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

One or two men would go straight into my father’s surgery. After a couple of hours they would come out and the waiting men would jump up. Everyone would mill about, exchanging greetings. They’d all take turns shaking my father’s hand, nodding when he said a few words to them: ‘Yes, doctor, yes, doctor.’ The men who’d been in his office would clap him on the shoulder, with camaraderie. Then they’d all leave together, squeezing into a couple of old cars, and my father would turn to go back to his surgery.

All the time we had been living in Sierra Leone talk was growing of a one-party state there. The ruling SLPP (Sierra Leone’s People’s Party) had come under the leadership of Albert Margai, the younger brother of Sir Milton Margai, who had passed away. Although the prime minister was known to be gravely ill, a troubling rumour persisted that Albert had dispatched him early in order to avoid allowing Sir Milton to hand over to his protégé, John Karefa Smart. Everyone in the country assumed Karefa Smart, who was also a doctor and Sir Milton’s confidant and evident favourite, would be the next leader of the country. But instead a series of political manoeuvres ousted him from the cabinet. Accompanied by his American-born wife and children he fled the country, claiming he had become the target of a campaign of harassment.

Once in power, Albert, a British-trained lawyer, tabled proposals to change the constitution with the aim of introducing a one-party state. In Ghana, Nkrumah was the first African leader to take his country down the path to becoming a single-party state. He claimed multi-party democracy encouraged ethnic divisions and drew too much energy from the real business of social and economic development. Soon African leaders by the score were following Nkrumah’s lead; they too insisted that only this way could their emergent nations acquire the stability they needed. Kenyatta in Kenya, Tanzania under Nyerere, Kaunda’s Zambia, Banda in Malawi all moved towards a unitary system of government. And this they did with the tacit blessing of their former colonial rulers who, in the climate of the Cold War, preferred to back dictators they knew rather than leave the door open to new leaders with different, possibly left-wing, sympathies.

In Sierra Leone, especially in Freetown with its entrenched, well-educated Creole population, Albert Margai’s proposals were seen as a transparent attempt to hold onto power by the SLPP. Besides, Margai was accused of introducing precisely the kind of Mende tribal hegemony he now argued could only be redressed by changing the constitution. The press was busy unmasking incidences of ministerial corruption, and every day stories and rumours appeared in the notorious ‘Titbits’ column of the opposition We Yone newspaper. The country was in serious financial straits, already mortgaged to the IMF and defaulting on foreign loans.

My father’s reputation, boosted in Koidu by his work as a doctor, had in fact begun to grow much earlier. When my parents first returned from Scotland he went to work for the government medical services at Princess Christian and Connaught hospitals. There he and the other young doctors, who had been trained in a National Health Service less than ten years old in Britain, were appalled by the standards in force in Freetown. Nurses frequently disobeyed the doctors’ orders; equipment wasn’t properly sterilised; supplies were pilfered. One day my father lost his temper at the discovery of stillborn babies left stacked on shelves in the maternity delivery room, where other women came to give birth.

The young doctors organised protests to the minister for health, with my father acting as one of the leaders. But despite the assurances they received, change if it came at all was slow. When our father’s frustrations reached a zenith he found himself summoned to the minister’s office. Eventually, a solution was agreed. He was given his own hospital to run: the military hospital at Wilberforce barracks with his old comrade Dr Panda; the two men determined to run it as a model hospital.

There’s a picture of us together at the time. Me, wearing a pale dress with white ribbons in my hair, in the arms of this army officer, my father, who is so smart and proud of himself. I was only two years old then, but I fancy I can really remember the touch of that rough serge and the feel of his newly shaved chin. At the time we hadn’t yet moved into the barracks at Wilberforce, but were still living in the government bungalow given to us when my father worked in the hospitals. It was opposite Graham Greene’s famous City Hotel, and at night you could hear the prostitutes hurling personal insults at each other as they vied for clients. On that first morning a friend of my father’s, an army major, came round early to dress him. He demonstrated the correct way to knot his tie, the proper angle for his cap, the way to wear each and every item of his uniform. Afterwards my father and I posed for our photograph.

