The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir

After dark on most nights just outside Koidu hordes of young men and some women scaled the fences, easily avoiding the single SLST helicopter that patrolled the area with search lights. In the early morning they wriggled back under the wire, gritty brown diamonds wrapped in small pieces of cloth tied round their necks. The dealers paid their illegal diggers a retainer to bring the gems, which they then sold on through the official government offices or shifted illegally on the black market. The world of the dealers was a closed one, a tightly run business controlled by a few men who maintained a private code of honour designed to hold on to their monopoly and increase the sum of their wealth.

The men who risked their health and liberty to dive hundreds of times to the bottom of the river bed and bring up pans of silt had no option but to sell the gems they found to their patron at the price he chose to give them. There were frequent accidents: several times we were all roused in the middle of the night or early morning because there had been a drowning. Sometimes the illegal diggers were caught and prosecuted – they were the only people who ever were. If their patrons couldn’t bribe the judge to let their man off, well, he’d be well compensated for doing time on behalf of the boss. In Koidu everyone knew their place.

Regularly men would arrive at the clinic bearing notes which simply stated to whom the final bill should be sent – inevitably one of several Lebanese dealers: After my father had treated their ailments and given them drugs, he sent the bill through to my mother to prepare and he instructed her to charge the dealers at the highest rate. At least eight out of every ten people who passed through our clinic paid nothing, even for their medicines, which my father fetched from the dispensary in the house and handed to them; people who could afford it were charged at the regular rate; and between them the diamond dealers paid for the healthcare of the rest of Koidu and the surrounding villages.

Almost always people who had not been charged came back on another day with something in return: a pair of live chickens, a sack of oranges or a basket of yams.

Late one night we were all woken up by a frenzied rapping on the door of the house, so loud it sounded as though they were trying to hammer their way in. When our father undid the bolts, there on the step was a young man, sweating and teetering on the edge of hysteria: ‘Oh, Doctor, I say do ya help me. I get syphilis.’ He babbled in Creole, fidgeting and jumping, utterly unable to contain himself. ‘I able feel am crawling pan me skin.’ He shuddered at that. We all did. ‘I need tchuk.’ He made the motion of giving himself an imaginary injection in the left arm. Our father, still half asleep, led him through to his surgery and treated him then and there. When the young man confessed he had no way of paying, our father waved him away.

A few weeks later my mother was out at night She had been to a dance at the Diamond Corporation, alone because my father was working. On the way home she drove over a pothole and burst a tyre. The road was dark and empty as the DiaCorp compound was some way out of town; dense elephant grass grew up on either side to well over seven foot. She couldn’t see a single light and within a few moments she began to consider her predicament: a woman, in an evening gown and high heels, without a torch on an empty road in the African bush. She had been there some time when she saw a car’s headlights in the distance. Conflicting thoughts occupied her mind and she prayed that this was someone who would help her, perhaps someone else on their way back from the party.

As the car came closer she saw that it was dented and old, obviously belonging to a local because no European would drive a car in such a state. It drew alongside, slowed and stopped next to her. My mother could see that there were several young men inside.

‘Na de doctor een wife,’ someone announced. It was ‘Tchuk’. He jumped out grinning and proud, evidently in the best of health. Within a few moments Tchuk and his companions changed the punctured tyre and saw her away.

By the time we had been in Koidu a year our father’s name and reputation had spread for miles. As with my mother, everywhere he went people greeted us, yelled and waved at the passing car. Yet to me at that time he was a distant figure.

My days were spent in the house, playing with our dogs Jack and Jim, and being guarded by Big Aminatta. I say ‘guarded’ because that is just about what she did: she pursued her many chores around the house, of which I was just one. Her task was to make sure I didn’t escape or run into trouble. She kept me within the confines of the compound by telling me of the devils lurking in the elephant grass beyond the screen of trees that marked the compound boundary. Devils with faces like gargoyles just waiting for the opportunity to feed on a child like me. At night she got me to clean my teeth with stories of cockroaches that crawled onto pillows and feasted on the crumbs left at the side of a sleeper’s mouth.

