, talking about the period two or three days before. He hadn't seen Dr Forna, he insisted. ‘I didn't even go to Milton Street with the purpose of making a coup.’ This time I didn't interrupt him. I noticed he was slowing down. ‘But I saw that man, perhaps if it wasn't the doctor it was Ibrahim Taqi, or somebody else . . . Three of them came in.’ Ibrahim Taqi had a cast-iron alibi for that night and that time. Several alibis, in fact. He had been in a bar called the Yellow Submarine. Morlai Salieu was beginning to ramble now, talking about Habib Lansana Kamara and the role he had played in the operation, blaming him for the fiasco; he, Morlai Salieu, had taken the decision to pull out.
After a long while I interrupted: ‘Are you saying you saw Dr Forna there or not?’
He stumbled: ‘Well . . . I . . . from my own memory . . . maybe it was a vision . . . ‘ He kneaded his forehead. His words came out in
staccato, partial sentences. ‘After this rebel intervention . . . my whole mind is gone. I was completely sick. I did not think I would survive. My statement . . . I memorised it. But everything that was in my brain. I don't know . . .’
And that was where we left it. We spoke for another five or ten minutes, but he had stopped making sense. The conversation went round in circles, with me asking what was true and what was false; he contradicting himself from one moment to the next, shaking his head, saying he couldn't remember. He blamed the war. His English began to falter. Before the second side of tape ran out I turned the tape recorder off and stood up. I thanked him formally. I even shook his hand. As he picked up his bag and prepared to go, he seemed to linger. I waited. He said something in a low voice and I bent forward to hear him. He was asking me for money.
I listened to the tape a few weeks later, and again many months afterwards. Only when enough time had passed, when I was in a completely different environment, away from Sierra Leone, did some clarity emerge. Up close I had found Morlai Salieu unfathomable; the interview baffled me. I was being lied to, but I could not understand why. Later, a new perspective emerged. I realised I had been so fixated on what I wanted out of the interview, what it meant to me, that I had overlooked Morlai Salieu's motivation in agreeing to talk. His sole purpose had been to exculpate himself. It became evident as I listened to the whole interview through from the start. He had devised a version of events that left him blameless. The only problem was he had miscalculated how much I already knew.
Morlai Salieu had been informing for S. I. Koroma. He admitted as much during the trial, under cross-examination. In the pages and pages of text I had somehow missed the reference the first time I read through the transcripts. When I met him a second time, by his booth in Wellington, where I had searched him out, I challenged him. I wanted to know what his role had been: had he actually operated as an agent provocateur, as some of the other defendants believed? He denied it absolutely, shaking his head vigorously. Though he admitted he had been to see the vice-president to ask for a job afterwards, in the same breath he declared he never worked for him. It occurred to me how the mention of S.I.’s name had this effect: people were wary, still, of talking about him. Throughout my search he alone remained a shadowy figure, the unseen puppet master, like a character in a second-rate thriller. I confronted Morlai Salieu again over the lie he had told me about the night of the 29th. He was angry and in turn he challenged me.
‘How do you know?’ he demanded. ‘How do you know? You were not there.’
‘Oh, but I was,’ I told him. ‘But I was.’
44
The sun rose ahead of us, up over a wandering horizon, to emerge through cloud-streaked skies as we drove due east out of Freetown. The procession of eight United Nations Land Cruisers and almost as many aid agency vehicles thundered through the narrow roads, leaving pedestrians consumed by the great cloud of dust kicked up from our tyres. Through Kissy we joined Bai Bureh Road, where we passed schoolchildren and villagers awaiting transport into the city centre. A dozen children in pristine green and white uniforms scrambled aboard a truck going in the opposite direction. For the first time since I had arrived in Freetown we passed through road blocks without so much as slowing. A poda poda pulled out of the kerb and then lurched to a stop to allow the convoy past.
Gradually the houses gave way to green. We crossed a bridge over a flat, wide ribbon of river. Below us a woman with a baby bound tightly to her back gathered crops from mounds of earth, wading ankle deep through the edge of the water. In the distance the mist rose in ethereal curls from the smoky mangrove swamps, leading down to the sea. Some minutes later we arrived at Hastings, the modest landing strip that served as the country's second airport, now a base for United Nations troops. Rows of military tents occupied the ground to one side of the road. On the tarmac stood a helicopter and in front of that a row of white tanks: strangely pristine, virginal beasts.
At a social gathering on Sunday a few days earlier I had struck lucky. I had been offered a place on a UN convoy heading north by a friendly logistics expert for the World Food Programme. The road to Magburaka was in rebel hands and littered with hazards, the journey would be dangerous and difficult, impossible even to contemplate in a private vehicle. Yabome herself had not dared to leave Freetown for seven years. Without a doubt the offer to travel under the auspices of the UN presented our best chance of reaching the town. I accepted without hesitation and Simon elected to accompany me. When the trip was confirmed on Monday we hastily assembled everything we had been told we would need: bedding, canned food, torches. I dithered over my tape recorder, then packed it in with my other belongings. Simon selected a couple of lenses for his camera. Early on Wednesday morning, thirty minutes before the allotted departure time, we gathered in the parking lot outside the large private house which the World Food Programme had converted into its headquarters in Freetown. It was still dark when the watchmen opened the gates and signalled the first of the vehicles out onto the road.