The army had recently come under the authority of Brigadier David Lansana. He was the first native-born force commander, a Mende and popularly seen as a Margai stooge. A few months after my father arrived a young woman appeared at the military hospital. She was pregnant and wanted an abortion. Abortion was illegal in Sierra Leone and my father declined her request. Some time later the force commander called the new doctor and, as his superior officer, commanded him to perform the operation. Both my father and Dr Panda resisted. They resigned their commissions in protest, but this only enraged Lansana more. He wanted them court-martialled for disobedience – my father especially, for his insolence. When the brigadier was advised his authority did not extend to medical personnel he tried to have him dispatched to Kabala, the most remote outpost imaginable.

For a short while the case became something of a cause célèbre in Freetown. My father’s self-assurance had always bordered on arrogance and he refused to budge an inch. I believe he probably enjoyed the stand-off. The privates, who already respected him for his dedication as a medical officer, loved him even more for standing up to Lansana and they were vocal in their support. Lansana was forced to back down. Our father left to set up his own practice. He had worn his olive green uniform for less than six months.

All the time Lansana was persecuting him, my father never revealed the incident which was the cause of their argument. He could easily have done so. It would have publicly humiliated Lansana and brought a halt to the whole debacle, but it would have meant breaking his doctor’s oath of confidence to the young woman. The issue, as far as he and Dr Panda were concerned, remained their authority as doctors to determine the use of the hospital facilities. Yet even with this knowledge Lansana did nothing to curb his own excesses. It merely seemed to drive him to go further.

The story quickly reached members of the opposition party, the All People’s Congress, who searched our father out and asked him to join in their struggle. Two of his close friends were already APC activists: Ibrahim and Mohammed Bash Taqi, Temnes like us, who even came from Tonkolili, the same district as the Fornas. Ibrahim was the man behind the ‘Titbits’ column, a dedicated journalist obsessed with amassing evidence of SLPP corruption. He had once been a laboratory assistant while my father was head boy at Bo School; they next met when Ibrahim covered the independence negotiations in London, dashing between Lancaster House and the telex office to brief his newspaper. He was an ebullient and tireless man. Taqi in Temne means ‘troublemaker’, and as far as the SLPP was concerned the Taqis lived up to their name. Mohammed, a chain smoker who wore a toothbrush moustache and had bright, melancholy eyes and hunched shoulders, was the quieter of the two. To the world he was known as M.O.; I called him Uncle Bash.

In Freetown my father resisted joining the APC. He had long opposed the activities of the SLPP, but at the time he was still convinced his calling lay as a doctor. In Koidu he spent every day working with people who died of easily preventable diseases, whose life expectancy was well below forty and whose children’s stomachs were bloated with malnutrition. It didn’t matter that he worked all day and most of the night, drove himself to the point of exhaustion, the cure for the malaise lay beyond the talents of any doctor.

Every day for over forty years the Sierra Leone Selection Trust had wrenched minerals by the ton from the river beds, leaving red earth exposed like suppurating sores across the landscape. Every week the De Beers plane flew another consignment of diamonds out of the country. Before independence, diamonds were merely the spoils of conquest; of the money the company now paid to the government in Freetown as taxes in return for the diamond concession there was no evidence in Koidu, which remained as backward as ever. Inside the company compound was another world: paved roads, street lights, telephone lines, a school – for the children of employees only – tennis courts, flower beds and lawns.

The environs of Koidu were littered with the rusting frames of expensive cars, abandoned by dealers who found it easier to replace a Mercedes than go to the bother of repairing it. The diamond merchants’ wives flew back and forth to Lebanon on extended shopping trips. Every day illegal digging became more and more blatant, and yet the government did little to curb it.

