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

My mother allowed herself to be reassured by our father’s words but, she discovered many years later when I was able to tell her otherwise, his easy manner was deceptive. He wasn’t free to leave, although in front of us he acted as though he remained of his own volition. The men had been warned that if they tried to leave the confines of State House they would be shot. The governor-general, the Queen of England’s representative, had relinquished responsibility and remained in self-imposed solitary confinement in his chambers. The radio played nothing but monotonous military music. The city was alive with armed soldiers and protesters had begun to take to the streets once more, as whispers carried the news through the city that once darkness fell Siaka Stevens and the other men held in State House would be taken away to an unknown fate. The country was in freefall.

Outside State House my mother waylaid a British journalist. He turned out to be the correspondent from Reuters. She tried to explain to him that Siaka Stevens wasn’t alone; there were others with him, including her own husband, but he brushed her aside.

That night our mother sat by the window of the Benjamins’ house on Old Railway Line Road watching the military headquarters at Wilberforce on the opposite hill. Truck after truck passed through the gates and down Motor Road into Freetown. Some hours earlier the Mercedes and our two friends from the APC had driven away, leaving us at the Benjamins’ comfortable home; they promised they’d be back with any news. After a meal and showers the three of us were put to bed in a room with the Benjamins’ own children.

Two old friends arrived: Donald Macauley, the lawyer who helped my father free the APC candidates in Kono, and Susan Toft, a teacher of anthropology at Fourah Bay college, an old friend of my mother’s from her days in Freetown. Moments after they arrived they found themselves trapped for the night when a brief announcement interrupted the music on the radio with news that the city was under curfew with immediate effect. Together with Ade and his Maltese wife Bianca, they tried to pass the time and, with less success, to distract my mother with continuous games of cards.

Inside State House food and water had run out and as the night deepened our father resigned himself to sleeping in his luxurious prison. The men were moved up to a drawing room on one of the upper floors and told to make themselves comfortable. When the doors closed they moved around the room, swiftly checking out their new surroundings, and discovered to their amazement that the soldiers had failed to disconnect the telephones. Within moments they were making calls. Ibrahim Taqi, the brand-new information minister, called his contacts in the foreign press and for the rest of the evening Siaka Stevens sat in the carpeted suite that ought to have been his own office, and gave interviews to western reporters, including those from the British Times and Reuters.

This was how the prisoners came to hear the rumour spreading through the town that they were to be smuggled out of the city later in the night, possibly to be shot. There was substance to the fear; a dark night, a cold bullet and an unmarked grave had already become the fate of several African opposition leaders. My father would have recalled how, in the Congo, the newly elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba was flown away in full view of the world, to be tortured and killed.

In the streets leading away from State House the protesters who had fled several hours before were re-forming into human barricades with the single idea of sealing all the exit routes and preventing the transportation of the prisoners. They tore up paving stones, knocked down roadside bollards and pushed cars into the street to create impromptu barricades. At the same time soldiers formed lines across the roads, effectively closing off the centre of town, and moved in on the protesters. The crowd was caught in a closing net. Hundreds of people took to the alleyways, trying to escape the military by running through the back streets where the trucks couldn’t pass. But there they found themselves confronted, not by soldiers, but by armed youths who wore bandannas and white vests bearing the palm tree symbol of the SLPP.

Our mother and her friends heard the gunfire up in Tengbe Town and they exchanged glances at each other round the table; our father and his colleagues heard it in State House, where they waited for dawn. The smell of cordite and tear gas swirled upwards on the currents of air.

By nine o’clock in Connaught Hospital the waiting room and beds were full; people lay bleeding in the corridors in rows all the way from the out-patients department to the operating theatre. The few doctors on duty set to work in the theatres, amputating limbs shattered by bullets. Even the plaster room was turned into a makeshift operating room. In the early hours of the morning a gang of SLPP youths, brandishing automatic weapons, ran through the hospital and burst into the theatres, intending to finish off their APC victims as they lay under the surgeon’s knife. The doctor in charge, unarmed and wearing bloodstained greens, confronted the ringleader with such ferocity that the attackers turned tail and slunk back into the night.

The official figures from that night stated that fifty-four people were shot and injured. Nine more were killed.