The dawn departure had been precipitated by the need to pass through the Occra Hills before the West Side Boys, or any of the other rogue contingents of rebels and sobeis who operated from bush hideouts in the forest, were awake and in a mood to waylay us. The hills were no man's land, disputed territory fought over by the rival guerrilla gangs. The area on the other side, stretching north to Makeni and Magburaka and beyond, was under the control of the RUF. At Hastings we checked in briefly with the regional commander. The air was tepid as we stood at the roadside, ate buttered rolls and drank a little of the coffee we had brought with us out of polystyrene cups. At the sound of a horn the assembled company of aid workers and UN staff climbed back into the vehicles and started the ascent into the Occra Hills.
The first town we passed through was Waterloo, much of which had been destroyed in the war. Clay bricks dried in the sun by the side of the road. People were occupied rebuilding their lives: binding poles, spreading wet earth across wooden frames to create walls, thatching roofs with palm fronds. They paused in their work, glanced up only briefly as we passed. Young men watched with unsmiling eyes. Children waved. There was a time in these parts, not so long ago, when the sight of several dozen westerners would have been regarded as extraordinary. Now the aid agencies were a new, though different, occupying force.
Outside Waterloo the road gently sloped into the first of the three hills. The vegetation along the roadside closed in, so that the view from either window was reduced to a dense wall of impenetrable green. Mostly the road was good, although in one or two places the tarmac had been dynamited and we were forced to slow down and ease our way into the hollow, climbing steeply up the other side, engines roaring, tyres gripping the crumbling earth. Shortly afterwards we drove over a short series of log bridges across deep gullies. These were the most dangerous moments, when it was possible we might be fired upon by snipers in the trees. As it was, we passed without incident. For a moment at the crest of the hill I had a rare and brief view of the vast acres of forest. They were lit by the morning sun: undulating, steaming, seductive. The only sign of life was the smoke drifting here and there across the tops of the trees. In that instant I saw this country of mine through the eyes of the stranger I had become, glimpsed the exotic Africa the first Portuguese and British traders must have seen. Ours was a country of immeasurable beauty, at once full of promise yet riven with unknowable perils.
We left the Occra Hills, crossed the dark and languorous waters of the Rokel, and at Massiaka we turned left and followed the road to Makeni. This was not the route I knew from old, when I used to drive to Magburaka with my family. In those days we took the low road, through Yonibana and Mile 91: a more direct route to Magburaka. The northerly road passed through Makeni and then curved south again to Magburaka. At Massiaka it became evident we were in rebel territory when we passed through the first checkpoint: a wooden pole, lowered and raised by means of a length of rope. To the side of the road stood the opera
tor: a boy of ten or eleven, bandy legged and barefoot, wearing a pair of ragged shorts and nothing else, save a large sub-machine-gun strapped to his back.
The roads were deserted. We had scarcely seen a soul. Once we passed a boy carrying a dozen great, green gourds, another time a single woman carrying water, and another with firewood: one long branch balanced carefully on her crown. The pedestrians disappeared down the bush paths at the side of the road, to villages hidden from view behind the screen of trees. The whole way, for four hours, we did not pass a single other vehicle although there were plenty of burned-out, rusting hulks at the roadside. My eye was caught by a kingfisher darting across the telephone wires in front of us; by the scarlet fruit and silver bark of a particular tree; a red-headed lizard disappearing into the undergrowth. Here and there I glimpsed sight of bound bundles of straw, placed high among the branches of some of the trees. I recognised the symbols of the Poro society. The trees marked the boundaries of the sacred Poro bush: to walk there or to eat the fruit of the tree was forbidden. Otherwise there was little to break the monotony of the road.
I stared silently at the speeding landscape, allowing myself to be mesmerised by the blur of green. I began to dwell on what I had achieved so far and what I hoped to gain by making this journey back to Magburaka.
In Freetown I had spent the last ten days searching for the former military orderly and trial witness Bassie Kargbo. The last anyone had heard of him he was living in Wellington. This information had been given to me by Unfa Mansaray. But since the January Sixth invasion no one had had any news of his whereabouts. Morlai volunteered to go to Wellington and ask around, accompanied by one of our cousins – a young man called Obai who worked in his father's rice store on nearby Bai Bureh Road. Obai thought he knew of a Kargbo family living in the locality, but since Kargbo was by no means an unusual name, I did not allow my hopes to rise. Sure enough, they turned out to be a different family. But they directed Morlai and Obai to another house, and then another. Slowly, painstakingly, they had returned over a period of several days, following every lead until, remarkably, they succeeded in locating Bassie Kargbo: a fifty-year-old man, living one hour's walk away off the main track, in a small house high on the hillside.
The Devil that Danced on the Water Page 40