The Devil that Danced on the Water
A Daughter’s Memoir of Her Father, Her Family, Her Country and a Continent
Aminatta Forna

For My Father

Honour and shame from no condition rise;

Act well your part: there all the honour lies.

From An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope (1733)

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Book One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

Book Two

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Book One

1

In the early morning he stands in the doorway of his hut and listens for the distant rumble. The cool air bears the earthy scent of promised rain. From the veranda above I can see the plume of red dust rising in the lorry’s wake long before the man with the pickaxe who waits below me hears the engine. I am ten years old. It is 30 July 1974. I am watching a dust devil heading for my home. It writhes as it chases the driver around the rocky lanes, towering above the truck, forcing the vehicle away from the main routes, past the tumble of houses towards the edge of the precipice where we live. Now I can hear its roar begin; at first low and deep it rises to a shrieking cacophony. And suddenly, silence. The driver swings out of the cab down below. Behind him the devil slumps to the ground and waits.

I watch the driver speak briefly to the waiting man, who nods in return. The driver climbs back into his cab. The man with the pickaxe moves to within a few feet of his hut and gestures with his right hand. The driver manoeuvres his vehicle forward and back, until it is almost up against the shack. The massive hulk of the truck might easily crush the flimsy panbody of rusting corrugated iron, wooden slats and cardboard. The roof is held down with old tyres. Twelve people live in there, my stepmother tells me. I wonder if they are inside now, while all this is going on. Finally the driver pushes a lever and the load of rocks slides to the ground, freeing a mighty dust devil which spins up above the heads of all of us: the mother devil.

When the truck is gone the man and I contemplate the mountain of rocks. He leans over and picks one up. In his hand it is about the size of a melon; the surface is pitted and full of holes and it looks like a red moon rock. He positions it with care upon the edge of a boulder protruding from the ground. Then he lifts his iron-handled pick and, with the practised grace of a tennis player about to serve an ace, he swings the tool in an arc up behind his back, over his shoulder and down, lunging at the heart of the rock. It shatters, pleasingly, into half a dozen pieces. He glances briefly up at me and nods; I wave back a small acknowledgement. Then he selects another rock and repeats the same, perfect action.

The plateau where he stands is just at the point where the level ground gives way to the steep sides of the valley. There are no more houses, just a dense, green mat of tangled vegetation crossed with narrow paths of bare, red earth leading to and from the stream on the valley bed. I am forbidden by my father to go anywhere near the water. Farther up the valley a slaughterhouse built directly above the narrow channel pours effluent directly into it. The slaughterhouse attracts vultures, who wait out the time between meals on the roof of our house. I often do go down to the stream alone because I can’t equate the joys of playing with the glittering, cool water with the invisible danger. Neither can the family in the panbody, who carry water from the stream to wash their pots and cook their rice.

On the opposite side of the stream, halfway up the valley, stands a wooden shed. Empty by day, it serves as an illicit drinking den at night where men and women from the low-cost houses gather and drink omole, a twice-distilled palm wine so strong, I’d been told, that it could rob a man of his sight. The fermented liquid had to be strained of dead flies and live maggots before it was considered fit to drink. On the weekends the drinkers become revellers and turn up the music until it reverberates across the slopes and drowns the night-time sounds. Every Friday night the clamour of the frog colonies at the water’s edge, the nocturnal serenades of stray dogs and the constant clatter of the crickets give way to the rhythms of Carl Douglas singing, ‘Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting’ again and again, until the early hours of the morning.

In our house, we love it. We learn the words and improvise dance routines. My cousin Morlai scrunches his eyes into oriental slits, spins on his heels, kicks and punches the air. He is in his twenties and wears a slim-fit, patterned purple nylon shirt and matching flares with patch pockets. The girls Esther and Musu, also our cousins, laugh as though they are fit to burst. Afterwards Morlai and Santigi (who is not our cousin but lives with us all the same) leave to go out on the town. As they depart we tease them from the same veranda I watch from now. They take turns at wearing a pair of cheap sunglasses and disappear from view enfolded into the unblemished blackness of the night. In the morning there will be stories of bars and bravado.

Against the metronome of cracking rocks I can hear car horns and the poda podas on Kissy Bye-Pass Road revving their engines as they prepare to take the workers into the city. High above the motors come the sing-song sopranos of the boys who lean out of the back door to call the routes: ‘Kiss-ssy, mountain cut, savage street, motor ro’ad.’ I can imagine the people pressing forward, cramming their bodies into every available space on board, the fetid odour, the heat. The latecomers climb onto the roof, or hang on the back step.

Poda poda: ‘hither and thither’ the words mean. Rival teams of minibuses, covered in painted slogans and boasting the names of their owners, flying through town all day long. From here they weave their way through the tight alleys of the East End into the downtown area, where the office workers drop down and disappear into a grid of low-rise office blocks and old colonial government buildings. Some buses go up Circular Road and past the cemetery, beyond whose walls thick tropical climbers coil round the gothic gravestones as though they’d like to drag them back into the very graves they mark.

Other poda podas inch their way around the massive trunk and soaring branches of the Cotton Tree, which appears on postcards and in calendars as the symbol of Freetown, home of the freed slaves, once but no more the Athens of Africa. The words are always written with capitals: the Cotton Tree. In between the massive roots the lepers sleep on, undisturbed under their makeshift awnings. The poda podas start up Independence Avenue but turn off halfway up, before they reach State House, where the president rests in air-conditioned rooms; across to Pademba Road they go and past the prison. At Savage Street the schoolchildren jump down and separate into shoals: royal blue follows royal blue, brown checks group together, green blazers and boaters drift into one.

On a free run down Savage Street the poda podas pass the brightly painted shutters and cottage gardens of the old Creole houses: little enclaves of Louisiana brought home to Africa. At Congo Cross passengers for the fishing villages at Juba and Goderich or those going out to Lumley beach and Aberdeen switch to transport headed in their direction. Next the buses ease up the hill to Wilberforce and Hill Station, where the view from the windows opens out onto the curved line of the hills of Freetown. At their base, lying like grounds in a broken coffee bowl, is the city. Beyond that the sea. Up here, above the heat and the constant clamour, is where the British once lived in a line of looming, identical wooden houses built on stilts with covered balconies and latticed stairwells. Here they thought themselves safe above the rank, malarial air of Freetown. When enough of them had died, in revenge they dubbed this whole region of West Africa ‘the white man’s grave’.

There was a time when we lived up here, too. The roads are lined with fruit trees: avocados, breadfruit, and mangoes hanging on loops like a woman’s emerald earrings. We children used to pick the mangoes green and eat them with salt, then roll around with bellyache. We stole the long seed pods from the flamboyant tree and used them as rattles. Weeks later, when every pod had fallen, the tree burst into beautiful, fiery blossoms. There were the tamarind trees, black tombla. In the tamarind season all the local children went their way holding onto branches of the tiny, dark fruit and sucking the sweet-sour sticky brown flesh from the smooth seeds. But that was nearly four years ago. Almost half my lifetime away.

Today from west to east above the city clouds slowly mass, crowding in between the hills. They drift above the trees on the slopes below Wilberforce and mingle with the fumes from factories and diesel exhausts above Kissy. They seek one another across the sky. They are waiting. Today rain is certain.

Last night it did not rain. I lay on my bed reading a book and outside the night was still. In the middle of the ceiling a naked sixty-watt bulb glowed. Above me my mosquito net was draped over itself. A few insects were beginning to gather around the light, but it was still early, only a little after seven. Daylight had just departed. It would stay dark another twelve hours. This close to the Equator the days and nights are measured with precision. Long before bed time Morlai would spray the room with repellent and leave a mosquito coil burning under my window.

My rubber flip-flops had fallen off my feet onto the bare, stone floor at the end of the bed. I was lying on my stomach in shorts and T-shirt, lost in the lives of Gerald Durrell’s family and their anthropomorphic pets, when my brother’s head appeared at the door. His face was riven with the excitement of one who knows and is about to tell: ‘Have you seen the man?’ was all he asked.

Our house has two verandas. The one at the back, away from the road, overlooks the crevasse and is next to the kitchen. We reached it in moments. We ran along the corridor, skidded round the corner, raced through the living room, past the dining-room table and out of the kitchen door. There were a number of people already out there and they were crowded around in a semicircle facing the other way from me. The span of their backs blocked my view. People were talking in low voices. I edged around the outside of the group.

A man sat almost motionless on one of the hard-backed chairs. His face was damp, great globes of sweat hung on his forehead, his head and eyes rolled slightly backward. Our father, balanced on the arm of an old black plastic easy-chair, was bent towards him.

I pushed in past them all and eased myself in next to my father. I smelled stagnant sweat and alcohol rising from the man, who must have been in his twenties. His skin was dusty grey. It reminded me of something I once saw on a trip we made up-country. We were driving back to Freetown, late at night; everyone around me in the car was asleep. Our driver swung the car around a bend and we came suddenly upon a dark figure walking at the side of the road, miles from any village, petrol station or even crossroads. The walker turned abruptly and the headlights lit up his face. I gasped and so did Sullay, the driver. The man’s black face was smeared with pale ashes. His robes were dark, their colour obscured by the darkness. He came like an apparition out of the night Seconds later the car had left him far behind. That, and the time a boy I knew was stung by a scorpion, were the only occasions on which I had ever seen someone turn that colour.

The light was yellow and poor. I peered down until I was able to see what my father was doing. In the man’s lap there lay a bloodied object. I thought at first he was holding onto something, a wounded creature maybe, so badly hurt as to be unrecognisable. Then I realised it wasn’t an animal but a hand – his own hand. Or rather, what remained of his hand. It lay in tatters. There were no fingers, no fingernails, no palm to speak of. The flesh seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. It looked just like raw meat. Amid the quantities of blood there was a gleam: a nub of bone, a sliver of white tendon, a glint of grey muscle. I stood mesmerised, as my father set to work removing pieces of dead flesh with a pair of tweezers.

There was no breeze; the air was close. I began to sweat. I wanted to stay and watch but my father ordered me quietly: ‘Am, you go and help with the bandages.’

My cousins were sitting at the dining-room table just inside the door. They were tearing a sheet into strips and sewing the pieces end to end. I moved to obey, disappointed at being sent away, placated that I had a task.

My father called for antiseptic and Morlai dashed into the house at once. A moment later he reappeared with a near empty plastic bottle. ‘Uncle, the Dettol is all done.’ He gestured with the bottle, half shrug, half question.

A beat passed and then I pitched in: ‘I have some.’ I saw my opportunity to be of real use and seized it.

I raced to my room, slid to my knees and reached under the bed. One day I wanted to be a vet. In a cardboard box that I kept hidden was my first aid kit for injured animals. Week by week I used my pocket money to add something new: gauze, tape, splints. Everything else I foraged, like the cotton wool, or else was donated: my father had given me a couple of plastic syringes from his own medical bag. So far I had effectively treated only the dogs and, with less success, a lizard that lost its tail.

At Choithrams supermarket a few days before I had bought a tiny glass quarter-bottle of Dettol. It was still new and unopened, easily the most prized piece in the entire collection. I loved the long Excalibur sword on the label and the sharp scent when I unscrewed the top. It was this I returned bearing, primed with self-importance.

‘Here’s some Dettol. It’s mine but you can use it.’ I held the little bottle up high. I took up the position next to my father again, and again he sent me away. For the next hour I sat with my cousins and stitched yards of bandages – more, I imagined, than anyone could possibly need.

A long time later, after the wounded man had been taken away and the detritus of soiled dressings cleared, I fell asleep on the same plastic-covered armchair where my father had been sitting. Someone must have carried me to my bed. When I woke up this morning, less than half an hour ago, I was lying under my mosquito net, sheets tangled round my legs. Dawn was barely a memory across the sky. For a little while I stayed there half dreaming until images of the previous evening began to come back to me.

In her bed on the other side of the room my elder sister lay still sleeping: I could hear her breathing. Outside a cock crowed, a tuneless, inarticulate and abrupt cry. It was a young cockerel and it hadn’t quite mastered the full-throated song of the rooster. It annoyed me because it often woke me up. One morning I went outside and threw a stone at it.

I lay there listening to the ordinary sounds. I hadn’t fallen asleep and been put to bed for years. Had I somehow imagined all of it? I wriggled free of my sheets and yanked up the mosquito net. Pulling it over my head, I leaned out, balancing myself with both hands on the floor. I ducked my head under the bed and slid out my vet’s box. The tiny bottle of Dettol was still inside, the top was on. Everything else was in place. I was about to close the lid and push the box back, when I paused and instead I removed the bottle to inspect it. It was my bottle, that was certain, and someone had returned it to the box. But there were no more than a few drops of liquid left inside. And the label was spoiled. It was bloodstained and covered in reddish-brown fingerprints so that you couldn’t even read the words any more.

At breakfast our father tells us the man had a car accident. He is wearing a brown suit, ready for the office. I am eating Weetabix, soaking them in milk and mashing the biscuits up. At the weekends my stepmother supervises in the kitchen and we have akara, deep-fried balls of banana, rice flour and nutmeg; or else fried plantains with a hot peppery sauce made with fish and black-eyed beans. On weekdays we eat cereal and toast.

‘How did he crash?’ we ask. I layer sugar thickly over the cereal.

‘I don’t know,’ our father replies.

‘What happened to him?’

‘He’s gone to a hospital.’

We nod. I spoon the soft brown mush into my mouth while I begin to formulate another question, but my father’s next statement stops me dead in my tracks.

‘Am, I’m seeing someone today. A maths tutor. I want you to have some extra lessons during the holidays.’