The next day Bianca and Susan found my mother sweating in her bed, reeling from nausea. Since arriving in Africa she had been given to bouts of malaria. Bianca took away the thick blanket my mother had wrapped herself in and directed the electric fan onto her. My mother was shivering uncontrollably and she felt chilled to the bone, but her temperature was spiralling upwards of one hundred degrees.

Outside the city was silent. No activity could be seen beyond the windows of State House; no more announcements were broadcast on the radio. We spent the whole day indoors. Donald and Susan went home and came by later in the afternoon. There was no more news: no newspapers; even the telephone lines were out.

In the evening the music on the radio stopped abruptly and the radio fizzed and sputtered for a moment. Finally a crackling voice became audible. Bianca crossed the room and turned the volume up. It was David Lansana. His voice, ponderous and heavy, filled the air. He declared the appointment of Siaka Stevens unconstitutional.

‘In order to prevent further acts of violence…civil war in our country, I have carried out my duty as first commander of the army of Sierra Leone and taken charge of the situation. The army is in control and you have my promise that I will do all in my power to see that justice is done.’ Here the broadcast ended. He had added nothing more than everyone already knew.

In the early hours of the following morning David Lansana was arrested by four of his own men.

A few hours later, when it was light, we heard the familiar growl of the Mercedes. The two APC men were back as they had promised. There was no news of my father who, as far as anyone knew, was still being held in State House. But the two men had an idea.

‘Dr Forna was once in the army, yes?’ one of them asked.

‘Yes.’ By now my mother was more or less recovered from her malarial fever.

‘Where do you keep his uniform?’

‘It’s up in Koidu at the house. But he hasn’t worn it for ages, at least two years. He left the army. Why?’

‘We must go and bring it down. Can you come with us?’

Our mother caught their drift. The men who had arrested Lansana were majors. As one of the medical personnel my father had been a major in the army, too. He was their equal plus; he outranked the men who were holding him at State House. Challenging Lansana had brought him enormous popularity among the ranks, which was still well remembered. Perhaps, in his uniform, he would be able to command loyalty from enough of them to secure his release and that of his colleagues.

It was a long shot and more than a little dangerous. Our mother would have to travel up to Koidu and back, and then, God only knew how, smuggle the uniform to him in State House. But to my mother, in the light of her current predicament, any plan seemed like a good one.

They left immediately. Susan accompanied her, lending moral support, and they bluffed their way through the road blocks by pretending to be missionaries on their way up-country. Outside Freetown the checkpoints ended and they drove at speed, stopping only once to buy drinks at the roadside. At the house they slept briefly and set out again while the sky was still flushed with pink; under the front seat of the car, folded and ironed, was the uniform. The atmosphere in the car on that journey along the roads and in villages could not have been more different, said our mother, from our triumphant passage to Freetown, just two days before.

13

The next time my mother saw my father’s uniform he was wearing it – or assorted parts of it, at any rate. We were back at home in Koidu; back into our old life – as far as that was possible. In our father’s absence family life became one-dimensional: we had routine without substance, days with form but no purpose, like a water pot with a broken base. One afternoon he strolled back through the front door wearing khaki shorts beneath a plain cotton shirt and long, military socks incongruously worn with his sandals. His beard had grown back and he was looking altogether leaner. He went straight into the bathroom, shaved his face clean, changed his clothes and opened the surgery.

Early in the evening of the third day of their incarceration soldiers had arrived at State House; they had seized Siaka Stevens and taken him to Pademba Road Prison. There, he was joined shortly afterwards by Albert Margai and Brigadier Lansana. My father and the Taqi brothers remained imprisoned along with the governor-general at State House for two more days before they were all released without ceremony. He had searched us out at Bianca and Ade’s house; once he was reassured we were fine, he departed with his colleagues. Who knows whether he had the chance to put the uniform to the test? I never found out. My father barely spoke of his experiences and my mother did not ask.

Back together my parents concentrated on the functions of living: the clinic, the patients, their children. My father strode through life making his own decisions; he didn’t know what it meant to feel afraid; he saw no reason to explain his actions to anyone but himself. His autonomy and unswerving confidence was matched only by my mother’s detachment; but whether with hindsight this was symptomatic of the deterioration of their marriage or the very source of their growing distance from each other, I have never known. Nothing in her upbringing had prepared my mother for the reality of the Africa with which she was now faced; these were not her people and she did not share our father’s passion or the political conviction that might otherwise have carried her through.

