Frank Jalloh regarded her, neither agreeing nor demurring. He was silent, impassive. Whatever he was thinking, his face betrayed no sign of it. Presently he began to describe the evening my father was arrested and taken to the CID: ‘I found them there. Sitting in my office. Forna and Taqi. Sitting in my office. When I came in. They had been arrested.’
I wasn't sure if he wanted to begin straight away. I asked a question – what, exactly, I cannot now recall.
‘They were in my office. The two of them. I allowed them to wait there while this thing was going on.’ He didn't move on. Instead he repeated himself two or three times more.
Yabome was sitting on the edge of the sofa, waiting politely. After a few more minutes she eased herself slowly up: ‘Yes. Well, see what you can remember. It's a long time ago, but you can think about it in the meantime. She'll ask you what she wants to know. Let's say tomorrow? By ten o'clock?’ I scrabbled in my bag for my notebook, hastened to write down the appointment.
‘They were sitting in my office when this thing started. I found them there. The two of them. Forna and Taqi.’ He was still using exactly the same phrases. We shook hands and left.
The next morning I faced Frank Jalloh. This time we were sitting outside on the porch. He was dressed in a long, pale-blue gown, embroidered at the neck. He was fiddling with a short-wave radio. He didn't offer me anything to drink. I sat down and took out my notebook. I had not brought my tape recorder this time, feeling instinctively it would be an error. I didn't want to do anything that might put him off.
‘So what do you want to know?’ He placed the radio on the battered metal table at his side.
‘I need to know about the events of the twenty-ninth of July. The night of the dynamite attack on Kamara Taylor's house.’ It had come down to this. I knew what had not happened on that night. I did not know what, if anything, had really taken place.
A silence followed. Frank Jalloh picked up the radio, adjusted the tuning knob, set it down again without turning it on. ‘I found them already there when I got to the CID. Taqi and Forna. I knew them. I asked them, “What are you doing here?” They said, “They have brought us here.” They had been arrested.’ As he spoke I wrote down his words. ‘I went to my office and sent for them. They said, “We don't know what we are doing here.”’
Frank Jalloh's feet, crossed at the ankle, barely reached the floor. He was sitting in front of a grubby, cream-painted wall. Behind him was a window to the room where we had met the day before. I sat with my back to the compound. There was nothing on the veranda save our two chairs and the metal table with the radio on it. When I arrived a boy had been sweeping the beaten earth of the yard and I could hear the incessant sound of the broom, to and fro, to and fro. Sweeping the same place he would sweep again tomorrow. I waited for Frank Jalloh to continue.
‘I found them already there, in the CID.’ He was repeating what he had told me yesterday. I assumed he would continue the story and I listened in silence, letting him take it at his own pace, not wishing to rush him. But after twenty minutes I found I had scarcely added another word to my notes. He had checked the station diary, he told me, but there was no mention of the arrests there. He had called the commissioner of police, a man called Kaetu Smith, who would not tell him anything. I jotted that down, beginning to feel my patience ebb away with the minutes. Beyond that sliver of detail we had not progressed. He continued to cover the same ground while I tried to hold on to my residual calm. He picked up the radio again. I allowed the silence to lengthen.
‘What happened next?’ I asked eventually.
‘I don't know. I found them there already. After that I was removed and posted to Kono.’ I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. Was that it? Was that what I had come here for?
‘But you must know something – about the facts of the case.’
‘Why would I know?’ He was being deliberately obtuse. He held the radio in his hands; his fingers were short and thick, the palms and the backs of his hands smooth and plump.
‘You were the head of the CID. You must have discovered something before you went to Kono. Tell me whatever you do know.’
‘Why are you asking me?’
I frowned. I was temporarily silenced. What on earth was he talking about? Was this some sort of joke?
A young woman had appeared at the doorway behind him. She adjusted her lappa, folded her arms across her chest, and was listening as we parried. I pressed on. He blocked me. I noticed the glimmer of a smile on her face. A few minutes later, when I glanced at her again, she was smirking openly. I was completely baffled. I had no understanding at all of why I was being treated in this way. Already it had taken a full forty minutes to get to this point.