My mouth is full of Weetabix and I am left speechless. It’s true that my maths is not good. I routinely come midway down my class, unacceptable by my father’s standards. Every term he hands out awards for first, second and third place but I rarely manage to make the grade. At the last minute he comes up with a booby prize ‘for effort’ which somehow always has my name on it. But the holidays have only just begun; we arrived home from our boarding schools in England ten days ago. I cannot decide whether I am affronted or pleased to be singled out for such attention, to have my own maths tutor. While I am considering all this my father finishes his breakfast and borrows my milk glass. He pours himself a glass from one of the bottles of boiled water we keep in the fridge. As the glass fills the water turns cloudy. It doesn’t look very appealing.

‘Ugh!’ I say.

‘It all goes to the same place.’ My father smiles, amuses us by draining the whole glass with exaggerated delectation. He kisses us and he is gone.

In the afternoon the rain begins. The ground around the house fills up with rust-coloured puddles. Little rivulets of blood join into ever larger tributaries which weave down the slopes to the slaughterhouse stream. The heat doesn’t abate and the smell of steaming dirt is like a wet dog. The drops hurtle onto the corrugated roof of the garage, bouncing obliquely on the curves of tin and crashing like a thousand demented timpanists. Through their discordant rhythm rises the regular beat of the man with the pickaxe, who keeps on splitting stones. He has stripped down to a pair of torn shorts and the water washes away the sweat and shimmers on his torso. The man doesn’t pause once. On his right a second mound of small stones has begun to overtake the original pile of rocks.

On the balcony, below the curled iron railings, pools of water form and stretch out over the tiles. I take my book and sit in one of the long line of chairs. I am alone. No one comes to the house today. Ordinarily, by mid-afternoon the people have begun to arrive alone and in pairs, usually on foot from Kissy Bye-Pass Road, more rarely by taxi. Anyone known to the family goes through the house and keeps company on the back veranda. The others sit out front on the roadside. They come from Freetown and from the provinces in need of help.

The chairs are strung with green and yellow plastic cord which is no longer taut and cuts into the flesh. The people sit uncomplaining on the uncomfortable chairs, nursing their requests until my father comes home from work. If he is late or busy, they come back the next day. Some of them are his former patients wanting further treatment but without money to pay another doctor; others bring news of a death or need help to school a child. Sometimes he is asked to intercede in a family dispute or help find someone a job. Most of them just want a little money.

When they start to arrive I usually disappear somewhere else. Once a blind man climbed up the stairs from the road and accidentally sat on top of me. In school we were taught that blind people had super sensory powers and hearing like a bat’s radar; we were warned never to treat them as though they’re helpless. So I watched as the blind man lowered his bottom, believing, until it was too late, that he must somehow know I was underneath him, my tongue locked with the shame of the moment. As soon as his buttocks touched me the blind man shot up in the air like a jack-in-the-box and groped his way silently into another seat. The blind man isn’t here today. There are no visitors at all. Perhaps it is the rain that is keeping them away.

After an hour or so I wander through the house. Inside all are preoccupied with their own business. Santigi is at the back of the house sorting the laundry. Morlai is in the room they both share off the kitchen. I expect he is studying. Santigi wants to go to school too, but he’s already over thirty, though he fibs about his age and says he’s twenty-one. He was once sent to literacy classes but he struggled to learn to read and write. Still, on occasions he borrows my maths and English schoolbooks and works through the chapters alongside me. ‘I want to learn,’ he always says. A few months ago Santigi bought a Bible and changed his name. One day he stood before us all at supper and addressed our father directly with a deadpan face: ‘Doctor,’ he said, in Creole, ‘ah wan change me nam. Please, oona all for call me Simon Peter.’ He has remained resolute since: he withstands our teasing and corrects us every time we call him Santigi.

Santigi arrived at the same time as my stepmother four years before. No one knows who Santigi is, meaning that we don’t know his family or to whom he belongs. In a society built, layer upon infinite layer, on the rock of the extended family, Santigi can produce neither mother nor father, aunt nor uncle, sibling nor cousin. All he knows about himself is that he was born in a village called Gbendembu, near Makeni in the Northern Province. After giving birth his mother, who was without a husband, put herself to work digging diamonds in an illegal pit many miles away in Bujubu. She left her baby with neighbours and never returned to claim him. Much later news came that she had died. Once Santigi was of an age the couple who had taken care of him sent him to Magburaka to work for my stepmother’s family. He first met my stepmother Yabome off the train when she was a schoolgirl returning home for the holidays and he has been by her side ever since. Santigi often spends time with me, but not right now.

The rain and the day wear on. Sullay drops by at lunch time and stays at the back of the house whispering with Santigi and Morlai. Sullay has a deep, matt-black complexion, a strong jawbone and sharp eyes shaded beneath a rather brooding brow. His whole face is a study in intensity. He rarely smiles, but he is very kind. I stop by to say hello. Sullay doesn’t stay long.

Shortly before dusk the sound of the pickaxe stops. There are no more rocks to split. The man stands in his doorway out of the rain, dwarfed by the enormous pile of stones. He is listening and waiting for the truck to come back.

My stepmother drives up in her Volkswagen and goes through to the master bedroom. A little while later our father comes home, running through the rain.

I am restless. I fetch a game of bingo given to me for Christmas. It is an inexpensive set with small wooden discs upon which the characters are stamped, slightly irregularly, in red ink. Once I had unwrapped it I ignored it in favour of grander gifts, but this summer holiday I have rediscovered it and there have been several uproarious games involving the entire household.

We use matchsticks instead of money and today I ask Santigi to let me borrow the big box of Palm Tree matches. On the cover it has a drawing of an inky native stepping between two palm trees that reminds me of the pictures in an old book of Edward Lear poems I used to own. I empty the matches out and count them into neat red-tipped piles, one for each player.

Each card has a row of numbers along the top and another row of letters down the side. The caller must pick from corresponding bags of letters and numbers. As our games draw to a close everyone always starts to call the combinations they need to win. It’s the best part of the game. Some of us call our numbers out as loudly as possible; others jig with anticipation; Morlai half closes his eyelids and mutters the figures like an incantation. Whoever is calling blows his fingertips, plunges into the bag and with great theatrics calls the winning sequence. Since I own the set I get more turns to do this than anyone else.

The last time we reached this point our father was sitting in the front on the settee, his card covered with little torn squares of paper. He only needed one more to win but several others were in the same position. The atmosphere was intense, and yet there was one outcome in which we were all united: if you couldn’t win yourself the next best result was that our father should win. After a few games I had reached the point where I stopped wanting to win at all. Instead I wanted to protect my father from the disappointment I imagined he would feel if he lost.

I had been calling the numbers. My father needed a B and a five. He said: ‘Give me a B five, Am! B, five!’

Everyone was hopping about, waving, calling out. I took my time, drawing the process out for as long as possible. I closed my eyes. I wished for a B and a five. I put my hands in the bags simultaneously and pulled out two wooden discs.

‘B, five!’ I was astonished. I dropped the five back into the bag. No one believed I had actually drawn it. ‘I did, I did!’ I shouted and started to grow upset.

I saw my father watching me. He was not sure what to believe. He smiled as if to say, ‘You don’t have to do this, Am.’

Outside the truck has arrived. The two men are shovelling stones into the back. Afterwards the driver takes some money out of his pocket, flicks off two notes and hands them to the man who lives in the panbody, who nods in return but doesn’t smile. As the truck departs he leans on his shovel and watches.

On the coffee table I lay the bingo cards alongside the matchsticks. Outside the window a movement makes me look up. Two men have come up the outside stairs and are standing on the veranda looking in at me. I go out to see what they want. They are standing directly beneath the fluorescent strip light with their backs against the growing darkness; the white light casts downwards, bouncing off their cheeks and their foreheads, turning their eyes into dark orbs. I have never seen either man before but I sense something indefinably familiar about them. They are both slim, sinewy with close-cropped hair and they wear short-sleeved safari suits. One of them has on a pair of fake crocodile-skin shoes, of a type sold in the market. The shoes are badly scuffed. Who are these men? Many years later I will discover they are called Prince Ba and Newlove, names as surreal as stage names – or aliases. Their faces are impassive; they impart an air of unutterable menace. One of them tells me they are here to speak to the doctor.

My father appears directly and speaks to them for a few moments. My bingo set is beside me on the table ready for our game. He turns to me, sees that I am there and says: ‘I have to go with these two gentlemen now, Am.’

He walks ahead of the two men through the door and out onto the veranda. I see them pass the window.

‘Daddy, when are you coming back?’ I am unsettled.

My father half turns from me, seems to pass a hand across his eyes, takes a few more steps. Then he stops and faces me again. The two men wait and so do I. All my life my father has had a habit of chewing the ends of toothpicks. He always keeps a couple in his breast pocket. Now he says to me in a low voice: ‘Am, go and get me a couple of toothpicks.’

So I run to the sideboard on the other side of the room and find the little plastic toothpick dispenser. I shake out three or four toothpicks and hurry back to him. My face still holds the question. ‘Tell Mum I’ll be back later.’ These are the last words, the very last words he says to me. And he steps out into the rain.

At the bedroom door I call to my stepmother that my father is gone. A moment later she runs past me with Morlai right behind her. They run silently, eyes fixed ahead, and disappear into the crystal darkness. Through the rain I hear the sound of the car engine starting; the tyres splashing through the puddles.

The next morning we three children have our breakfast together, just the three of us. Outside the truck arrives and deposits another load of rocks. The rain is still coming down: it rains all through the day and the next night. It rains until October.

2

‘Daddy’s back!’ It was my brother. I had never seen him so excited, adult poise utterly cast aside. The early morning sun was bright and reflected in his face and eyes; his whole expression was radiant.

Everyone was smiling hard at me, Yabome and my sister. The same excitement glowed in their faces, too. Obviously, I was the last to find out and I stared up at them warily, not wanting to believe.

‘It’s a dream,’ I said at last.

‘No, it’s not. He’s really here.’

‘It’s a dream,’ I insisted. ‘I’ve had them before.’

Yabome put her arms across my shoulder and squeezed me. The others laughed; it was a beautiful, silver sound. ‘It’s true. He’s coming. Sheka and I are going to fetch him.’ And before I could shake the feeling of unreality that clung to me, they were gone.

I sat down again. Breakfast was laid at the big, wooden table. Memuna stayed behind with me, but she seemed to be taking events in her stride, as ever. Her calm was a source of envy for me. I, who became so easily heated and could be wound into a frenzy by my family.

When I was ten, after my father was taken away, I began to suffer migraines that remained undiagnosed for years. With the heels of my hands pressed against my temples I would run round the house making desperate circles, as though if I moved fast enough I might succeed in leaving the pain behind. Often there was nobody at home except for us three children, but if my stepmother or Santigi were in the house they’d take me to my bed, fetch me aspirins and try to subdue me, holding me by the shoulders and pushing me down against the pillows. It never worked: when they left I would cry and bang my head hard against the bare walls of the room.

I poured a glass of orange juice and drank half of it. I found myself dithering, unable even to find a place to put the glass. The table was laden with food and with the debris of a half-eaten breakfast. The room was part of a stately home, heavily furnished, oak-panelled and cold. I didn’t recognise the house, but it was familiar as the kind of old country house where I had gone to boarding school. Eventually others started to come down to breakfast: friends of mine, who joined us at the table. A red squirrel appeared at the window. It was large and had a strange, pointed face. To me it didn’t look much like a squirrel at all: the nose was too long, like a mongoose I once owned as a child.

When I heard my stepmother and brother come back, I started up from the table. The sound of their footsteps was on the stairs.

‘July the fourth,’ said Sheka. He was still breathless. ‘He’s going to come on July the fourth now!’ What the reason was for the delay nobody suggested. I thought he would be here, with us that very day. But I didn’t feel disappointed. Instead I felt this was how it should be: time to prepare after so many years. I left the dining room.

The huge staircase dipped away below me and the carpeted stairs swung round in a lush sweep. I put a hand on the banister, feeling the cool, varnished wood, one foot out onto the first step, and I began to walk down the stairs. My family were crowded around behind me. I could hear the rustling and feel them jogging each other. What on earth were they all doing?

As I turned the arc of the stairs I understood. The bearded figure standing in the hallway at the bottom wore a tan, short-sleeved suit, despite the cold. He had on polished brown shoes and a gold watch and although he was talking on the telephone with his back half turned towards me, I recognised him in that instant. I could still hear their voices behind me as I hurled myself down the stairs. He hadn’t seen me yet and I felt like a child again, my legs moving in great, galloping strides as I threw myself towards him. In that moment he turned round, smiling with surprise, and caught me in his one free arm.

‘Hey, hey. What’s all this?’ he said, as though I really was an overexcited ten-year-old. But I didn’t care. I put my arms around him and hugged him. I could feel everyone gathered around behind me. My face was against his shoulder and I squeezed my eyes shut.

When I opened them again the pale, grey London dawn had cast a triangle of light on the wooden floor. I could see the shadows of my clothes hanging from the pegs on the back of the half-open door. The blinds were still closed. On the chair by my bedside the faint glow of the alarm clock lit the shapes of a pencil, paper, a lip balm, a book and a wooden box. The sheet below me was wrinkled, cold with sweat.

Once a year, twice at the very most, the dreams had grown fewer as the decades passed. Sometimes I dreamed he came back from living in a far away country, that he had been looking for us, but couldn’t find us. Other times I dreamed that he had been in hiding and everyone around him sworn to secrecy. I’m sorry, Am, he’d say with a smile. We wanted to tell you sooner. Yes, the dreams came less frequently now, but despite the twenty-five years that had passed, they had never ceased entirely.

3

All my life I have harboured memories, tried to piece together scraps of truth and make sense of fragmented images. For as long as I can remember my world was one of parallel realities. There were the official truths versus my private memories, the propaganda of history books against untold stories; there were judgements and then there were facts, adult stances and the clarity of the child’s vision; their version, my version.

