Читать книгу The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir - Aminatta Forna - Страница 15

Our house and compound were my entire world and together they created a dizzying universe. Two mango trees stood like sentries in front of the veranda of our house, overshadowing the corrugated iron roof. Despite the fact we had no air-conditioning and perhaps because of the trees, the house stayed reasonably cool even on those days when the temperature outside reached forty degrees. Koidu was far inland, lying in the sweaty pit between three bodies of mountains and there was rarely even a light breeze to break the torpor.

Our part of the building, the front wing of the house, was modest and consisted of no more than a couple of bedrooms and an open living area. Farther back the rest of the space was given over to my father’s surgery and the drug store. There was a spare bedroom next to the store, where the mad lady stayed for a day and a night. A narrow walkway joined the living quarters to the obstetrics ward behind and there were toilets and showers on the left: one for the family and the other for the patients.

The door of our house was always open and people wandered in and out of my world. From the moment they crossed the threshold they were given flesh and blood, voices, laughter and life: humans and animals, chickens, even the slow-moving chameleon I followed as it made its way across the dirt. I was a child, I lived my life in the moment. For me people existed only when I could see them. When they left, as far as I was concerned their flesh turned into air and they ceased to be.

The appearance of visitors at all times of day and night annoyed my mother. She didn’t like strangers coming into the house, especially when they expected to wait there for my father. Often men arrived claiming to be brothers all the way from Magburaka. By then my father was practically supporting his whole family, paying school fees for children and helping out in dozens of different ways; the list of requests was never ending and the appearance of a visitor certainly meant someone in need. My uncles had been educated by the Imam according to Islamic custom, and in virtually every way they still lived the existence of their forefathers in the villages. By pure chance my father alone had acquired the skills to survive in a modern world.

When the brothers arrived my mother asked them to come back another time. She complained to my father about the constant visitors, but when he heard she had turned his brothers away without offering them a drink or anything to eat he was incensed. Her behaviour offended his family greatly. In return my mother demanded hotly to know what she was supposed to do – she couldn’t remember them all: my father had twenty-eight brothers and nineteen sisters. Fortunately for my mother, his sisters rarely, if ever, managed to make the journey.

Besides the patients and the trail of uncles, another group of people became regular visitors at the house. They were young men, most of whom didn’t ask to come in but sat on the veranda, and the murmuring sounds of their conversation drifted through the house. Other times they simply sat in silence. When I skipped past with my hand in my mother’s they always greeted her most respectfully.

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.