‘Why did you tell me to come here, then? Why did you agree to see me?’ I demanded. Anger coloured my voice and there was nothing, but nothing I could do to disguise it. I knew I was breaking with every convention, challenging an older man who was my social senior in this society. I was risking everything but I was unable to contain myself. In that instant came the release, like falling, I felt the last vestiges of my self-control slipping away.
‘It was you who wanted to come here,’ he replied, unruffled. The woman sniggered audibly.
With that sound I jumped to my feet. ‘Is it funny? Is this so funny?’ I demanded of her. She didn't reply. ‘Maybe you find it amusing but I do not. Not at all. This is my father, my family we are talking about. And you think it's funny to see me sitting here wasting my time.’ I directed all my rage at her until, with satisfaction, I saw the smile slide from her face. She stared at me, shock mingled with uncertainty across her features. Frank Jalloh sat silent and unmoving. I groped behind me for my chair and sat back down. The woman disappeared into the house. That's it, I thought, certain he would ask me to leave. I gave it one last shot. I decided to reveal my only card: ‘Did you know that Kendekah Sesay was brought to our house that night?’
Frank Jalloh looked up, his eyes, small and dark, curtained by folds of flesh, were directed at me. I had him. I had his attention. Silence while he regarded me, properly and for the first time. He nodded, slowly, still watching me. The game was over. Yes. Yes the CID had known. ‘Yes,’ he said.
I drew a dividing line in my notebook, across the page at the point where the interview changed course.
On the night of 29 July or, to be precise, the early hours of the morning of the 30th, Frank Jalloh was woken at home by the commissioner of police, who informed him there had been an attempted coup, and that the matter was already being investigated by Jalloh's deputy Bambay Kamara. In turn Frank Jalloh telephoned Bambay Kamara at his home, asking why he had not been informed of the matter straight away. He was, after all, the CID boss. Bambay merely apologised for the omission. On his way into the offices the next morning Frank Jalloh encountered his deputy again. This time he learned that Bambay had already visited the crime scene and collected the evidence.
‘Kamara Taylor had called him first. Instead of me, he called my deputy. Bambay was hand in glove with the politicians. It was even Bambay who gave instructions to the chief of police. Without consulting me!’ On the last three words of the sentence Frank Jalloh's voice, which had barely broken above a sort of thrumming monotone, soared momentarily with indignation. He went on to describe his relationship with his second-in-command. Bambay visited State House regularly; he was known to be a favourite of Stevens and S.I., he said. Often the president or the vice-president would call the CID on some matter, talk to Bambay first, and only then ask to be put through to Frank Jalloh. It had got to the point where orders were being issued over Frank Jalloh's head straight to Bambay. By 1974 the whole situation was beginning to vex Frank Jalloh considerably.
In the afternoon of the same day, the 30th, Frank Jalloh decided to visit Kamara Taylor's house himself anyway. He collected a sample of the dynamite, observing, he told me, that the explosion was so near the master bedroom it would have been impossible for anyone sleeping t
here to have escaped unhurt. Later, much later, when he heard Kamara Taylor insist he had been at home, he came to his own conclusion. Kamara Taylor and the family must have been appraised of the attack before it happened.
The sample of dynamite he collected that day matched a type sold exclusively by one manufacturer: Delco, who were based in Lunsar. Frank Jalloh visited their factory himself and spoke to the manager. He learned the dynamite had been sold to several soldiers. The manager identified Kendekah Sesay, who by now had been reported absent without leave, as being among them. Frank Jalloh interviewed some of the soldiers who had been in the Murraytown barracks on the night of the 29th. He learned that Kendekah Sesay had been injured early in the evening when a stick of dynamite detonated in his hand during a clandestine demonstration. Kendekah was hidden somewhere in Freetown before being sent to Magburaka Hospital in a taxi. The driver of the taxi was a man by the name of Yamba Kamara. The vehicle had been chartered by an unconfirmed person. At Magburaka the trail went cold. Frank Jalloh discovered Kendekah had mysteriously disappeared from his bed on the ward one night a few days after he arrived.