There were times, a summer holiday or a few months, when I lived my childhood as a seamless dream where time ebbed like the tide and there was nothing to break the rhythm. But for the most part that was not so. Over and over the delicate membrane of my sphere would be broken and I tumbled out of my cocoon into the outside world.

Afterwards no one explained. People imagined these were things children shouldn’t know, or they did not think we had a right to know. We were encouraged to forget, dissuaded from asking. Gradually I learned to spy: I eavesdropped on adult conversations, rifled hidden papers, devised lines of questioning and I began to build onto my fragments layers of truth. And as I did so I discovered how deep the lies went.

I grew older, became a journalist and made a living using the skills I spent my childhood honing. All the time I hoarded my recollections, guarding them carefully against the lies: lies that hardened, spread and became ever more entrenched.

Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?

In the African oral tradition great events and insignificant moments, the ordinary and the extraordinary, are notches on the same wheel. They exist in relation to each other. The little occurrences are as important as the grand designs: the threads are the texture of truth that separate man-made myth from fact. They are the testimonies; the words of history’s eyewitnesses.

I remember cockroaches.

The tiniest of tickles across my toes made me look down. Early morning and I stood alone, chin high to the bathroom sink, both taps running. The cockroach was standing next to me and his sweeping, chestnut antennae brushed my foot in a way that seemed remarkably intimate, as though he imagined we were friends. Glossy wings tucked flat across his back; legs angled outward below the armoured undercarriage; the jaws which dominated his minuscule head worked steadily like a toothless old man. I kept my foot still, one eye on my flat-backed companion, while I reached for the tooth mug. As fast as I could manage I up-ended the beaker, pulled my foot away and trapped the cockroach under the glass. It sat unperturbed, as at home as a fish in an aquarium.

By the end of the day there were half a dozen inverted objects on the floor around the house: two china cups in the sitting room; a plastic toy cooking pot and a second glass in the hallway; and in the bathroom a toilet roll with a wad of paper wedged into the top. They were put there by the three of us: my sister, my brother and me, and we waited for our father to come in. This was our daily routine. When he arrived he went round the house picking up each object and dispatching the creature beneath, while we followed behind gazing at him with a mixture of disgust and admiration.

You could hear the crack and crunch of the cockroach as its skeleton gave way underfoot, pale innards spurted out. We were in awe at the way this grotesque feature didn’t seem to bother our father, who would squash a cockroach with his bare feet. If you caught him at a particular time, when he was still in his pyjamas in the morning, say, and asked him to kill a cockroach for you, he would go right ahead and stamp on it with his naked feet.

My mother had a story about cockroaches that took place in the same house. We’d just moved up-country, where my parents planned to set up a clinic, the only one for hundreds of miles. For several months my father had scouted the regions looking for a suitable spot and finally settled on Koidu, three hundred miles to the east, right on the border with Guinea, in the heart of the diamond-mining region. He rented a rambling bungalow with several wings, set within its own compound, with the idea of turning one wing into a ward for in-patients and living in the others. My mother and we three children left our noisy, downtown flat in Freetown and flew to Koidu in a plane that bounced from town to town across the interior of the country, while my father drove up in our Austin with the dogs and the luggage.

When we arrived it was late into the night. My parents stacked our belongings in the main room and my mother set up cots for us in one of the bedrooms, camp beds for my father and herself in another. In the early hours of the morning, when it was still black, she awoke to the sound of my cries. She rose and came to me, turning on the lights as she passed through the house. She soothed me and returned me to my cot. Just as she was back in her bed and falling asleep again she heard me crying. This happened three times.

The fourth time she didn’t bother to turn on the lights. She paused at the door to my room and as she looked around she saw that the walls seemed to be moving. My mother decided that she must be exhausted or else still dreaming and lingered a while in the dark at the bedroom door. Yet beneath her gaze the entire room seemed to have lost density: ceiling, floor, walls, even my cot heaved. Her baby was still shrieking. She flicked the light switch. Nothing. Turned it off and waited. Slowly the walls turned fluid again. She ran to fetch her husband, who was still sleeping deeply on his camp bed. As they stood at the door of my room, she showed him what she had seen, flipping the lights on and off.

He saw it, too. He rubbed his face, yawning widely. ‘Cockroaches,’ he said, and he turned to go back to bed.

My father’s feet had strong, yellowish soles. He told us that he didn’t own a pair of shoes until he went away to secondary school, and up until that time he had to walk five miles to classes and back again. This deeply impressed us, at the first telling. I disliked wearing shoes and at first I assumed the story’s purpose was to let us know that shoes didn’t matter. After all, my father managed without. Both of us had the same broad, long, flat feet: African feet. While I was growing my feet shot out first, ahead of the rest of my body. By the time I was eleven they were size seven and I barely cleared five foot. I was an L-shaped child.

In fact, our father’s story was a multipurpose parable with ever-extending dimensions of meaning. At its very simplest it was a warning against the dangers of catching hookworm by wandering outside without shoes on. I learned that one the hard way. They burrowed through the skin on the soles of my feet and made a home in my bowels.

Then the story was an inducement to be grateful for what you had. My father grew up in the villages, where life was very harsh indeed. There were no hospitals and very few schools. When Ndora, my grandmother, was sick the family had to take her all the way to Rotifunk, on the other side of the country, where there was a mission hospital. In Freetown there were several hospitals to serve the British administrators and their Creole civil servants, but these were not open to people from the country. They walked most of the way, carrying pots of food and sleeping mats on their heads. When they got to the hospital, amenities there were so basic that the doctors could not come up with a diagnosis. So they shrugged and sent her away, telling the relatives to bring her back if she got any worse. As if that were possible.

Five months later she died, leaving a six-month-old baby girl and her two beloved boys. Our father was five years old then. That evening as he was sitting among the men at the back of one of the houses he heard a high-pitched, rhythmic wail coming from the street. It was a Bondu elder, speaker for the secret society of women, and she was holding a broom up to the sky. That was the sign that one of the village women had died. A fragment of her song came across: ‘…the one from Rothomgbai’ – my grandmother’s village. Then he knew Ndora was gone.

Soon afterwards, our father ended up being the only person in his entire family to go to school just because his mother had died. The missionaries had opened a school nearby in Mamunta. The days passed and nobody came to enrol their children in the new school, so the missionaries approached the chief, who listened to what they had to say and then passed an edict: each household from the villages neighbouring Mamunta would volunteer one child to the new school. None of the women wanted her son to be chosen. People were very suspicious of education back then; they said that people who went to school never came back. With no mother to defend his interests my father was elected to go. Fourteen years later, when he left for Britain to become a doctor, he thanked them and they were pleased they were right. See, they said, he’s leaving for ever, as we knew he would. This was the final meaning of my father’s story: it was about the value of education and not shoes at all. Do well in school and thank God you had an education, because lots of people don’t even know its value.

In fact the new school was closed within the year after the head teacher was caught having an affair with one of the paramount chief’s wives. The headmaster was fined, which was the correct punishment. But the cuckolded chief wasn’t satisfied and he closed the school down as well, saying that there would be no more white man’s education in Mamunta. Privately Chief Masamunta, who was also my father’s uncle, arranged for his own two sons and his nephew to be transferred to another mission school in Makeni some miles away.

My mother didn’t have African feet like ours. She had European feet. They were similar in the sense that they were quite big, but the arches were high and the soles smooth and thin and pale as paper. I had my father’s feet but, on the matter of cockroaches, my mother’s western sensibilities.

Gradually the cockroaches moved on as we swept the house out, washed cupboards down and covered the thick green and blue gloss on the walls with white emulsion. We hired a local man to help us with the work, and under our mother’s instruction he cut down branches from the trees and pushed them into the earth around the edges of the compound to protect the house from the churning dust of the road. When the rains came the branches flourished miraculously and our house was enclosed in an elegant screen of trees; we were all astonished and delighted, my mother as much as the rest of us.

My father bought iron beds and mattresses for the maternity ward and my mother donated my cot for the newborn babies. Within a very short time word got around that the clinic had opened and new patients began to arrive; every day the line of people trailed out of the waiting area and onto our veranda.

Our father worked ever longer hours. He ran two clinics in the centre of town – one for prescriptions, the other for minor surgical procedures: cataracts, circumcisions and the like. He tried hard to persuade people to bring their boys to him, instead of cutting the foreskin the traditional way, by a cleric or medicine man who tugged on it three times before slicing the skin off with an unsheathed blade. Certain days were set aside for circumcisions and sometimes fathers arrived from the countryside with six or seven boys of different ages. The obstetrics clinic was at the house, so my father could be on hand for those women whose babies came at night.

There was no nurse, so our mother helped. She held the women’s hands while they were in labour, especially the Fula women, who had to endure childbirth in silence. They were also supposed to give birth alone and by the time their relatives forced themselves to break their own traditions and bring them to the clinic the women often didn’t make it. Other times my mother monitored heart and blood pressure when an anaesthetic had to be administered; often my father just wanted my mother to stay in the room for propriety’s sake, so few of the women had ever been to a gynaecologist before.

When she wasn’t helping out in the clinic, or in her part-time job at the Volkswagen franchise in town, my mother sang: ‘“Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance,” said he.’ Her mighty voice was the loudest, purest sound I had ever heard; it ran through my body with a shiver, like a cold drink on a hot day. She sang sitting cross-legged with her guitar balanced on her knee, in a cotton dress she’d made herself, hair hanging loose.

We sang too, after a fashion, like three baby crows gathered around a songbird: ‘I danced for the scribe and the far-thest-seas, but they would not dance and they would not follow me.’

She could practically sit on her hair; it was thick, naturally bleached by the Tropics and people in Sierra Leone marvelled at it. One of my aunts thought she must iron it straight and asked to borrow her hot tongs. My father used to have fun taking several strands and tying them into a knot to demonstrate how they unfurled in an instant, sliding like wet ice across glass. The trick was quite a crowd-pleaser among our African relatives, who came forward one at a time and asked to touch it.

Years later, when she no longer lived with us, her hairstyles became the test of memory between us children. ‘Can you remember Real Mum when her hair was long?’ we asked each other. Around the time she and my father split she cut her hair short. If you remembered her when she pulled it into a doughnut shape on the top of her head, or let it dry in crinkly waves down her back, then you remembered a time when our parents were together.

For me the image of her face and her hairstyles faded and brightened through the years. But her voice: I never, ever forgot the sound of her voice.

4

They met at a Christmas dance in 1959. My father was a third-year medical student at Aberdeen University and my mother was in her final sixth-form year at the Aberdeen Academy and a volunteer at the British Council. She wore her hair in a French plait, a tight-waisted skirt that made the best of her voluptuous figure and winkle pickers on her feet.

My father was just five foot eight; one of those people everyone imagines to be a great deal taller. In his student photograph he wears a well-cut suit, narrow in the leg and lapel, in the style of the sixties. His dark skin glows against the starched white cuffs and collar. The expression in his eyes is both amused and utterly self-possessed. Scattered like freckles across his cheeks and nose are dozens of small round scars, remnants of a childhood battle with smallpox. Yet the scars, like his height, were obscured by his own self-confidence. He had an eye for attractive women and he crossed the room to her: ‘I’m Mohamed.’ He extended his hand. ‘And you are…?’

Maureen Margaret Christison was a local girl, raised all of her nineteen years in Aberdeen. Her father was a clerk in a travel agency and a strict Presbyterian; her mother, dark-eyed and anxious, had a job in a milliner’s until she began to have babies and slowly developed agoraphobia. Maureen was smart, attractive of a strong, open type that in Scotland they call bonny. The confines of home life were as suffocating to the daughter as they were comforting to her mother. Maureen found herself drawn on many nights to the British Council, to the events held for overseas students which she volunteered to help organise.

For the African students Britain was a new and demanding experience. Many kept to themselves, finding safety in numbers. They were all on government scholarships – men and women chosen to lead their countries one day soon across the post-independence horizon towards a new Africa where they would design bridges, run schools, plan towns, drain swamps, build hospitals or, as likely, become desk-bound bureaucrats.

When he was fourteen my father had won a scholarship to Bo School. The Eton of the protectorate of Sierra Leone was established by the British in order to educate the sons of chiefs to take their place in Britain’s empire. He spent seven years there, wearing a white uniform, taught by English masters. In his last year he became head boy and while he was waiting for the results of his scholarship application to read medicine in the UK he taught the junior years. Alongside his formal education the years at Bo gave him an understanding of the men who ruled his country and their values and their history, or at least the version taught in England’s public schools.

Before they boarded a cargo ship bound for Liverpool at Freetown’s docks, the only understanding of Britain most new pioneers possessed was through their first British Council induction seminar. The arrivals from the provinces were herded into a darkened hall, where they watched reels of black and white short films entitled An Introduction to British Life and Culture.

In one short film, Lost in the Countryside, two young Africans in old-fashioned tweed suits amble through a pastoral scene. Their skin is so dark they almost look like they’re white actors in blackface, and their hair is brushed straight upwards. Suddenly they realise they can’t find their way back and a crescendo of mishaps parallels their mounting panic. When they emerge from a haystack pulling strands from their hair an authoritative voice cuts in: ‘If you become lost in the countryside do not panic. Find a road. Locate a bus stop. Join the queue [and there, in the middle of nowhere was a line of people]. A bus will arrive, board it and return to the town.’ The film ends with the Africans looking mightily relieved sitting on the bus, surrounded by smiling locals.

They were given a map of the London Underground, a train timetable, and a talk on expected etiquette, including how to behave in a British home. Visits should be undertaken on invitation only. Never walk into a British household and sit in the chair belonging to the man of the house. In Britain visitors are expected to maintain a flow of conversation. It is polite to decline a second helping of food. And on it went.