As opposition to Margai grew, the APC swelled in popularity. Their leader, an ex-trade unionist by the name of Siaka Stevens, was amassing a huge amount of grassroots support, particularly among the Temnes and other protectorate people who saw no future under the Mende-dominated SLPP. But Stevens was convinced the party lacked the one element it most needed to seriously challenge Margai, and that was intellectual credibility: the kind of brain power required to create policies and a manifesto capable of winning the Creole vote in Freetown. Teams of young APC activists went out scouring the country. Their brief was to search out young, western-educated professional men and win them over to the cause.

During the day I rarely played inside. If I wasn’t doing the rounds with my mother I stayed in the yard where I could, if I cared to, see everything that went on in my world.

One day there was even more toing and froing than usual; it began in the morning and went on all day. In the afternoon a man arrived, older than the usual visitors. Uncle Bash was with him, and he and the other young men darted like egrets around a buffalo.

The man moved slowly, with the authority of age, as though he’d never been young, in fact. He had a stout build and a large square head on a muscular neck. Fleshy lids sloped down at the far corners of his eyes. His lower lip was thick, protruding and dark, and when he spoke he revealed his lower teeth. The curious feature was his hairline: a perfect semicircle above a high forehead; the hair at the sides was cropped so close there was barely any at all. The whole effect was of a small cap, like a judge’s black cap, on the top of his head.

This was Siaka Stevens, who at this time was effectively in hiding and moving from safe house to safe house. He was undertaking an extremely risky tour of the constituencies in an attempt to garner support. In order to change the constitution and introduce a republic with himself as president with sweeping new powers, Albert Margai needed the approval of two sessions of parliament with a general election in between. He’d won the first vote by a two-thirds majority. Now he had called the elections and these he was determined to win at any cost. Four APC MPs had already been arrested and held without charge, then deprived of their seats for absenteeism. Stevens was choosing to keep a very low profile.

When he reached me he paused for a moment and looked down. The whole entourage came to a halt and they gazed upon me too. Then Stevens said something to them and they all laughed. I didn’t understand. They passed on. At that moment my father came out into the living room, drying his hands on a cloth. My mother was there and she went to fetch cold drinks. Obviously this man, although I didn’t know then who he was, wasn’t one of my father’s brothers. He sat comfortably in one of the low wooden chairs we bought from the Forestry Commission shop and they spoke for a while. My father was very polite to him and acted in the way he usually reserved for Pa Roke. After a few moments my mother left them and the two men sat talking a while.

Uncle Bash sat outside on the veranda, with the other men. It was January and the temperatures were beginning to rise. The young men waited, beginning to sweat in the heat. They seemed very tense and excited. When Siaka Stevens reappeared they all sprang up and flew around him again. A few seconds later the cars were reversing, one after another, turning tightly in the restricted space of the compound until they drove off together, creating a great huff of dust that engulfed me.

Much later, when the day was old, Uncle Bash came back and hurried in. When he left my father was with him. They climbed into the Austin and drove away. My father didn’t come back that night, or the next. When he returned several days later he was dishevelled, unshaven and on foot.

10

One night I heard my mother’s voice – distorted by the dark, muffled through the walls of my room, disfigured by anger and tears. The three of us, my brother and sister and I, crept out of bed and opened the door. In the light of the corridor our mother and father faced each other and shouted. My mother’s hair tumbled around her shoulders in disarray, sticking to her face where the tears glistened. She was wearing her night clothes. My father’s anger was dark and rumbling. I had never seen him this way.

We stood there for a moment watching in silence. Big Aminatta had clearly made a decision to stay in her room. I have no idea now what the argument was about. I could not hear the words, but I could sense the emotions as painfully as boiling water poured onto my skin. Sheka and Memuna felt it too and, like frogs disturbed in their pool at night, we opened our mouths and lungs together and began to wail. I stood, in my patterned pyjamas, watching my parents fight and I screamed louder and louder.