At that time we had two Old English sheepdogs. With their heavy coats they were hopelessly unsuited to both the humidity and the ticks that burrowed into their flesh, but they seemed to manage all the same. Given to us as puppies in Freetown, they were at first presumed to be mongrels until they grew into apparently full-blooded Old English sheepdogs. My mother called them Jack and Jim and they were the only pedigree dogs I ever saw or have ever seen since in Sierra Leone. I spent my days tumbling with Jack and Jim in the yard and kissing them on the nose, playing in the dirt until I contracted enormous tropical boils, which my father lanced for me from time to time, and generally ingesting enough germs to give me a lifelong immunity to hepatitis. In the evening our father came back long after we were all in bed. He literally worked every hour of the day.

Mornings, when our father went to the bathroom for his early constitutional, was our quality time together. The three of us followed him to the bathroom, carrying our colouring books, toys and stories. We sat on the floor around him, chatted, finished our drawings, showed him the work we had done the day before or persuaded him to read aloud to us. At some point I suppose he sent us on our way. I don’t remember that, only lying on the lino colouring a picture of a princess for him.

From my three-foot-high perspective, my strongest memory of my father is from the waist down: mid-grey slacks, open sandals. I remember the exact shape and hue of his toenails, his strong, muscular thighs and rounded bottom, but the face on the top remains a blur on top of a vaguely light-coloured, short-sleeved shirt and stethoscope. He had a beard at that time, but my memory of him only truly begins when he shaved it off a few months before we left Koidu for good. Most of the time our worlds barely collided, and those moments when they did were the most memorable.

A deranged woman was brought to the clinic. I guess she must have been in her forties, although she looked much older. She snatched at the lappa she was wearing and at her blouse, screamed and started like a mare, and behaved as though unseen hands were pinching her or, I thought, tickling her armpits and squeezing her sides like my uncles did to me in a way that both hurt and made me howl at the same time. The more I shrieked the more they thought I was enjoying it and continued. The family said she was bewitched and they couldn’t look after her any more, so our father put her in one of the rooms in our house, I think with the intention of sending her or driving her himself down to a mental hospital in Freetown. Later the same day I wandered past the window of the room where she was being held and saw her face staring at me behind the mesh of the fly screen. She shouted and her eyeballs reeled. I fled back to Big Aminatta.

Some time later in the afternoon she escaped. Nobody in the house knew how or when, but she couldn’t have been gone long. My father raced to the car and the three of us leapt in behind him, standing on the plastic seats and blaring at the top of our voices that we were off to look for the madwoman. My father drove at speed telling us to keep a look out; he seemed to be enjoying the adventure as much as we were. Everyone was making a riotous amount of noise and we felt no fear.

We hadn’t been gone long when we saw her. She was standing at the side of the road, on the balls of her feet with her back pushed hard against a tree. Her shoulders were drawn up high and she was shrieking. Above her the tree was in flower, decorated with splendid fleshy, coral heads framed by thick petals that grew upright, like hands reaching to the sky. The orange and pink colours made the flamboyant tree look as if it were alight with burning candles. From a distance I could see the woman was staring at a branch from the tree that was lying in the middle of the road. She seemed to be fixated on it, as though it were alive. When we drew nearer I saw the branch wasn’t what I thought at all, but a snake.

The car went straight over it, I felt the bump under my bottom and thighs. A moment later we were in reverse. My father kept going, changing gears backwards and forwards, until after a while I couldn’t feel the point where the snake’s corpse lay on the road any longer. When we were certain it was dead we felt like heroes who had vanquished a dragon.

In my mind’s eye the snake had been enormous, stretching the entire width of the road. As I grew older I thought perhaps I imagined it: no ordinary snake could really be that long. Now, I realise it was almost certainly a twig snake – six foot long, yes, but absolutely harmless. It wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with the madwoman except perhaps to get past her up the tree to lie in peace on its favourite branch.