Instead she hoped for the best. My father immersed himself once again in his work as a doctor, and my mother prayed that life would continue that way. The military junta had banned all political activity and closed down the newspapers. The country was still under martial law; the House of Representatives had been dissolved and the new government had given itself extensive powers. The governor-general had been released, persuaded to go on extended leave, sparing the British the effort and inconvenience of having to intervene on his behalf. He was, after all, officially the representative of the Crown and until further notice the queen was still head of State of Sierra Leone.

The first twenty-four hours of the new regime were marked by numerous switches in the leadership within the group of young majors calling themselves the National Reformation Council. Colonel Genda, an old friend of ours, had been flown back from America to take command at the request of the coup leaders. My mother had been friends with Ruth, his British wife, and we used to play with their children when we lived at Wilberforce barracks. But Colonel Genda had made the mistake of confiding to an army colleague, Major Juxon Smith, who was on the same flight, that he intended to reinstate a civilian regime as soon as possible. While the plane refuelled at Lanzarote, Major Juxon Smith slipped away and used the interval to telephone his contacts in the NRC. In a single call he alerted them to the colonel’s democratic inclinations; he then usurped Genda and took the leadership for himself.

From the moment Juxon Smith turned up at his first press conference wearing an outlandish Russian fox fur hat in the stewing heat of Freetown, it was evident that in him our country had a ruler with all the hallmarks of a true African dictator. Within a matter of weeks he wanted the name of the country changed to the more African-sounding Songhay, the national anthem rewritten, and cars to drive on the opposite side of the road. He shared a birthday with Winston Churchill, whom he greatly admired, and he proposed a plan to the British government to fly the great man’s widow out for a state visit.

Juxon Smith liked to turn up early in the morning at government offices and fire anyone who wasn’t at their desk on time. He forced car drivers who failed to stop for his cavalcade to appear at State House and apologise to him in person. His habit of waving his arms and legs around when he spoke earned him the nickname Juxon Fits. Juxon Smith was soon extremely unpopular among his own aides; he telephoned them with orders to report to his office in the middle of the night only to take every decision himself anyway.

Yet despite all his eccentricities, Juxon Smith would find history and her bedfellow hindsight fair judges of his brief period of rule. Only a personality so extreme could tackle government corruption in the way he did, or force an unpopular but essential austerity budget onto our unruly populace. He was in many ways a true visionary. He would stand trial for treason, survive and reputedly end his days as a preacher roaming the southern states of America.

In Koidu, three weeks after he returned home our father began to disappear again, slipping away with his colleagues for an hour or two, then a day and a night. In no time at all we were back living in the uncertainty that had prevailed before the elections. The rules shifted, the security and substance vanished from our lives, as though the walls of our house had turned from concrete into paper, likely to fly away at any time if someone outside blew hard enough. And beyond the walls there were indeed those watching and listening, beginning to huff and to puff.

In Sierra Leone at that time the milk came in triangular cartons. They stacked up, top to toe, alternately in the fridge so they formed a block. It was really quite a clever design. To open them you snipped one of the ends off – of course, it didn’t matter which one. In my opinion that was the beauty of them. The milk came in regular and chocolate flavour. The chocolate was the best: velvet smooth, not at all grainy like the sort made with powder. Ours tasted as though it came straight from chocolate cows. We had ordinary milk at home, but the chocolate was special. I have a memory from that time, a memory of chocolate milk and subterfuge.

One day, for what reason I have no idea, my mother took us to a café where she ordered each of us a triangular carton of chocolate milk as a treat. I can’t remember where we were, whether it was in Koidu or in Freetown at some earlier juncture. I do remember the café had booths, a little like an American diner, with red plastic seats. There was a counter by the door and a big freezer behind the till. The room was air-conditioned, with the quality of airtight quiet you only get from artificially cooled spaces. We didn’t have air-conditioning at home and I imagined this was what it would be like to crawl into the fridge and close the door. I was sitting in a booth opposite my mother, my arms resting on the cool metal edges of the table, sucking my drink through a paper straw, when my father came in.

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