A trawl of the army followed. There were numerous arrests and interrogations. Frank Jalloh had conducted most of these himself with the permission of the commander-in-chief. Some of the meetings the soldiers confessed to had indeed taken place at Habib Lansana Kamara's house, close to the barracks in Murraytown. But not one of the soldiers named Mohamed Forna in connection with a conspiracy or placed him at any of the meetings, nor did they name Ibrahim Taqi. Habib Lansana Kamara, in Frank Jalloh's opinion, would have been happy to see the army mutiny. He hated the army authorities for the way he had been treated. If there was talk of a rebellion he would have been only too pleased to support it. But Frank Jalloh believed Habib Lansana Kamara was probably only remotely connected with whatever occurred that night. It was Habib's link to Mohamed Forna that drew the interest of the authorities.
S. I. Koroma himself telephoned Frank Jalloh and told him where to find Kendekah Sesay's body. The first time he called and instructed him to send his men to arrest Momodu Forna. In a second telephone call he told him to prepare a team of divers. I asked Jalloh about the man, Ibrahim Ortole, in whom Momodu had confided about Kendekah Sesay.
‘Ortole was an informant. I saw him with Stevens, sitting in Stevens's office. Stevens trusted him. He had been informing ever since the days of the UDP. He would tell them where the party was holding meetings. They would go and send in their boys.’ Although Frank Jalloh claimed he had known and respected my father – ‘a great friend’, no less – he had never passed on the information that Ibrahim Ortole was operating as an informant.
As the investigation progressed Frank Jalloh was summoned to State House to see the president. He used the opportunity to complain that Bambay Kamara was undermining his authority. ‘We have respected you all along,’ Stevens had told him, ‘but if you don't want to do your job, then perhaps you should leave.’ He recognised he was being given an ultimatum: cooperate or go. As it was, they took the decision for him. He was sent on assignment and then transferred to the far north-east of the country well before the trial opened. His job as head of the CID was handed to his rival Bambay Kamara.
Frank Jalloh spoke for a while longer about Siaka Stevens: his fear of Mohamed Forna and his hatred of Ibrahim Taqi. ‘Stevens knew Forna had been a competent minister. But by that time they were persecuting everyone from the north. He hated Taqi. Stevens thought he could fool everyone about the money he was taking, but he knew Taqi was out to get him. Forna and Taqi were together so much of the time.’ There he stopped talking.
We sat in silence. It was half past twelve. We had spoken for two and a half hours. I had covered thirteen pages of my notebook with writing. My fingers were stiff and my wrist ached, but I made no move to go. Dura had already arrived to collect me and I had waved him away. I would have to walk home now. Frank Jalloh sighed heavily. He looked away, reached for the radio and turned it on. His attention was no longer with me. He fiddled with the tuning dial and held it up to his ear. The hiss and high-pitched whine from the instrument filled the air. It was as though I was no longer there. The interview was at an end.
48
I had spent twenty-five years in ignorance and one year gradually uncovering some of the truth, and yet now I could barely recall what it felt like not to know. It was as though this terrible knowledge: of the lies and the manipulation, the greed and the corruption, the fear and violence had been with me for ever. So this is innocence lost, what it feels like. The country had changed, I had changed. Lumley Beach, where I sat with Simon watching a sulphurous sun disappear behind the bank of clouds stretched across the horizon, was no longer the same. As for the past, it was irrevocably altered.
On this beach I had learned to swim, during long, hazy afternoons, where my greatest regret was that the sunflower on my red-and-blue swimsuit was not in the same place Busy Lizzie had hers. Now, at regular intervals the attack helicopter from the air base behind us took off and landed, skimming the water as it descended, causing us to break and stare up at the sky, partly because the noise drowned out everything else, but also because of the sheer awe the sight inspired. At every table around us UN soldiers sat and drank beer. A raucous game of beach volleyball was still in play behind us. On the road soldiers manning the road block sat behind razor wire and a sandbank. Children hawked groundnuts to the soldiers, tradesmen brought garish sarongs to display before our table. A seller placed Nomoli figures on the sand in front of me – miniature soapstone icons to the god of fertility buried by the farmers in the fields before the harvest. I spoke to him in Creole: gradually I had recaptured a little of the lost language of my childhood. Other vendors thronged around us, attracted by the possibility of a sale, but then stayed on, preferring conversation to the rigours of the hustle, enjoying the novelty of listening to me speak. ‘You are a daughter of Sierra Leone,’ smiled the man with the Nomoli, whose face was as deep and broad as one of his own carvings.