We drove home with the mad lady now sitting quite calmly between us in the back. The next day she went off to Freetown. I wasn’t there when she was taken away, and when I discovered she was gone, I missed her.

7

My mud pies were too dry and the sides were crumbling. I’d sloshed water into the mess and begun to swill it all with a stick when Pa Roke showed up. He was my grandfather. Everything about him – the way he dressed in long embroidered gowns with a matching fez, or skull cap, his solemn bearing and formal manners – came from a different age of Africa, one that still existed among the rural people for whom life hadn’t changed in centuries, but was disappearing everywhere else.

Whenever my grandfather arrived he seemed to materialise out of nowhere. Although I’m sure he must have carried his clothes in a bundle, he never appeared to have anything resembling luggage. And when he walked into the compound there was no evidence of the means of transportation he had taken, no bush taxi disappearing in a whirl of dust, no car or bus. Not even a bicycle. He looked as though he had just come from the end of the road instead of Magburaka, where he lived, a whole day’s travel away. By necessity, since there were no telephones and no mail service to speak of, he arrived unannounced and would stay for a few days or sometimes a few weeks.

Because I was the only one at home and he seemed to have little to do during those visits except wait for my father, Pa Roke and I spent our days in each other’s company – although it’s true to say that there was very little contact between the two of us. Pa Roke sat around the house, calling occasionally to Big Aminatta to fetch and carry for him and for the most part ignored me, though it gave me some small pleasure to see Big Aminatta, my own constant nemesis, being ordered around.

Big Aminatta was in awe of Pa Roke, an awe which struck so deep into her core it even altered the way she walked. Usually she swayed her bottom and slid her flip-flopped feet across the floor so that they made an insolent sort of sound, like a market woman hissing through her teeth. In front of our grandfather she took short, fast steps and moved around at quite a clip. She was permanently bent at the waist, as though stuck in a half-curtsy and she never spoke to him, except to say, ‘Yes, Pa,’ keeping her eyes lowered all the while.

I suspect Pa Roke had little time for me. By my age most children were beginning to learn how to be useful. They were started on the smallest of errands, fetching and carrying glasses of water and passing items to their mother. European child that I was, at least in part, I did nothing all day except make mud pies and attempt to divert adult attention. Every now and again I felt Pa Roke watching me, but when I looked at him appealingly I never elicited much by way of response.

In the afternoon Pa Roke accompanied my mother and me on our rounds, taking my place in the front of the car while I was relegated to the back seat. My mother communicated to him using improvised sign language and practising the Temne she had picked up. Her Creole by that time was quite good too, and Pa Roke understood her a little. When all else failed she spoke loudly in English, affecting an African accent, smiling brilliantly. Pa Roke said little but nodded agreeably and smiled back at her, showing the gaps in his teeth, or rather, since he had so few, it would be more accurate to say he displayed the teeth in the gap of his mouth.

He and my mother rubbed along, watching each other through the veils of age, race, gender, language and culture. They seemed fond of each other in the way visitors like the locals in a new place, where everyone welcomes them and people are reduced to cartoons of themselves without nuance, detail or subtlety: a superficial world where everyone laughs and exchanges are full of feigned bonhomie.

When my father arrived home later in the day a transformation came over Pa Roke. He filled out into a real person, talking and laughing, suffering the occasional coughing fit. He even seemed to notice I was in the room and he asked my father about us, pointing in our direction every now and again.

Pa Roke wore mukay, pointed leather shoes, that men used as slippers with the back trodden down. He would slip them off and cross his bare feet at the ankle. Likewise my father took off his sandals. This signalled the beginning of their sessions. They talked for hours together in Temne, who knows what about, since I couldn’t understand a word they said. Perhaps they discussed the cases Pa Roke judged in the villages. My father once took my mother to Magburaka to watch Pa Roke sitting in the barrie and listening to the people’s grievances. One particular case involved a woman and three men. My father explained to my mother that they were watching a paternity suit. My mother tried to follow the proceedings for a while. Then she nudged my father and asked him whether the woman had been asked to name one of these men as the father. My father shook his head. No, he had explained, each of these men wishes to claim the child as his own. No man would ever give up a child that might be his.