So very different from the African household in which I was raised. On the weekends and even the weekdays my aunts and uncles appeared at all hours and sat on the veranda for lengthy periods, just keeping company. They talked for just as long as someone had something to say and then lapsed into companionable silence. Every now and again one of my aunts would break the silence to begin the routine of greetings all over again. When they’d finished, people would snort with serene satisfaction; my aunts would adjust their head-dresses and lappas; and settle even more deeply into themselves. Conversation is a whim, not an art. Of me no one expected anything except a respectful silence and the appearance of listening. If I’d begun to try to amuse them with stories and precocious attempts at conversation, the way children in England did, they would have exchanged sly glances. ‘How dis pickin dae talk so!’

In time, very often when most people had already been there for half the morning, the cook would begin to prepare food. I’d be given a plate with a man-sized helping and if it was a special occasion we were all expected to go back time and time again to taste each dish: mounds of jollof rice, cooked in tomatoes so that the rice turned pink, sour sour or stewed sorrel, okra stew, chicken fried with fresh Scotch bonnet peppers, deep-fried plantains. At the end of the day half the visitors left carrying a tin dish wrapped in cloths to take home for the rest of the family.

From Freetown to Liverpool, then by train to Aberdeen, where the green and ochre of Africa was replaced by shades of blue and grey. In winter the sky over northern Scotland turned to black and the granite of the buildings glittered like silver. And the cold, it was alive! It stung legs, bit cheeks, pinched fingers and toes. It was like going for a swim and being caught in a flurry of jellyfish. The newest arrivals were always obvious: they wore old-styled cotton suits made by their provincial tailors, neither customer nor tailor imagining for a moment that they would not be thick enough to stand the coolest weather. By the end of the first week their smart new suits were packed away in tin trunks for good.

No traveller arrived in Britain from Africa without being suitably awed by his first sight of a terraced row. The houses were built in a single row that ran the entire length of the street like a set of dentures. A rich man in Africa builds his house to stand out from every house around it. In Britain people owned their homes, but all the houses looked the same. A story was told of an undergraduate on his first day in Aberdeen who was taken to his friend’s student digs in a terraced row. He thought his friend must have made good and exclaimed on the length of the house. When the others laughed and pointed out that the building was in fact many houses, he was crestfallen. Now the house began to looked cramped. But once you were inside you saw there were more rooms than you could ever guess at from the narrow frontage.

My father discovered the sin of sweet things for the first time in his life, munching his way through packets of Opal Fruits. Muslim or not, his newly awakened sweet tooth extended to an enthusiasm for sweet alcoholic drinks: sherry or brandy mixed with ginger ale. In Aberdeen he had his first toothache, followed by his first visit to the dentist and his first filling.

The short, round African vowels that fell off the front of his tongue moved further back in his throat and lengthened into local Aberdonian rhythms; he began to draw out his ‘e’s, to emphasise his ‘r’s and then to roll them; and finally he adopted the local idiom, talked about patients turning ill and taking scarlet fever, asked them where they stayed. For the rest of his life he spoke with a curious hybrid accent that puzzled some and brought a smile to the lips of others.

In his first year as a student my father spent much of his time on his own, walking up to his chemistry and biology lectures in the Old University buildings in the north of the city. The next year there was a batch of new arrivals from Sierra Leone: Bernard Frazer, a confident Creole, was wealthy enough to fly to Britain when he started at university (generations of his family had been educated in the UK); Dan Sama, a Mende also from Sierra Leone, was dark and serious and had a long-term love affair with a Scottish student. There was Charlie Renner, who sped around Aberdeen in a green Mini; and the Guineans Henry Blankson and David Anamudu. David’s square face and glasses earned him the nickname ‘Mr TV’ and he skated fearlessly over the wet, black cobblestones on a Vespa scooter. They were all studying medicine.

That first winter the wind gusted in from the North Sea, swirled around the harbour like a furious sea god and rushed straight up Union Street in the centre of town. Just when my father thought the weather couldn’t possibly get any worse, it snowed until the black city turned white, like a negative of a photograph. The next day the sun shone strongly for the first time in weeks and the sky was like a stretched sheet of sapphire silk, the colour of the Atlantic.

The unpredictable northern European weather systems left the West African students battered and freezing; they felt like pioneers battling up the north face of the city; Michelin men dressed in so many layers of sweaters. At home they spent the best part of their grant money on shillings for the gas and at night they slept with their overcoats over the counterpane.

In Sierra Leone the rains begin on 1 May every year. From then on it rains at eleven o’clock every night, gradually moving forward in the day until the rain falls almost continuously. As the season advances, so the rain recedes at exactly the same pace. Next the sun shines for seven months until the clouds come back again. On 2 May, if for some reason it did not rain the night before, people in the marketplace might remark, ‘The rains are late this year, not so?’ This, in Sierra Leone, is what passes for a conversation about the weather.

Few of the African students could afford to go home for the holidays. They spent Christmas in each other’s company, but New Year was a very different matter. My father and his friends suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of dozens of invitations from their neighbours; they accepted them all and went from house to house downing malt whiskies, enjoying their sudden popularity. The young doctors were already accustomed to locals who crept up to them in the street, reaching out furtively to touch their black skin – for luck, they explained apologetically if they were caught out. Any of the Africans who thought they’d have a quiet night at home spent the early hours of New Year’s morning answering the doorbell to revellers hoping to win a little luck in the coming year by catching sight of a black face on Hogmanay.

Mohamed and Maureen were together for two years before her father passed them on the other side of Union Street one afternoon. When she arrived home she found him maroon with rage. He told his daughter that he would not tolerate her seeing or being seen with a black man.

Later, in the little attic flat my father shared with Dan Sama, he listened to an account of the scene from my tearful mother and knew exactly what to do. ‘I’ll call on your father at home,’ he told her, confident he could put things right.

Gairn Terrace is a row of plain semi-detached houses built on the edge of Aberdeen close to the river Dee and the road to Perth. There is nothing to distinguish one house from the other, except the colour of the woodwork that brightens pebbledash facades the colour and texture of porridge. The Christisons’ window frames were painted pale yellow and two net-curtained windows faced the street, one above and one below. Curiously, in a world in which appearances mattered, the houses were built with no proper front door, just an entrance reached by a dark side passage.

When my mother was growing up there was an army training ground opposite and, farther on, a crater where a fighter plane had been downed during the war, in which wild blueberries grew. In 1935 Robert Christison bought one of the new houses for four hundred and twenty pounds and from then on he kept three boxes on the dresser. For the next eighteen years he put two and sixpence into each one every Friday to pay for the mortgage, insurance and bills. In all respects life in number 38 was equally regimented.

My grandfather’s chair was closest to the fire and faced the bay window onto the street. To the left was the wireless, which replaced the old crystal set after the war. It was a magnificent piece, in two-tone polished mahogany, and stood about three and a half feet tall, occupying the entire corner of the room. From his place my grandfather could reach it comfortably. Its prime location was really the only outstanding feature of my grandfather’s chair, which was just one part of a three-piece suite, upholstered in rust and sufficiently yet not excessively comfortable. A lace-edged antimacassar covered the headrest. My father, wearing a suit and tie, took the chair opposite.

My mother and grandmother stayed in the kitchen – Maureen preparing the tea things and Lydia smoking Woodbines – while my father asked Mr Christison’s permission to continue seeing his daughter. Mr Christison listened, though not with his lean, sparse body nor with his brisk blue eyes; he sat with his arms crossed and never once looked my father in the eye, but he didn’t interrupt either. My father spoke fluidly and directly, describing his many aspirations, including his plans to specialise in obstetrics.

Mr Christison was not impressed by the black man’s credentials. Nor did he like his forthright manner. ‘Arrogant’ is how he would dismiss him later. He stated his position, an entirely simple one: ‘I’m not prejudiced. I’m sure you’ve done well enough. But I won’t have Maureen going about town with any man of a different colour. It’s my view you stick to your own. There are black women for black men, Chinese women for Chinamen and, for all I care, green women for green men.’

‘Forgive me, sir, but if Maureen dated a teddy boy, would that be all right…as long as he was white?’

‘I wouldn’t tolerate that either, as a matter of fact. But that’s as much as I have to say to you on the matter.’

Mr Christison stood up, shaking the newspaper from his lap. He was much taller than my father; he once tried out for the Rhodesian police. He said: ‘Thank you for stopping by.’ Their eyes still did not meet and he excused himself from the room.

While the visitor was still in the house Mr Christison remained outside, standing on the steep slope of his garden digging at his rhubarb. His wife fed the visitor angel cakes and tea and chattered nervously all the while. If her husband was unimpressed, Lydia Christison was secretly delighted by Maureen’s African doctor, who in that hour charmed her entirely. For years afterwards she defied her husband, paying visits to her daughter carrying petits fours and children’s clothes, and allowing my mother and her little ones back for hot baths in the years we lived without a bathroom.

Afterwards my father told my mother what had transpired in his conversation with my grandfather. And I can imagine exactly how my grandfather behaved during the exchange, because almost forty years later, shortly before he died, he was the same way with me when I asked him about the day he met my father for the first and only time. There we sat in the very same room, the decor barely changed in all that time. A clown doll made by my grandmother after she had her stroke sat on an occasional table. A set of tiny ornamental sabres I used to play with as a child had gone. Those were the only differences I could see. He sat in his chair and I, cross-legged on the floor, my back leaning on the chair where my father had sat. Between us on the leather pouf was a great pile of photographs and a tape recorder.

My grandfather was preparing to die: emptying drawers, sorting through closets; he had even finally given away my grandmother’s clothes. The next day the two of us took a trip up the coast towards Inverness. By then he was over ninety, had trouble walking and had been forced to stop driving, but he read the map and worked out different routes there and back that carried us through the finest scenery. On the way up we stopped at a roadside tea room – a lodge, he called it – and told me how he used to bring my grandmother there. Among the trinkets for sale I found a pretty rococo coffee cup and saucer, but when I showed it to him he called it tat and said I was daft to want to buy it.

In the morning I stopped by Gairn Terrace to say goodbye: I was on my way back to London. He called me upstairs, to one of the bedrooms. Inside, piled on the bed were dozens of different household objects: framed pictures, coat hangers, an old heater. He handed me four yellow and black coffee cups and a set of tea cups in the same florid style as the single coffee cup I had chosen at the lodge. They were my grandparents’ wedding gifts, entirely unused in almost seventy years.

I smiled and kissed him and he hugged me back. Three months later I was up in Aberdeen again, in the snow and sleet, this time for his funeral.

The end of my father’s first year in Scotland coincided with the culmination in Ghana in 1957 of years of brokering between the Ghanaian leaders and British rulers over a new constitution which would bring self-government to the colony. After the Second World War Britain had promised her colonies independence in return for their military assistance. Hundreds of thousands of black and brown soldiers died and, though India was granted independence in 1947, the African nations remained colonies. Virtually overlooked by the Marshall Plan, which gave millions to rebuild Europe and the Far East, impoverished by the low, fixed prices paid for cash crops while European middlemen grew fat, African leaders began to rally their people against the inequity of colonial rule.

In Ghana the independence movement was led by a charismatic former teacher called Kwame Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist who had been imprisoned for several years by the British. Nkrumah was Scottish-educated, and during the 1940s a leader in the influential West African Students’ Union. It was inside WASU that the seeds of pan-Africanism and anti-colonial politics germinated, fuelled by the hostility of British society and the humiliation of the colour bar. Later these sentiments were re-imported to Africa, where they ultimately flowered in rebellion.

All the African students watched and waited as one after another the colonies were granted independence. Shortly after my parents met, Nigeria celebrated its break from the empire, alongside thirteen French colonies – practically the entire Francophone empire, with the exception of Algeria, which remained sunk in a bitter and frustrating war of liberation. For the West African states autonomy was not so much a question of if as when, and the anticipation ran like a fever through the exiled students.

Gradually the topic began to dominate every gathering; people turned the record player off at parties the better to be heard and huddled over the paraffin heaters in each other’s apartments late into the frosty night. For Maureen the talk soon palled. Mohamed, on the other hand, was already deeply politically committed, a member of the British Labour Party and president of the local chapter of the West African Students’ Union – although in truth Aberdeen was never able to boast more than a handful of members.

In the years before full independence was finally granted Sierra Leone had moved slowly towards self-government, a wind of change that revealed schisms hidden under the sand of white rule. In Freetown the Creoles had fought for self-rule since the founding of the colony by the Nova Scotian blacks in 1792. They were former slaves who fought on the side of the British in the American War of Independence. After the American victory they were forced to emigrate to the British settlement of Nova Scotia in Canada and thence given passage to Sierra Leone with the promise of land and freedom. But Britain double-crossed them: Freetown was given first to the profiteering Sierra Leone Company and later turned into a crown colony. A hundred years on, during the scramble for Africa, the rest of the country was brought under British protection.

Freetown soon flourished. In the fifty years up to 1900 the city, holding onto the south-westerly curve of the continent, became known as the Athens of Africa. The Creole emphasis was on education and professional achievement, their aspirations essentially European. They looked outward, across the sea, rather than inward to the hinterland, sending their children to Britain to be educated. Freetown had a flourishing free press; the first university in Africa founded at Fourah Bay; and at that time there were more children in school in the colony than in England itself. When Britain became the dominant colonial power they looked to the Creoles, in their starched bibs and laced boots, to fill positions in civil service administrations throughout West Africa.