The hot tears clouded my eyes and the scene in front of me blurred and faded. I felt as disorientated as I had once when I thought we were lost in the car during a thunderstorm; rain poured onto the windscreen, lightning shattered the sky and thunder crashed all around us. Now, completely lost in my own sorrow and fear, I threw back my head and howled. Snot welled in my nose, blocking my air passages and making it hard to breathe. I began to feel nauseous. In the farthest fields of my vision I could just about make out my brother and sister crying too. I took choppy, shallow breaths and pushed the sobs up through my chest and out of my gulping mouth.

Our mother’s voice briefly cut through the clouds. ‘You must be joking if you think I’m staying here. I’d rather sleep in the car.’ She was holding onto a sheet and a pillow. Maybe she had them before. She may have even been on her way there already. I don’t know. Whatever, she still didn’t move. Her eyes locked onto my father’s.

In that second Memuna broke ranks, ran forward and put her arms round my mother’s thighs. Our mother hugged my sister to her and they stood defiant. Our father looked exasperated but no less angry as he stared at them both.

‘I’m going with you, Mummy,’ said my sister, a cub facing off the leader of the pride.

For a moment I had no idea what was going to happen. We were all suspended in the moment, afraid to breathe or move. My father shrugged. ‘Fine, fine.’ He turned away. Suddenly he swung around and his gaze dropped down on my brother and me, hard like a pebble. The sob in my throat hung suspended, bobbing and trembling, too terrified to come out, but incapable of returning. My chest quaked.

‘And you two? Do you want to go with your mother as well?’

Us, us? What did this have to do with us? Up until then I had thought I was just watching, as I did everything else that went on in the house. I couldn’t even begin to imagine why my father was suddenly questioning us. I automatically thought I must have done something wrong. I certainly didn’t want to sleep in the car.

‘No, Daddy,’ we said.

My sister and my mother went out to the car and stayed the night there. Sheka and I crept back to our beds.

By the time of their fifth wedding anniversary our parents’ marriage was falling apart. The only time I remember them together, actually physically together in the same space, was the night their raging broke into my dreams. My father, obsessed only with his patients and politics, had withdrawn almost totally from his wife. He was away for days at a time; when he returned he was wearing the same clothes he left in; he was unwashed and the skin round his eyes sagged with exhaustion.

The young activists were travelling huge distances, moving from village to village around the country canvassing and holding meetings, many of them clandestine. They were forced to stay out of the way of the authorities, especially the police, who were breaking up APC gatherings and arresting the leaders. At night they slept rough or on floors and ate whatever their supporters, who were mainly poor villagers with little to eat themselves, were able to spare.

My father went round his Lebanese diamond-dealer clients, soliciting funds and persuading them to back the APC. Most of them traditionally supported the SLPP but they were alert to the mood of the country and anything that might influence their chances of making money. They donated generously to the new party and, to cover themselves, funnelled a bit more cash in the direction of the SLPP as well.

At home my mother was left holding the fort. She spent her days with no idea where her husband was or when he was coming back. There was nothing to tell the sick people who came to the clinic, except that the doctor wasn’t in. When my father did eventually come home, usually after two or three days, it was late in the evening. He showered quickly and changed his clothes, but instead of going to bed he would unlock the surgery and usher any waiting patients inside.

One evening a young woman arrived at the house in time for evening surgery. She was haemorrhaging badly: the back of her lappa was stained dark red and blood streaked her legs. She was weak and stumbled as she tried to walk, supported on her husband’s arm. My mother let them wait on the veranda. By now my father’s appearances and disappearances had a sort of rhythm: he tended to be gone for two nights, three at the most, return for one night and depart again early in the morning of the next day. He was never at home for more than a day at a time. The woman settled to wait. On our veranda her husband spread out cloths to lie on and mixed a little of the rice and sauce they had brought.

In the early hours of the morning the headlights of a car lit up the front of the house. My father was home. As soon as he saw the bleeding woman he admitted her straight into the ward. After she was comfortable he lay down and slept for a few hours. In the morning he called my mother and she helped while he rapidly performed a D&C. When the patient had recovered sufficiently, he was gone.