A few days into his visit Pa Roke and I had lunch alone together. Everyone else was out: Sheka and Memuna at school; my father had a meal sent to him at the downtown surgery and my mother had plenty of other things to do. Before the meal my grandfather pulled out a small straw prayer mat with a picture of a mosque on it in black and red and laid it down on the ground. His mukay were left discarded on the tiled floor as he stepped onto the mat. He stood still with his hands at his side, his head bent, then he knelt, hands resting on his thighs, palms to the heavens in a gesture of supplication. It was beautiful to watch him kneeling and stretching his body out to touch the floor with his forehead with the grace of a water bird stretching its neck out across the surface of a lake.

A time would come when I would be made uncomfortable if I was caught in a room with someone who was praying, never knowing whether to go about my business and pretend I hadn’t noticed them or keep still out of reverence. My father was a Muslim, yet we had not been brought up in any particular faith. I had a Muslim name and all my relatives regarded me as a Muslim, but I had never been into a mosque or held a Koran.

It happened once that I came across Pa Roke at his midday prayers and the idea lodged in my head that I should be praying, too. So I knelt behind him, copying all his movements with no earthly idea what it all meant. Halfway through I began to feel foolish and decided to extricate myself, but that posed a new difficulty: to sidle away midway through prayers seemed sinful; at the same time I worried my grandfather might think I was making fun of him. I couldn’t make the decision, so I went on, standing, kneeling and bowing for what seemed like eternity. When he finished, he stood up, rolled his mat and walked away without looking back or acknowledging that I was there. I didn’t get the impression he was angry. Rather that he understood, better than I, the struggle that had played out in my young mind.

Pa Roke was used to eating with his hands, although sometimes he used just a spoon. Before his prayers and again afterwards he called for Big Aminatta to bring a basin of water and she held it, bracing under the weight, while he washed his hands elaborately and shook the water from his long fingers. We had a bathroom with running water, but it didn’t seem to occur to him to get up and go and use it He was just used to a different life, one in which one of the young girls in the family fetched him water from the stream every morning.

Lunch that day was groundnut stew and rice, made with plenty of hot cayenne pepper, chicken and beef stewed for hours in a stock thickened with finely ground peanuts, which Big Aminatta roasted and crushed using an empty bottle as a rolling pin. The local chickens were so tough she had to boil them up for ages with onions and tomatoes. But once cooked they were tender and full of flavour. She added small pieces of hairy, cured fish which gave off a strong, smoky taste. Groundnut stew was one of my favourite dishes.

Pa Roke worked his way through the food on his plate until there was nothing left but a small pile of chicken bones. These he picked up one by one, and devoured them methodically. First he bit off the soft tissue and cartilage. Then he slowly chewed the knuckles at either end. Finally, he cracked the fragile, splintering bone with his back teeth and licked out the dark marrow. When he had finished there was nothing, but nothing, left of the fowl to speak of. I had never seen anything like it

I was brought up to chew my bones; they were good for my teeth and the marrow full of vitamins. But I was sickened by the rubbery, slippery texture of the cartilage in my mouth and I left those pieces discarded on my plate. The grainy, soft ends of the bones I liked, but though I usually chewed them I stopped short of attacking the shaft of the bone with its sharp, jagged slivers.

I always called my grandfather Pa Roke. All my uncles, aunts and cousins did the same and even those people who were not related to us. It never occurred to me that this was not his name and I was well into adulthood when I made the discovery that Pa Roke wasn’t a name, it was a title: Pa Roke, Regent Chief of Kholifa Mamunta.

In the 1880s the chiefs of Temneland double-crossed a fearless young warrior by the name of Gbanka, whom they had hired to fight the Mende people and force open the trade routes to the Bumpe and Ribi rivers. Gbanka was born of a Mende mother and a Temne father. When he realised he had been cheated he went to his mother’s people, whom he had just defeated, and allied himself to them. There he swore a bloody revenge upon the Temne people and over the coming years he captured town after town in Temneland.