Some questions remained to be answered and probably never would be. The identity of the person who had thrown the dynamite at Kamara Taylor's house remained a mystery as did the identity of whoever brought Kendekah Sesay to our home in Kissy that night. No one in the house at that time was certain. It seemed likely he was brought by his fellow soldiers from the barracks, possibly Habib Lansana Kamara, their ex-colleague who lived close to Murraytown barracks. Where else would Habib have taken him but to our father: a dissident and a doctor? That there were rumblings of discontent and open talk of a rebellion in the army seemed certain. I also believed that Morlai Salieu and Bassie Kargbo had infiltrated the ringleaders and been sent to my father and Ibrahim Taqi's office to try to draw them into a conspiracy, real or illusory.
There was one more conversation still to be had. Saidu Brima, the steward at the PZ compound and the last of the main witnesses, was brought to me, unexpectedly, by Unfa Mansaray. Yabome had pulled off this particular coup, and she delivered the news with a small smile of triumph. I was astonished to discover the two men were still in touch. It had never even occurred to me to ask Unfa Mansaray about Saidu Brima's whereabouts.
‘Ah, but I have forgiven him,’ Unfa told me when I expressed my surprise. ‘I saw how they were beating him that time in CID.’ The reconciliation had taken place soon after Unfa's release from prison. To this day they lived close to each other up at Wilberforce.
Saidu Brima was a tiny man whose movements were stiff and uncertain with arthritis. He had worked for a long time as a steward in the houses up at Wilberforce, and still lived there in his own little hut. He sat opposite me across the dining table at Yabome's house, scarcely able to look up, speaking in an almost inaudible whisper, hands clasped on the table in front of him. Yabome sat next to him, encouraging him to talk. He was not one of the men who had visited the solicitor-general's office asking for money and favours the day she had been there. That was Morlai Salieu and Bassie Kargbo. The third man, Kem
oko Suma, I had tried to locate. He was last heard to be somewhere in Guinea.
Back in 1974, Saidu Brima confirmed, there had been talk all over the barracks of an uprising. The soldiers were in and out of the PZ compound all the time, and this was how he got to hear about things. They were not discreet. One of the Mende soldiers, Regimental Sergeant-Major Kalogoh, who was among those later arrested and charged with masterminding the plot within the army, was the most vociferous and would boast openly about ejecting the present commander-in-chief in favour of their former boss, David Lansana. Bassie Kargbo worked at the time as Kalogoh's orderly. But Saidu Brima did not take Kalogoh's bravado seriously; he thought few people did. None of the soldiers had any weapons. Stevens didn't trust the army, and only the Internal Security Units were properly equipped. Someone talked about going to Lunsar to buy some dynamite and, just once, Saidu Brima was given a tiny box of ammunition to hide under his bed. As the night of 29 July approached the rumours were thick that a military rebellion was about to take place. When he heard the explosion Saidu Brima was in his own quarters, only half a mile away from the minister of finance's house.
Saidu Brima did not recognise Mohamed Forna or Ibrahim Taqi. A CID officer pointed both men out to him during one of the site visits from Pademba Road, telling him to remember just what they looked like. By that time Saidu Brima had already been burned with lighted cigarettes and whipped with a belt. He did not elaborate on the torture; I saw how his hands plucked at the crocheted tablecloth as he spoke. The knuckles were swollen. His fingernails were ridged: the sign of some deficiency or another, or was it a heart condition, blood pressure? I couldn't remember exactly. He had agreed to tell Newlove, his interrogator, what he knew – the rumours that had been circulating around the barracks. He mentioned a meeting at Milton Street. The beating and interrogation went on for the whole morning. Newlove asked him about Mohamed Forna and Ibrahim Taqi. Saidu Brima replied he did not know them; at least, if he did it was only by reputation because they had once been well-known politicians. They had never been mentioned by any of the soldiers. In the afternoon Newlove read his statement back to him. Then Saidu Brima was taken to the cells.
The Devil that Danced on the Water Page 44