By now our income was dwindling fast. My mother still worked at the Volkswagen garage and gradually her earnings alone supported the family. The clinic was no longer bringing in money and our father had contributed the family’s savings to the political fight. Added to that, the Austin was gone – given to the party to help ferry activists around the country. Fortunately, my mother still held on to her Beetle.

In February 1967 a date for the elections was announced. They were to be held in March, just one month away. Everyone in the country had been waiting and preparing for this moment. The APC planned to challenge virtually every seat, with the exception of some of those in the southern Mende heartlands, where they reckoned they could not possibly win. They mobilised a formidable campaign. At its heart was the message to the people that the APC intended to stop Albert Margai’s republican constitution from advancing any further.

One night we children were already in bed; my mother was sitting up talking with Foday, the man who owned the bookshop in town and who occasionally stopped by for a visit. We were good customers; my sister and brother were avid readers, my sister especially: a precociously early learner she earned her place in family lore by finishing Lorna Doone when she was four. I hadn’t conquered reading or discovered the world of books; my pleasures were as yet confined to ants, dogs and mud. Foday had brought my mother a gift: a copy of the newly published Encyclopaedia of Cooking.

They had been keeping company a while when my father stepped through the door. He was as unkempt as usual, but beneath the tiredness he was restless and evidently excited. He kissed his wife, sat down next to her and waited. Foday sensed his company had become superfluous and stood up to go. When the door closed behind the bookseller my father pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and passed it to my mother. He gave no explanation, just watched her closely. He looked pretty pleased with himself, my mother said later, puffed up from inside with pride.

In her hand was a flyer, no more than about eighteen inches in size. At the top of the sheet was the red rising star, the symbol of the APC; in the centre a picture of my father. He had recently shaved off his beard, and in the photograph his chin was clean. The printer had touched up the white shirt he was wearing and also the whites of his eyes, ever so slightly, in order to give some definition to what was a rather poor quality image. The whole effect was to make my father, who already looked startlingly young, even more wholesome. His name was printed in capitals, below that his qualifications: MB, ChB, DRCOG and then the words:

‘This is Your APC Candidate.

He is your Karefa-Smart’s Choice

Vote APC all the way.’

Siaka Stevens had personally asked him to take on John Karefa Smart’s former seat of Tonkolili West and our father had agreed. It was his home constituency. My father was the obvious – indeed, the perfect – choice.

As the election date drew closer, my father was absent round the clock. His constituency was a whole day’s journey away. By now the small, discreet meetings had burgeoned into rallies attracting huge crowds, but in order to hold a political meeting of any kind the candidates needed the approval of the paramount chief, most of whom were loyal to the government. It became routine for permission to be refused. Under these circumstances any meeting that went ahead, impromptu or otherwise, was likely to be heavy-handedly broken up by the police. Across the country there were frequent, sporadic clashes between government and opposition supporters.

Koidu, in Kono, lay on the axis between the SLPP Mende strongholds of the eastern provinces and the Temne north, which was mobilising behind the APC. One afternoon, on the way back to our house from school, with we three children in the car, my mother turned a corner and drove into a pitched battle between several hundred APC and SLPP supporters on the main street in town. Some people were waving guns, others hitting each other with their fists, sticks – anything they could lay their hands on. My mother pulled up, intending to reverse out. But the people nearby, who were as much engaged in the fighting as anyone else, recognised our car and started to shout for people to clear the road. There was a pause in the battle, like a black and white slapstick movie when the music stops, and we drove through the crowd. When we emerged on the other side and looked out of the rear window, the music and the fighting had started up again.

Some evenings later my mother was at the ‘nightclub’ having a drink with her Lebanese friends. It was a favourite haunt of the Lebanese merchants and other well-to-do folk and she often went to sit and chat in the evening air. The bar was next to the mosque, a typical provincial prayer house built in concrete with four squat, plain minarets, one of which housed the muezzin. These were the days before it became standard practice to rig up an automated loudspeaker system, and in Koidu the muezzin still climbed the stairs of the tower and called the faithful to prayer five times a day.