My great-grandfather Pa Morlai was a Loko and a warrior from Bombali. At the time Loko fighters were amongst the most skilled in the land. They had long-standing connections to the Mende people and an interest in the lucrative trade with the Europeans who sailed their ships far up the rivers into the interior looking for gold and ivory. When the Temnes fought back against Gbanka’s war boys, the Loko were drawn into battle on the side of the Mendes.

Pa Morlai captured and became commander in charge of the town of Mamunta, in Tonkolili, deep inside Temneland. When finally Gbanka was captured and imprisoned by the British, who soon tired when the fighting began to disrupt trading, Pa Morlai left Mamunta to return to his village. Matoko was on the other side of the Katabai Hills and when Pa Morlai entered the home of his birth he was a wealthy man, bearing the spoils of his war, including a sizeable retinue of slaves.

Among those wearing the round wooden collar of the enslaved was a young girl of twelve or thirteen called Beyas. Pa Morlai presented Beyas as a gift to his mother Ya Yalie to raise – a companion who would help her around the house and in the fields.

Beyas was the daughter of Masamunta Akaik, literally Chief Big Beard, of the Kamaras, one of the ruling families of Mamunta. As a slave with an aristocratic bloodline she was a trophy. And as she went about her tasks she impressed Ya Yalie with the delicacy of her demeanour: one day, when Beyas was about fifteen and was maturing into womanhood, the older woman went to her son and suggested that he take Beyas as one of his wives.

Beyas and Pa Morlai had four children together: three sons and one daughter. The years passed but Beyas, now called Ya Beyas by everyone in recognition of her status as a mother, never grew accustomed to her life. For all that she was married to a big man, she was still a slave.

One day, more than twenty years after Ya Beyas arrived in Matoko, a trader appeared at the marketplace selling round baskets of different sizes. They were woven out of coloured raffia and known as shuku, which people used to store clothes or pack their belongings for journeys. At the sight of him Ya Beyas became distraught and none of her children, who had accompanied her that day, could fathom what had upset her so much. Ya Beyas waved them away; refused their solicitations. She wanted to talk to the basket weaver alone. For a few minutes the two conferred, then Ya Beyas, seemingly much recovered, returned home and did not speak of the matter again. In time the incident was completely forgotten – by everyone that is, except Ya Beyas.

The weavers of Mamunta are renowned for their basketry. Ya Beyas recognised the intricate weave, the bands of turquoise and mauve that made up the design, which came from her home. Secretly she had sent a message with the trader to take to her brothers (she was certain that by now Masamunta Akaik was dead), telling them she was enslaved in Matoko. She begged them to find her and redeem her.

It took a whole year for the basket seller to complete his travels and return to Matoko. When she began to expect him back Ya Beyas invented every kind of excuse to go to the market by herself. Eventually one morning she saw the man sitting behind his huge pile of shuku and her heart lifted. But the trader had failed in his task. He had nothing to say for himself except that he had somehow forgotten.

Not one of my elderly aunts, who recounted the story of Ya Beyas to me, could tell me how or why he should do so. But they were clear: he had forgotten. He had not been waylaid or confused, found her family had disappeared or never returned to Mamunta. He forgot. Perhaps, I thought to myself as I listened, he drank too much omole.

Again Ya Beyas begged him to take a message and the trader promised that this time it would get there. In the meantime she resigned herself to twelve more months in Matoko.

The trader was true to his word. Some months later two of Ya Beyas’s brothers, Pa Santigi Kamara and Pa Yambas Sana, arrived in Mamunta, splendidly attired in gold-embroidered robes as befitted their status, followed by retainers carrying everything required to formally redeem their stolen sister: a barrel of palm oil, a sack of rice, a cow, a sack of pure salt, a tie of tobacco leaves, one woven country cloth and four silver shillings. These gifts they presented in the barrie before the paramount chief, the elders and Pa Morlai. When the ceremony was over Ya Beyas was a free woman.