On the whole the Creoles did not view themselves as Africans. They opposed the creation of a single state of Sierra Leone and objected to the right of people from the protectorate to sit on a new post-war legislative council in Freetown. The Creoles already enjoyed separate status as British subjects and they wanted this fact to be acknowledged in any new constitution, a wish that was ignored by Britain. In 1957 Sir Milton Margai, an elderly doctor from the provinces, successfully led a broad-based coalition to become the country’s first prime minister; a year later all British officials relinquished their government posts.

During the university vacations most of the African students took the train to Norfolk and worked in the Smedley pea factory, filling and labelling cans. At night they slept together in long dormitories of bunk beds, up to a hundred young men side by side, above and below. The factory was some way out of town, and evenings were quiet. Among the gathered students from universities all over the country and as many different nations, talk turned frequently to the question of independence.

At that time most of the African students studying in Britain were still young men from privileged families, town dwellers. Mohamed Forna was the first Sierra Leonean from the provinces to be admitted to Aberdeen University. Sitting on a suitcase at the end of his bed, Mohamed described existence in rural Africa, the total absence of basic life-giving amenities, the yawning disparity between the city and the people of the provinces. He was convinced that Africa’s poorest were already being cut out of the future.

When the Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba was murdered, my father cried. At the time the popular leader’s death was blamed on Katangan secessionists led by Moise Tshombe; not until decades later was it actually revealed to be the work of the CIA and the Belgian government, who had a deal with Tshombe to exploit the vast mineral resources of Katanga. It was the only time anyone heard my father swear. ‘Moise Tshombe is a fucker!’ He shook his head in despair.

He joined the British Labour Party and began to attend student meetings regularly. Even among his peers he had a reputation as a firebrand. One evening Bernard Frazer, who took a more languid view, challenged Mohamed. If he thought all the politicians back home were doing such a poor job, why didn’t he run the country himself? I will, replied his friend, rising to the provocation, if I have to.

In 1960 a series of meetings began to be held in London to agree a new fully independent constitution for Sierra Leone. As a representative of one of the student unions, my father was invited to meet the Sierra Leonean delegates. They gathered in the tense and heady atmosphere of Lancaster House to weave a constitutional framework for the future.

‘Uncle Sam’ was a one-time church minister in Freetown who arrived in Britain in the 1930s to train as a doctor. He flunked and switched to law; flunked that too. With the last of his savings he managed to buy a four-storey house in Paddington and he set about restoring it in a haphazard manner. In the meantime he lived quite well renting out rooms to a tidal population of students. Uncle Sam’s house was where most young men from Sierra Leone who were short of cash but wanted to see the big city ended up staying.

What Sam made on the house he regularly lost on the horses and at those times he would go round the house emptying gas and electricity meters of shillings, and shrug soulfully at the bitter complaints of his young tenants.

Some years back Sam won the love of Dora Fossey, an English hospital matron who lived several doors down and regularly bailed him out of his financial straits. Dora and Sam never dared to marry or even to go out in public more than once in a while. Instead, when her shift at St Mary’s ended Dora spent every evening at Sam’s, watching television and cooking him English meals. Anyone who knew no better would imagine they had been married for years, but their relationship was conducted entirely within the narrow world of the crumbling West London terrace.

One afternoon Mohamed came back to Uncle Sam’s to find one of his many cousins standing in the kitchen. Brima Sesay, nephew of Chief Masamunta, was a nursing student making a tour of the country. Neither could believe the luck of the coincidence and they crossed the floor to embrace. Afterwards Brima took Mohamed to Shepherd’s Bush market, where they bought slippery okra, palm oil, tiny stinging scarlet peppers and blackened, smoked grouper. That night they stayed in with Uncle Sam and feasted on rice and plassas. They hadn’t seen each other since they used to play on the Fornas’ farm during the school holidays. They had lost touch when my father was eleven, at which point one of his teachers had asked the family permission to take him away to the south as a ward in order to complete his education. Soon afterwards Brima had been adopted into a group of missionaries who brought him to England.

Brima called my father Moses, explaining to a mystified Dora how the mission teachers went round the class on the first day of school changing the names of the children for their own convenience. Around the same time my father chose his birthday: November, which coincided with tarokans. The date, the 25th, he decided on himself. A name the bureaucrats could spell and a date of birth: these were the first essentials on the path to westernisation. My father dropped Moses the day he left the primary school; but Brima used both his names: Alfred Brima.

Days later my father caught the train from King’s Cross back north and Brima went on to Birmingham. When Alfred Brima was back at college in Portsmouth, a letter arrived. It was from Mohamed and contained bad news. ‘Remember Maureen, the girl I told you about?’ Mohamed wrote. ‘A terrible thing has happened. She is pregnant.’

Mohamed wanted advice from his cousin, someone who knew the family. He had thoughts of marriage but worried about Maureen’s father who, he supposed, would detest this solution as much as any other. His greatest fear was that Mr Christison would report him to the university authorities and try to have his scholarship revoked. Then there was the matter of the Fornas. He remembered the Conteh cousins who returned from Britain, one after the other, each with a white wife, and the indignation and upset that the women managed to provoke within the family.

Brima didn’t hesitate. Marry her, he said. The older members of the family aren’t going to live for ever. But, he warned, you must make sure the family never have reason to resent her. And if you take her from her own country, to a place where she is a stranger, you will have to be utterly loyal to her, too.

Maureen and Mohamed married at the register office in Union Street on 28 March 1961. She was nineteen years old and he was twenty-five. Charlie Renner acted as a witness and Dan Sama was my father’s best man. Dan’s Scottish girlfriend had given birth the month before, but she had disappeared back to her family and given the child up. She dropped her classes; no one had laid eyes on her since. Bernard Frazer came along and proposed several toasts in the Union building after the ceremony.

On her wedding day my mother, dressed in a pale-blue suit, left Gairn Terrace with a packed suitcase in her hand. She didn’t tell her parents she was getting married, though she found out many years later that they already knew because someone had seen the banns up on the board in town. But within the house no one spoke of it.

One month later, in April, the British flag was lowered in Sierra Leone and replaced by the green, white and blue tricolour. My father organised a sherry party in the beautiful stone British Council building in the harbour at Aberdeen. At the end of the evening, flamboyantly drunk, he staggered away under the weight of several crates, declaring there was far too much sherry to leave behind. On the top floor of the bus he lit six cigarettes and smoked them all, three in each hand. Someone teased that he wasn’t even a smoker. ‘I’m smoking the smoke of freedom, man.’ He blew out great gusts of smoke. ‘I’m smoking the smoke of freedom.’

At the end of the evening my mother, pregnant and sober, pushed him up the stairs while he leaned back so far he was almost horizontal. Then she put him to bed with a bucket by his side.

5

My mother was one of the only white people in Koidu. The only other one I ever saw was her boss at the Volkswagen franchise, Franz Stein from Bischofstauberville in Germany. One day, soon after we arrived to live in the town, my mother appeared in his showroom to buy her first car, a sky-blue Beetle. Franz Stein was just about to lose the bank manager’s wife, who did the accounts for him, and so he asked my mother if she wanted a job. Our clinic had barely opened and we could do with the money, so she agreed.

In the mornings, after we dropped Sheka and Memuna at school at the Catholic Mission, my mother left me at home in the care of my cousin and namesake Big Aminatta while she worked at the garage calculating the repair bills. The mechanics told her how many men had worked on a car and for how long. Then she added up the cost of the parts and computed the tax; when the bills were paid she totted the figures up exactly in a big accounts book.

In addition to Volkswagens the showroom also sold Porsches – at least in theory. The same car was on display the entire time we lived in Koidu. Every day people came inside to look at it, but no one ever wanted to buy it. There was barely a few inches’ clearance beneath the low-slung undercarriage, little use in a town which could not boast a single tarmacked road. But Franz Stein said he kept it there, buffed and polished and looking about as improbable as a pair of stilettos on a nomad, because it attracted so many people into the showroom.

In the afternoon my mother drove around town in her car asking people to pay their invoices for the clinic and sometimes I was allowed to accompany her. We drove from house to house, along the corrugated roads, rocking up and down on the car’s springy suspension.

In the 1920s Koidu was a rural village of no more than a hundred or so people, built around an intersection of roads heading east and south, in the cup between the Nimini and Gori hills. The people who lived there were mostly farmers, descendants of the same clan, who had lived identical lives for generations.

Almost overnight during the 1950s the population of the tiny hamlet flashed to twelve thousand as people converged from all over the country, drawn by a silent siren’s call. Government clerks left their desks in Freetown and took to the road; teachers walked out of the classrooms to dig in the mud of river beds; so many farmers abandoned the fields that the price of rice rocketed. Within months there were nationwide riots.

Diamonds. They washed up in the water of streams, hid in the soft silt beds, even glinted underfoot on the roads and pathways. It was said that in Koidu people didn’t look where they were going but walked everywhere with their heads bent down, gaze permanently trawling the ground for stones; people called it the ‘Koidu crouch’. Eventually, the government was forced to declare an emergency and even offer to raise salaries to woo their civil servants back.

In many ways Koidu was like a town in the old Wild West. The cinema even had a bullet hole in the middle of the screen where someone in the audience lost patience and shot the baddie. There was only one road that constituted the town; it had a single mosque; next door to this was the nightclub – really just a bar selling beer and spirits – and farther on a few Lebanese-owned shops.

The Lebanese merchants were very sociable and always gave a tiny cup of coffee with cardamom and a piece of baklava to my mother, and a Fanta to me, while they went over the doctor’s bill. When time came to pay, my mother told me, they always asked for ten per cent off, sometimes twenty. In the beginning she felt obliged to agree because they had been so hospitable, but after a short while she got into the practice of adding ten per cent before she presented the bill. The whole transaction was executed with displays of excellent humour, smiles, more sweet, black coffee and, for me, another fizzy drink.

My mother told me a story about her visits to our Lebanese clients. They always pressed her to accept a drink, but my mother rarely touched alcohol. One day she laughed and declared: ‘I only drink champagne.’ They took her at her word and the very next time she visited a bottle of champagne was brought from the fridge and opened. Of course, she had to accept. Gradually the word that the doctor’s wife only drank champagne spread and everyone began to keep some in the fridge just for her.

They liked to spoil her. When she shook hands to go the men would hold onto hers, patting it, and look directly into her face; they smiled, showing gold teeth. The women complimented her clothes. They treated her as though she were special, as though she were one of them.

The autumn after my parents were married in Scotland, my brother was born. My father delivered his first son himself. He graduated soon after and almost exactly a year later my sister came along. Then the family moved to Glasgow, where my father pursued an extra qualification in obstetrics.

All this time my mother had been turning slowly from white to black. At the university in Aberdeen the African students were considered exotic. People knew they had gilded careers waiting for them; they were the chosen ones – at least where they came from. Out in the city there were few enough blacks for them to be considered rare birds and accorded a measure of tolerance.

But with each child my mother found her skin darkened, almost as though it were a side effect of pregnancy. By the time we moved to Glasgow she was virtually transformed into a full-blooded Negress. People began to treat her the way they sometimes treated my father. They stared at her as she walked with me in the pram, my sister perched on the back and my brother following behind; and they cast remarks under their breath, barbed like a fisherman’s fly, deftly designed to land just within earshot.

When my father was with us men would yell, ‘Look at the darkie!’ and spit the word ‘whore’ with guttural emphasis. If we were alone then quite often old ladies would come up to say how cute we children looked, and stroke our heads.

Bellshill Maternity Hospital, where I was born, served the working-class outlying Lanarkshire suburbs. It was a massive concrete edifice, entirely surrounded by council houses, like a factory producing baby Glaswegians by the score. I went back only once in my life on my way through from Aberdeen to London, when I looped round the country via Glasgow to see my first home. As I walked into the maternity hospital I was forced to squeeze past a group of heavily pregnant women, dressed only in pastel dressing gowns and slippers to guard against the damp October air, chain-smoking outside the front entrance.

Outside our bungalow in Ardgay Street I sat in my car, waiting, trying to make up my mind whether or not to knock on the door and explain to the inhabitants that I had once lived in their house. My drive through the neighbourhood had told me it was poor, but beyond that I hadn’t much idea of what sort of people lived here. I had seen no black or brown faces, but then again there had been few people on the freezing streets. I dithered, folded and refolded my map. I reached for the door handle. At that instant the door of 19 Ardgay Street flew open: a man with a shaved head, holding a piece of wood, stood there and seemed to stare straight at me. A Rhodesian ridgeback bounded past him and up to the front gate. My nerve failed. I started the ignition and drove away.

Back then we were broke and we were black. We survived on my father’s grant, stretched to meet the demands of each new baby. It was tough to find anyone who wanted to rent us a place to live. Lots of the advertisements specified ‘no blacks’; sometimes it said ‘no foreigners’, which was another way of saying the same thing.

Searching for a house could be so difficult that one medical student put a large advertisement in the local newspaper in capitals: BLACK DOCTOR SEEKS ACCOMMODATION. He said it cut short the process of going to see apartments which were always gone the moment you showed your face. My father went to Bellshill Maternity Hospital, where he was taking up his internship, found another black doctor who was leaving to go home, and asked him if he could rent his apartment.

The five of us lived in two rooms in Ardgay Street. The Shettleston house was owned by a couple who ran a driving school and lived in the other wing. Above the door was an inscription to ‘Our Lady of Fatima’. There were times on a Saturday night when a brick would crash through the two windows facing the street; but my mother said it was because they were Protestants and thought we were Catholics, not because we were black.

The hospital where my father did his rounds and delivered babies was a different world; he was treated with great respect and his patients adored him. People talked about his wonderful ‘bedside manner’. It was years before I understood what they meant. I imagined my father sitting next to his patients, eating from a table elaborately laid with every kind of silverware, de-boning a sole or delicately peeling a peach with a knife.

When I was six months old a letter came from the family in Sierra Leone. It was from our father’s father. Ibrahim, one of my father’s elder brothers, had died; our grandfather begged Mohamed to come home at the earliest and help take care of the family.

We sailed on the passenger ship the Aureol. It docked in the Canaries, where the crew filled the pool on the deck with sea water; then we set sail for Freetown. The other passengers were mostly returning former colonials, who played cards, organised a fancy dress party and sat at each other’s tables in the evening without ever inviting us to join them.

When the ship docked alongside the massive warehouses of the Queen Elizabeth II quay, the first thing my mother saw was the fedora belonging to my father’s friend Dr Panda bobbing in the surging crowds. She stepped off the boat and into the throng of Africans and she was transformed, once again, into a white woman.

In Freetown people stared at her wherever she went, especially when she rode by on her bicycle. ‘Look! White woman dae ride bicycle!’

White again, my mother was accepted, on certain conditions, into the ex-pat community in Freetown. She joined a Scottish dancing group that met at the Railway Club and at the exclusively white Hill Station Club. Before independence black people were not even allowed up to Hill Station unless they worked in one of the big houses. A special train was sent down every day to bring the workers up to the hills. Certainly, there were no African members of the Hill Station Club. My mother was popular there: she had grown up performing songs and dances and she entranced everyone with her outgoing personality. Her only disappointment was that at the end of the evening the other members never invited her to their houses for drinks or supper, and she made her way home alone.

Marriage to my father turned my mother into a multi-hued chameleon. He, by contrast, had been a black man in Scotland and was a black man in Africa. Once I asked my mother how my father regarded her patronage of the Hill Station Club. She said she didn’t know.

‘What if he’d wanted to come too?’ I pressed.

‘Well, he wouldn’t,’ she replied. ‘He didn’t know the Scottish dances.’ That was the way she thought about these matters. It was as simple as that.

My father’s visiting brothers were kind to her, especially Uncle Momodu. He had an appetite for all things western and always wore western clothes. He came down to Freetown ‘on business’, he stated enigmatically, and, when he wasn’t at one of his assignations, he flicked through the magazines my mother brought with her from Britain, questioning her about life ‘over there’. Momodu wandered in and out of the house, played with the babies and loved to tease his serious younger brother’s wife. But Maureen felt frozen out by the wives of my father’s friends who, she thought, disregarded her, though she could never quite put her finger on the problem because it lay in what was missing from their welcome rather than what was present.

Soon after we arrived Pa Roke, my grandfather, came to visit, bringing with him several live chickens, some sacks of rice and one of his junior wives. He cast an eye over my mother: ‘So you went to the sea and turned into a fish,’ he said to my father in Temne. He’d warned his son not to come back with a white wife. There were a lot of local families who would have liked to make a match. ‘How much did you pay?’ He meant how much was the dowry. She was young; her breasts hadn’t fallen yet.

‘Ten shillings,’ my father replied straight faced. That was what he’d been charged at the register office on the morning of the wedding. Pa Roke smiled: he was pleased. His son’s wife might be white, but she had come at a good price.

In Koidu as we passed people waved and called out to my mother and me. Young men offered to carry her packages; shopkeepers ushered her over to look at the latest imported fabrics. Everyone recognised her. She was the doctor’s white wife. And there was only one white woman in Koidu. And only one doctor.

6

A few months after our clinic opened a battered bush taxi drew up in front of the house. There were quite a few people crammed inside; at first it was difficult to see exactly how many. They struggled out, among them a woman so emaciated and feeble that she couldn’t walk, as well as a boy of around eight or nine who looked as if he were unconscious.

Our father came out and helped carry them into the surgery; it was obvious he was upset and angry: ‘Why do you bring them to me when it’s too late?’ No one replied. And he knew the answer: they had nothing, there was no way to pay a doctor.

The woman was close to death. The boy, who was perhaps her son, had died in the back of the car a short while before: his body was still limp, no signs yet of rigor mortis. My father asked the family about the woman’s and the boy’s symptoms. Were there others? They nodded. Yes, they replied, there were many others in the village, too ill to make the journey.

My father didn’t have a laboratory but it took him less than a minute to reach his diagnosis: what the people described was a cholera epidemic. He took his bag, swept up armfuls of drugs, threw them all onto the front seat of our Austin and left. The family sat in the back giving him directions to their village, cradling the body of the small boy wrapped in a sheet.

My father didn’t come back until much later that night, until after he had traced the source of the contamination and persuaded the village headman to stop people using the water. It was never easy; there was often only one well or stream; people didn’t understand the basic principles of infection, spread and cure. Outbreaks of disease were almost always blamed on witchcraft. He taught them how, at the first sign of diarrhoea they should shake the gas out of a bottle of Fanta or Coca-Cola and drink it at room temperature. It was a simple trick: the equivalent of sugar and salts. But it was a life-saver.

When my mother was alone in the city and our father was in the regions planning the clinic, a measles epidemic gripped Freetown. In Britain measles is an ordinary childhood illness; in Africa the same virus kills as recklessly and easily as a child tumbling a tower of wooden blocks. That year hundreds of children died. At Connaught Hospital they didn’t have space to admit any new cases. All three of us children were infected; spots even erupted down the inside of my brother’s throat. My father wasn’t due back for many days and there were no telephones up-country, no way to reach him. So my mother nursed us at home, letting us sip flat Fanta when we were too weak to eat anything else.

Eventually a colleague of our father’s was reached and he drove over to see us. He put my brother on a drip and told my mother she had done just the right thing. She was so relieved when we began to improve after ten days that she ran across the road to Patterson Zochonis, the expensive and only department store in Freetown, where she bought us absurdly expensive Swiss maraschino cherry ice cream, and spooned it down our tender throats one by one.

In Koidu there was so much to do and no other doctors with whom to share the load. The building of this clinic was the realisation of a simple dream for our father. Many of the western-trained doctors preferred to stay in Freetown and work in the larger hospitals. With a modest private practice on the side within a few years they could own a Mercedes and be waited upon by servants wearing white gloves, like Dr Panda and his wife. But our father had a vision that one day there would be a network of cottage clinics across the country. The success of our clinic was important to him and his motives were plain.

When our father was a child during the war, a vaccination programme was announced. Scores of families left their villages to make the trip to the mission hospital. They settled on the rows of long wooden benches under the sun in the courtyard, alongside patients who arrived with other complaints. When the benches were full, the line continued along the walls and encircled the building. My father sat for hours on the ground, his back against the wall, listening for his name to be called. In front of him in the queue was an old man. When the Fornas appeared, the old man asked for help going to the toilet and he gave my father some cola nuts in thanks afterwards.

The hours passed and when at last his name was called the old Pa seemed to have fallen asleep, so my father leaned over and shook him lightly. The man slumped over sideways and lay face up, blue cataract-filled eyes reflecting the sky. A few minutes later the orderlies pulled him up by the arms and carted him away. They were used to it: the old ones who died before they made it to see the doctor.

Following Ndora’s death our father left the village to live with Teacher Trye. Soon after he left, a second tragedy struck his tiny family. A letter arrived in Bo, written by a hired letter-writer, informing Mohamed that his elder brother Morlai had died ‘of a headache’. He lay down one afternoon saying his head hurt and simply never got to his feet again.

We never, ever turned a patient away. And if someone couldn’t pay, we treated them for free. It was hard to imagine, given the principles that governed our father, that the clinic was making money but remarkably it was.

In the town there were a small number of extremely wealthy diamond dealers. They operated cheek by jowl with the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, who paid the government millions to exploit the country’s reserves, as well as the Diamond Corporation, a holding of the De Beers empire, who held the rights to buy the lion’s share of gems. Some independent dealers bought government permits allowing them to mine restricted quantities of gems. Others dispensed with the law and sent teams of their own men to dig illicitly in the restricted area. Many did both.

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.

Ya Beyas wanted nothing more than to go back to Mamunta to see her family, but Pa Morlai was loath to allow her to leave. She might no longer be a slave, but as his wife she had to obey her husband. A sore on her foot had turned septic, and Pa Morlai insisted that she stay under the care of his healer until she could walk properly.

The seasons had run through twice more by the time Ya Beyas wore her husband down. He seemed to find an unlimited number of new reasons why she should stay in Bombali and he obliged her to do his bidding. At last he relented and agreed to the journey. Ya Beyas wanted her daughter Hawa to accompany her, but Pa Morlai imposed his will one last time and refused to allow it, for the young woman was betrothed to a youth in Matoko. He suggested she travel with their second son Saidu instead.

Pa Morlai waited in his house in Matoko for Ya Beyas to return, but the rains came and went and there was no sign of her. Unlike his wife, who had learned patience, Pa Morlai was not born with a great deal and his small store soon ran out. One morning he rose, walked to the door of his house, snapped his fingers to summon his retainers and ordered them to begin preparations for a journey. Within a short time he and his entourage were ready and they set out, back across the Katabai Hills to Temneland, carrying with them a large calabash.

In Mamunta Pa Morlai stood before Pa Santigi’s house, knocked and waited. After a few moments he knocked again. The third time the door was answered and he entered.

In front of him walked a delicate girl, his youngest niece, who carried the tremendous calabash on her head. Under the weight of it her neck swayed like a pawpaw tree overburdened by fruit. The room within was full of people. Trembling, the girl laid the calabash at the feet of Pa Santigi, who sat cross-legged on a low stool. He looked inside and helped himself to a few of the cola nuts before passing the rest around the assembled company. After a few moments he looked expectantly at Pa Morlai, the conqueror now turned supplicant, who cleared his throat and announced his business.

‘I have seen a flower,’ he said, using the customary words of a prospective bridegroom in the house of his beloved. ‘And that flower is growing here, in the house of the Kamaras.’

Pa Santigi gave a signal and three girls were brought forth. The first one advanced and stood before Pa Morlai. Her face was covered by a cloth and he carefully raised it. No – he shook his head. Each woman was presented and each time, even though they were fresh and lovely, he looked at the woman he had been offered, declined and waited.

The three young women left through the door and stood outside, where their muffled giggles could be heard in the stately silence of the room. A fourth figure appeared at the door: rings of age thickened her waist and her neck; as she moved she dragged her foot slightly. Pa Morlai had no need to raise the cloth that covered her face. He nodded. ‘Here is my flower.’

In front of her gathered family – elders, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces – Ya Beyas paused; then she bent and picked up the calabash. With that gesture she accepted Pa Morlai as her husband, not as a slave, but as a free woman. She sat on the floor next to her elder brother with the calabash containing her dowry on her lap.

Inside Ya Beyas’s wedding calabash were cola nuts, a symbol of friendship; bitter cola nuts to represent hardship; a prayer mat; a head of tobacco for the elders who would counsel the couple through the highs and lows of married life; atara alligator pepper which, if the seeds were kept in the pod, would for ever bring peace to a union; and a needle and thread, to remind the bride of her wifely duty. And finally, at the bottom of the pot, in gold, silver and precious stones was the measure of her worth as a woman.

A few days after the ceremony Pa Morlai prepared to leave Mamunta for Matoko. He went to Ya Beyas and told her he planned to leave. He assumed she would accompany him, but he was careful to couch his command as a request. ‘So, Beyas, it’s time for you to say goodbye to your family. We should leave for Matoko in a few days.’

Ya Beyas looked at her husband. Pa Morlai was nearly seventy, an old man, and she was already middle-aged. She let her eyes linger on his face, his eyes, his mouth. He was her captor, her owner, her husband and the father of her children. She looked down and replied slowly, barely audibly: ‘No, my husband. I will not.’ This was Ya Beyas’s sole act of defiance in her entire life: a life lived as a daughter, sister, slave and junior wife.

And so Pa Morlai returned alone to Matoko, where he died some years later. Ya Beyas stayed in Mamunta, with her son Saidu. And no one knows, to this day, whether Pa Morlai and Ya Beyas ever laid eyes on each other again after their wedding day.

8

Once Pa Roke noticed me. I was following a line of ants across the ground to the entrance into their nest, a hole by the roots of the mango tree. Above me the trunk of the tree seethed with ants. I was placing obstacles in the path of the column to see whether the ants would break formation. When Pa Roke’s shadow fell across me, I had just laid a long stick on the ground in front of them.

I fancied I knew how the ants communicated with each other. When the giant obstacle suddenly appeared across their path, a couple of ants raced each way some distance down the length of the stick. They were the scouts. The others, the bearers, waited patiently with their loads. The scout ants came back and reported that there was no way of going round the object, it would take too long. They would have to climb over. The other ants waved their antennae in agreement, or so I imagined. And without delay an advance party set out up and over the stick.

The lives of ants could hold me spellbound for hours. There were the regular black ones that everyone knew. Then there were the tiny red ones – they were the ones that gave you stinging bites. If you stood near their nest they swarmed up your leg and sank thousands of tiny teeth into you, leaving painful red marks. Several times the size of the ordinary ants were the giant ones, which could be either red or black. They were harmless, but discouragingly large. Overall the black ants were by far and away the friendlier of the species.

There were ant hills all over the surrounding country. Acre upon acre turned to moonscape by the giant moguls, often interspersed with termite hills that towered over the ant hills like giant stalagmite fortresses. War raged constantly between the armies of the termites, the red ants and the black ants. They killed, captured and enslaved each other.

I once saw red ants swarming over one of the big black ants; it staggered like a bull brought down by a pack of wild dogs, helpless as the red ants began to eat it alive. When it stopped struggling they carried it away, still twitching, even though it was several times bigger than each of them. Much later I learned that the only two species who wage war against their own kind are ants and men.

Pa Roke watched me for a short while and then he beckoned to me to follow him. We went a little way to the edge of the compound where the earth was soft and sandy. There were several funnel-shaped holes, each barely an inch across. Pa Roke waved, indicating to me to crouch down and watch. He picked up a dried leaf and broke off a fraction of the tip and dropped it over the rim of the tiny crater.

‘What is it?’ I asked. Pa Roke put his finger to his lips.

For a few seconds nothing happened. We waited. I began to think there was something wrong with Pa Roke. But when I glanced up at him to check, he pointed impatiently back at the ground. I looked back and the piece of leaf was gone. A second later it came flying out of the hole and landed on the ground by my feet. I started. Pa Roke laughed, a short hoarse sound. He looked genuinely amused.

A small, black ant wandered by. Pa Roke used the edge of the leaf still in his hand to ease it over the edge of the hole. As the ant slid down the sandy incline, it began to scrabble desperately, raking the smooth sides as it failed to find a grip. When it reached the bottom it waved its antennae around, apparently trying to get its bearings. I knew now what was going to happen. There was a tiny flurry. The ant reared up and then disappeared beneath the sand, its angular legs the last to go under.

‘Ant lion,’ said Pa Roke. And he got up and nimbly stepped back up to the house, his robes flapping behind him like a great bird.

I fetched a stick and poked around the sand in the hole. I wanted to save the ant. I unearthed an insect the shape of a miniature armadillo; it was still holding on to the ant, which had accepted its fate and stopped kicking. But freed from the earth the ant seemed to fight with renewed vigour. The ant lion gave up, retreating back under the sand while the ant hobbled away: a crumpled body on broken legs.

In Mamunta, Pa Santigi, brother to Ya Beyas, decided to run for the forthcoming chieftaincy elections. The chieftaincy rotated between the three ruling families and the last ruler had died some months before. Now the elders were busy organising elections for a new king, though since the arrival of the British there were officially no more kings, only paramount chiefs. When the protectorate was brought under British colonial rule the newly installed governor declared the only recognised sovereign from that day on was Victoria, Queen of England.

Ya Beyas’s son Saidu helped in the elections, canvassing votes for his uncle among the people of the outlying villages. Now a grown man with two wives, he had moved away from Mamunta and farmed at a small settlement called Rogbonko. He spent many days and weeks on the campaign trail, sometimes taking his two children to accompany him.

Nearing the crucial run-up to the election, Pa Santigi’s campaign began to run out of funds. The uncles needed to raise cash in the fastest way possible and they decided to sell their nephew Saidu into bondage to a wealthy farmer in Mayoso. There he worked long days and slept in the fields at night alongside other indentured men and prayed that his uncle would win the election and redeem him as soon as possible.

A year later Saidu found himself living in the forest, taking part in the kantha of his uncle, now Chief Masamunta Kanakoton of Kholifa Mamunta. Though still young his political skills and commitment were evident and Saidu was to be honoured with the title Pa Mas’m, chief minister and principal adviser to the new king. For months the king and his ministers stayed hidden beyond the darkness of the trees in the sacred bush, where they learned the principles of governance from the elders and took part in induction rituals carried out by the secret society, the Poro.

At the end of this came the three-day kathora, the ceremony to install the new ruler. On Chief Masamunta’s head sat the stiff, embroidered head-dress; on his chest lay a heavy necklace of amulets and animals’ teeth and he carried a long, forked staff covered with leather and adorned with fragments of leopard skin. He led his cabinet forward into the village to the barrie and they circled it thrice before they entered and took up their places.

Weeks later the new Pa Mas’m returned to Rogbonko only to find that in his absence his two wives had quarrelled badly. Ya Monday G’bai, a mature widow inherited by Saidu from an uncle on his passing, had departed. According to custom she left her son, also the message that she had gone back to live in peace with her own family. Now Yima, Saidu’s spirited and mischievous younger wife, claimed for herself the role of first wife to the Pa Mas’m.

It was Ya Yima who, passing through Rothomgbai one day on her way back from Mamunta (where her husband now kept a second home in order to attend to his court duties), noticed a girl standing by the side of the path carrying a water jug. There were four miles more to Rogbonko and Ya Yima asked the child for a drink. As she watched the girl quickly pour the water she was impressed by the girl’s demure manner. Yima made enquiries. She found out the child’s name was Ndora; she was the daughter of Yamba Soko Serry and Digba Kamara and the great-granddaughter of a chief.

It was at Ya Yima’s instigation that Ndora became Saidu’s sixth wife and went to live in Rogbonko. Ya Yima herself made all the arrangements. For the first few years Ndora helped the older wives around the house. She fetched water for her husband in the mornings. Late in the day she joined the other young girls down by the stream in the deep channel that ran behind the clay brick houses; they scrubbed clothes, pounding them against the rocks, creating a froth of suds, while cascades of water drops made rainbows above their heads, flashing the same vibrant colours of the kingfishers on the opposite bank.

Some time after her first blood showed, Ndora went to her husband’s room. On the first occasion she was carried, according to custom, on the back of one of the senior wives. From then on she spent three nights with Saidu in turn with each of her co-wives. Ndora’s first son she named Morlai and suckled him for two years. The second child, another son called Mohamed, was born after the harvest in the month of tarokans, a year after Morlai began to eat his first mouthfuls of pap.

Ya Yima was entranced by Ndora’s fat, bright new son. After Mohamed was weaned she insisted on taking over care of the baby herself and, ignoring Ndora’s protests, she brought the child into the big house she shared with Saidu. Ndora was left outside. Yima passed her time playing with the little boy, while Ndora worked long days in the fields side by side with the other junior wives and the indentured men. Sometimes on her way home, she would go by and take little treats to her son: a catapult she made herself or a little piece of canya made of rice flour, sugar and peanuts.

Months passed and still Ya Yima kept little Mohamed by her side. She brushed aside all Ndora’s entreaties. Didn’t she take good care of him? Besides Ndora was so busy. And the little boy was happy, said Ya Yima.

When all else failed Ndora determined to bypass her senior wife’s authority and beg her husband in order to have her child returned to her. Saidu, by now, was used to Ya Yima’s wilfulness. It came as no surprise she had upset a co-wife; nevertheless he did not expect to have to intervene in their concerns. He told Ndora he would handle the matter himself, to be patient and not to worry. But when Ya Yima refused to listen to even his efforts to persuade her, he lost his temper and ordered her to return the boy to Ndora.

Ndora sent her son to join his brother Morlai at the home of an aunt in Rothomgbai. One night a snake crept into the hut where several children lay sleeping side by side on a mat. A few minutes later Mohamed woke screaming, with two small puncture wounds on his foot. The poison lodged in his foot: he survived, though nearly lost the foot. Not one of the other children was harmed. A diviner was brought in and an investigation mounted. There was only one explanation: witchcraft. Suspicion fell on many and rumours rustled through the villages: Who had seen a soul stir? What old grudges were borne? Who else might fall ill? Nothing was ever proved.

Realising the folly of his actions had put his own son in danger, Saidu immediately brought the child back to Rogbonko into his own home, and returned him to the arms of Ya Yima.

Two years later war broke out in Europe. Up in Rogbonko at first it had little impact. But after the British lost control of the Mediterranean and were forced to route their supplies bound for the east through Africa, they were attracted for the same reasons as the slaving ships two hundred years before to Freetown’s deep natural harbour. Men from the protectorate were recruited to fill the demand for cheap labour, including many from Mamunta and the surrounding villages. Thousands more were drafted to fight the Japanese in the jungles of Burma. There was an even greater demand for produce for export and yet the prices offered by the colonial rulers never improved. With the extra hands gone from the fields, life grew hard for everyone in the villages.

Ndora began to lose weight. The white doctors at the hospital failed to heal her, so the family turned to their own medicine. The day came when Ndora couldn’t climb up off her sleeping mat. Fearing the worst the family sent for the healer, Pa Yamba Mela, at the house Pa Mas’m provided for him in the Fornas’ compound.

Pa Yamba Mela arrived at Ndora’s bedside carrying his divining thunder box. He was as handsome as he was terrible; it was he who smelled the odour of magic behind the snakebite on Mohamed’s foot and again when the boy was struck with smallpox some years later. People for miles around claimed Pa Yamba Mela could even draw thunder out of the sky to strike wrongdoers down. Indeed, it had been known to happen to some errant souls who had committed God knows what crime. They were found lying in the fields or under a tree during the rains. Some died; the others were never the same again.

The medicine man knew immediately he had found the culprit. Only by confessing to dabbling in witchcraft could Ndora save her own life; she had become ensnared in the power of the rites she had tried to use for her own purposes and now she was being consumed from within. All day Pa Yamba Mela stayed with her mouthing incantations and exhorting the dying woman to admit her guilt, even as the delirium overwhelmed her. Finally, just before her last breath slipped over her lips and mingled with the air, Ndora confessed.

Shortly afterwards Chief Masamunta passed away and his spirit flew home to Futa Jallon, the home of the Temne kings. Before he was interred his head was removed, to be preserved and buried alongside the next king, whose own head would be buried with the next and so on in perpetuity. Chief Masamunta’s Pa Mas’m, Saidu Forna, presided over the burial rituals and was afterwards elected to take the place of the dead ruler: he was anointed Pa Roke, Regent Chief of Kholifa Mamunta.

While the other children were raised by their mothers, my father grew up in my grandfather’s house. And so, even though Mohamed was only the younger son of a junior wife, Pa Roke came to favour our father above his other children.

It may have been the weekend. At any rate, unusually for the time of day, my father was in the house. The sun was high, so it must have been early afternoon, at the time when everyone had just eaten lunch. At the back of the house Big Aminatta filled the dogs’ bowls with scraps from the table and put them out in the yard.

‘Daddy?’ A moment later I trotted to my father, who was sitting on the veranda with my mother. I scarcely allowed a moment to slip past before I began again: ‘Daddy?’

‘Yes, Am.’

‘Jack’s making a funny noise.’

Everyone followed me round the side of the house. I was right. There was Jack, the Old English sheepdog, standing with his head low, his stomach in spasms, heaving violently. With each painful contraction he gave a wheezing noise and a sort of hacking bark. He looked like dogs do when they are trying to be sick, but I’d never heard one make that noise before.

Jack had a chicken bone stuck in his throat. The walls of his oesophagus were torn and with each effort he made to dislodge it the sharp fragment of bone tore deeper into the wall of muscle. The pain must have been terrible. My father grasped the dog and, gripping Jack between his legs, bent over and prised his jaws open. Then he plunged his hand deep into the dog’s throat. You could see him feeling down inside the dog’s gullet. He pulled his arm out and tried again, over and over. And Jack just let him. He didn’t snap or wriggle; he submitted as though he already knew this was his only chance at life.

Minutes seemed to pass. The whole family watched and waited. There was nothing anyone else could do.

When my father realised the bone was too deeply embedded and it would take an operation to free it, he went to fetch his medical kit. There was no vet in Koidu. By this time Jack was feeble and had begun to whimper. My father took out a needle and syringe and gave Jack a dose of the anaesthetic normally reserved for humans. The hacking and whimpering stopped. Jack’s body relaxed and he stopped breathing.

For most of my life that image was all I could summon of my earliest years. I was very young the day Jack died but I remember vividly the sight of my father standing over him with his arm down the dog’s throat.

Afterwards my parents explained to me what had happened, although I wasn’t overly distraught because I didn’t have any understanding of what death meant. Gradually as the days went on I watched Jim prowl the yard looking for his brother and playmate, or lie listless in the shade and howl at night.

The next time Pa Roke visited and I saw him demolishing a chicken bone I thought: How come Jack dies and Pa Roke doesn’t?

Soon after that Pa Roke left us and returned home, departing as he came. He walked to the end of the road and vanished into the wind.

9

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.

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.

That night my mother’s attention was caught by the familiar sound of the prayer call starting up. It was well after midnight – nowhere near time for prayers. Gradually it became apparent to everyone this was no muezzin, but an audacious protester who had seized the mosque’s loudhailer. For a time everyone was still as the words ricocheted off the tin roofs, fluttered like feathers down into the streets, whizzed around the heads of the people as they sat on the steps of their houses.

‘No more Albert, no more Margai, No more Albert over me,’ he sang.

Within minutes a crowd of supporters and detractors gathered in the street below the mosque, shouting encouragement or insults accordingly. Soon enough they started to scuffle between themselves. The man in the minaret sang on: ‘And before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave.’

Thirty minutes later the police arrived. They dragged the protester down from the tower and took him away, but not before they had given him a hearty beating in front of the crowd of onlookers.

By now SLPP support in Kono was wavering badly. Determined to win at all costs, some in the government were beginning to resort to extreme tactics. My father was campaigning in other parts of the country, supporting candidates in more marginal seats, as well as canvassing for votes in his own district. Driving home from the south, he stopped one night for petrol at Panguma Junction, by coincidence encountering a local APC candidate on the run from the police. A warrant had been issued for the arrest of all four opposition candidates in the region: the plan was to stop them registering themselves as candidates by using the law to hold them for forty-eight hours over the crucial registration period. My father gathered the four together and urged them to stay. He found a good lawyer, who also happened to be the cousin of the attorney-general, and they all went to the police station and challenged the local police chief. By the end of the afternoon the warrants were withdrawn.

There were only four weeks between the date parliament was dissolved and polling day. With my father away for the whole period, life in our house moved quietly from day to day. My mother followed her usual routine of work, friends and family life. Ade Benjamin, an old friend from Freetown, turned up unexpectedly to stay and the two of them went out dancing together, lifting her spirits considerably. Meanwhile, she waited to hear from my father.

Even during this intense period my mother remained detached from the swirl of political activity around her, despite the fact that the election outcome and our own lives were now completely intertwined. Although she chose not to say so to my father, she was frustrated to see the success of the clinic faltering. My mother was as pragmatic as my father was idealistic; she saw herself first and foremost as a doctor’s wife, and it had been her plan to remain one.

Polling day, when it came, created a storm of speculation and excitement in the rest of the country. This was the second democratic election in our fledgling state, and a great deal hinged on it, including, as far as many saw it, the future of democracy itself. People were beginning to anticipate a victory by the opposition APC and an end to the Margai government. The anticipation and even trepidation as people queued to cast their votes was intense. Yet the tempest passed over our small house, leaving the domestic scene inside untouched.

The news took a while to reach us that my father had won his seat. He not only took Tonkolili West for the opposition but by the greatest margin and the greatest number of votes cast in favour of any one candidate during the entire election: close to eighteen thousand. The ruling party candidate had not even managed to secure five hundred.

In Kono the APC took two of the four seats. In Freetown every single seat went to the APC. The party’s triumphs were sweeping the country as opposition candidates toppled government incumbents in constituency after constituency. Victory began to look inevitable.

Four days later, in the early morning, a car arrived at the house. It was a long, low Mercedes, one my mother recognised as belonging to one of the wealthiest of the Koidu diamond merchants. Inside were two young APC party workers, smartly turned out in clean white shirts, unrecognisable from the sweat-stained young activists we were used to seeing. They told my mother they were to take us down to Freetown to attend the swearing-in ceremony for the new prime minister and cabinet.

The inside of the car was air-conditioned and smelled of leather. Under my bare legs the seats were cool and smooth. We took the new road to Freetown; it was still being built and hadn’t been tarred but it surpassed the old, rocky road. Our route that day took us through Magburaka, in Tonkolili district, and it was strange to see posters and flyers of our father’s face pasted everywhere: on shop fronts, on the sides of market stalls, rows and rows of them. People cheered as we drove in; young men ran alongside the car to catch our companions’ outstretched hands; little boys dressed only in shorts danced barefoot in the dust, sticking out their bottoms and stamping their feet, and the driver sounded the horn at pedestrians who waved back at us.

We pulled up outside a house in the middle of the town and within moments the car was surrounded by people. There was a lot of backslapping and clapping as our companions climbed out. We were all led inside and my mother and we three waited while the clatter of excited voices speaking in Temne flew around our ears.

Presently, a woman came forward bearing an enormous dish piled with rice and cassava leaves, stewed with meat and peppers. Everyone ate from the same dish. Cold, sweet drinks were pressed into our hands. All the time an unending stream of people arrived and the clamour of laughter and congratulations swelled until it could scarcely be contained by the walls of the room and burst out of the windows, trickled through the cracks in the floors and flew into the street, where other people heard it and came to join the throng. It was like a wedding party and we were unexpectedly the bride and groom.

Makeni, Lunsar, Port Loko, Waterloo – everywhere we passed the electorate had just voted to overturn their government and on the roads the people were in celebratory mood, heady with the first sweet success of what democracy could do. Young men in freshly pressed trousers and open shirts wandered about in groups; at the roadside bars the owners strung up rows of coloured bulbs; in village after village people gathered on their verandas overlooking the street. On the roads crowded poda podas raced along, full of supporters travelling to the capital to take part in the festivities. The Mercedes swept on towards Freetown.

We had been travelling all day and now the shadows were just beginning to chase away the remaining sunlight. Our plan was to go to a friend’s house so that we could shower and change into the clean outfits our mother had packed. After that no one really knew, but we had all the confidence in the world that once we reached our destination our father would have taken care of everything.

In the back of the car our mother entertained us with games of I Spy and songs. My favourite at the time was ‘Soldier, soldier’. We took turns at the verses while my mother sang the lead:

‘Oh, soldier, soldier, won’t you marry me, with your musket, fife and drum?’

‘Oh, no, sweet maid, I cannot marry you, for I have no shirt to put on,’ sang the next person.

Everyone joined in – eventually I think even the APC boys learned the words:

‘So off she went to her grandfather’s chest and brought him a shirt of the very, very best and the soldier put it on…’

I hadn’t yet assigned myself a gender and I liked the idea of having a musketfife’n’drum, whatever that was, as well as all the rest of the fancy regalia that the young woman kept in her grandfather’s chest. My mother must have shown me a picture because I had a very strong image of the gold-braided coat and tall, peaked cap I would wear one day.

It was dusk as we passed through the outskirts of Freetown an hour or so later. Strangely the long road into town was almost empty of people, even the tradesmen who normally sat at the roadside in huddles around their lamps seemed to be few and far between. In the front of the car the two party workers exchanged a few words in Temne. I suppose they were wondering whether we were late and all the people had already made their way to State House to greet Siaka Stevens, the new prime minister. What if we’d missed the ceremony?

Some distance ahead something had fallen across the road and two men were standing by it. As we drew closer we saw there was a long pole balanced on two oil drums; large stones had been placed across the road in front. It was a road block and the two men were soldiers. When they saw the Mercedes they began to move towards us, waving the car to a halt. Inside everyone was silent as we watched the uniformed men approach us, one on either side of the car. Tucked in under my mother’s arm, I could feel the beating of her heart.

The men were in full battle kit and carried automatic weapons slung across their shoulders; their faces were sullen and dark. Nothing about them brought to mind the brave redcoats of my imagination with their long, shiny black boots. They indicated we should all get out of the car. ‘Commot!’

The grown-ups climbed out. We three stayed sitting in the back seat. Still no one spoke. The soldier who had given the command sauntered round to the back of the car. He asked where we were going, but didn’t seem very interested in the reply. He took the driver’s licence and studied it at length before handing it back.

The other soldier now put his head through the open door on the passenger side and looked around the car. His glance passed over us as though we were invisible.

‘What’s in here?’ The first soldier tapped the boot.

‘Nothing, there’s nothing there. Bags, that’s all.’ It was our driver: he ran round holding up the key.

‘Open!’ The monosyllabic soldier gave a slack wave of his hand. Inside were our bags, full of children’s clothes and my mother’s personal effects. Our mother walked over and, at his instruction, opened each one. He leaned in and watched her. When she had finished he nodded and stepped away, while she pushed everything back into the bags and closed them.

She ventured a question for the first time: ‘What’s going on?’

The soldier looked at her. ‘They’ve taken over State House,’ he said. ‘Everybody is under martial law. The army’s in charge now.’

The empty streets, the silent suburbs all began to make sense. People were retreating to their houses, waiting for trouble. The soldiers let us go and told us to hurry.

Back in the car the APC men began to talk rapidly between themselves in Temne. Their faces had tightened into frowns of concentration. The driver gripped the steering wheel tightly. They seemed to have completely forgotten we were still sitting in the car behind them. Once we were out of sight of the soldiers the Mercedes began to accelerate.

The soldier hadn’t asked us who we were and all we’d told him was that we were visiting friends in the city. My mother asked only as many questions as she dared and all we knew was that someone, just one person – presumably Siaka Stevens – was under house arrest in State House.

My mother hadn’t said anything for a few minutes, but now she asked: ‘Where are we going?’ The car was moving at speed.

‘We have to go to State House and find out what has happened to our brothers. Once we get there we’ll know what to do.’ The young man in the passenger seat looked round and into her face. ‘Don’t worry.’

He didn’t smile.

11

Rumour of an army takeover had been rife in Freetown for several days.

Forty-eight hours after the closing of the polls the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service announced the election results – SLPP: 31 and APC: 28. Five results were still outstanding. Two independent candidates had yet to declare their support for either party. The five awaited results were popularly assumed to be certain APC wins, but the two independent candidates were former SLPP loyalists who had fallen out with Albert Margai and been refused the party symbol at the elections. Now the race was on between both sides to secure their allegiance.

That night Sir Albert flew south in a private plane to meet the two candidates on their home turf in Bo and Kenema in order to try to persuade them to rejoin the ruling party. But although the prime minister didn’t know it, he had already been beaten to it. Our father and the Taqi brothers proved themselves to be the sharper political strategists, though they were half the veteran politician’s age. The very night the votes began to be counted my father left Uncle Bash to supervise in his constituency while he and Ibrahim drove hell for leather down the length of the country, first to Bo and then to Kenema, where they held private meetings with each of the candidates. The two would not support the APC, but they agreed to withhold their support from the SLPP if Sir Albert remained leader.

The APC celebrated their triumph, but in Freetown the confusion was mounting. Sir Albert tried to buy time by insisting the independent candidates couldn’t formally declare for one side or the other until parliament opened. The five awaited results were delayed, prompting accusations of government gerrymandering; all the time newly-elected MPs and convoys of their supporters trucked into Freetown and paraded the streets in support of Siaka Stevens.

Media reports added to the chaos. A local newspaper published a new set of figures giving the APC a clear win; next the BBC World Service declared a dead heat. A telegram was dispatched from the high commissioner in Freetown instructing the World Service to broadcast an immediate correction. Still no official statement was made. Bursts of violence erupted. In Kroo Town pro-APC protesters torched Fulah shops in revenge for Fulah support of the government. The tribesmen replied by firing upon their tormentors.

In the avenue outside the governor-general’s office the chanting crowds massed; inside his red and gilt chambers the governor floundered. Then, not a moment too soon, a messenger brought him the final count. The SLPP and the APC had 32 seats each, not including the two independents. Four other independents had already been claimed by Sir Albert and added into the SLPP total. The governor-general summoned the two leaders and asked them to form a coalition government. They refused. The pressure on the governor-general to bring a swift end to the impending crisis was immense. He decided to appoint Siaka Stevens prime minister of Sierra Leone, believing that he alone could command a majority in parliament. No sooner had he done so than rumours that David Lansana would lead the army in a takeover to reinstate Sir Albert quickened into life.

From his office the British high commissioner issued hourly reports back to his superiors at the Africa Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. The next morning he received a call from one Dr Forna and Ibrahim Taqi; the latter he knew as the editor of We Yone newspaper. They were concerned about the country’s stability and asked if Britain might intervene to prevent an army takeover in Sierra Leone. The high commissioner declined, but was sufficiently impressed with the foresight of the idea to request London to position a naval ship secretly along the Guinea coast, just in case he needed it himself. His next caller was the force commander. David Lansana warned the high commissioner that the appointment of Siaka Stevens as prime minister would be considered unconstitutional. The army commander confided that he had taken the precaution of moving some of his units and had already taken over the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service building. The queen’s representative, Governor-General Henry Lightfoot Boston, was the next through the door. He arrived after lunch looking ‘shaky and uncertain’, reported the high commissioner to his superiors later. Sir Henry repeated his decision to appoint an APC government with every possible haste.

From early morning a euphoric crowd had begun to gather outside State House for the swearing-in of the new prime minister. The throng swelled through Independence Avenue and flowed down the hill and around the roots of the Cotton Tree. Students from Fourah Bay College, supporters from the provinces, locals, old, young, men, women and children turned out in their thousands. Music was playing on transistor radios tuned to pick up the next official announcement; some people began to dance. Young men climbed the Cotton Tree and lay like lizards along the branches; others perched on the walls of surrounding buildings; in the street everyone waited.

At about three o’clock a motorcade arrived and eased through the crowd. The applause rippled through the people and then rose up into a great roar as the heavy gates of State House swung open and the motorcade passed through. In the first car was the familiar profile of Siaka Stevens. In the next car were the four new APC MPs who were to be sworn in alongside him as members of the new government. They were the Taqi brothers and, sitting next to them, our father.

March is the hottest month of the year – in Temne Gbapron means ‘walk on the side’, in the shade of the trees because the sun is too high to walk down the middle of the road. Many in the crowd had been there all day, as the temperature nudged up to forty degrees. There was little to eat or drink, but the people ignored the heat and discomfort; they waited patiently for the country’s new leaders to emerge and greet them from the circular balcony overlooking the avenue on the top floor of State House. An hour passed.

At first it felt like a low rumble reverberating through the masses like distant thunder. The sensation shuddered through calves, thighs and chests, growing ever more distinct. It seemed to emanate from the road beneath them. The new sound replaced the chatter of the crowd as a hush fell. People began to look around.

The military convoy appeared at the top of Independence Avenue, where it turned and began its descent: truck after truck. The drivers didn’t slow as they neared the densely packed avenue: people were forced to scramble to one side. Armed soldiers were moving in on State House. At the gates they stopped. There was silence.

One, two, three, four, the soldiers jumped from the back – dozens of men. They ran, guns at the ready, until they had surrounded the entire building. Once in their positions the soldiers turned as one and slowly levelled their guns at the crowd.

Nobody moved. The heat shimmered across the white painted facade of State House and glinted on the metal balustrades. Sweat dripped from under the helmets of the soldiers, slipped down their faces and stung their eyes; it ran down the backs of the legs of the people as they stood; it trickled under the dresses and between the breasts of women; it bubbled on the backs of men and streamed down their spines. It bloomed darkly under thousands of arms, and prickled the soldiers’ palms wrapped around their gun barrels. Salt drops hung on the upper lip of the commander in charge.

All was still.

Inside State House Siaka Stevens had just taken the oath of office when the governor-general’s Mende aide-de-camp Hinga Norman stepped in and placed the governor, and the four men with him, under arrest. Briefly the governor-general continued, swearing in Ibrahim Taqi as minister of information. When he had finished Sir Henry turned and walked slowly past his disloyal lieutenant. He left the room and took the stairs up to his private quarters. No one stood in his way. The five remaining men sat down to wait in the company of their captor, while guards were posted outside every door of the building.

At 5.55 p.m. David Lansana’s voice came on the radio to tell the people of Sierra Leone that the country was under martial law.

At 6 p.m. the crowd of people outside State House were ordered to disperse.

Somebody began to chant: ‘No more Albert, No more Margai.’ In ones and twos, finally by the score, other voices joined the chorus. Some people sat down in an act of defiance, to show that they had no intention of ever leaving.

At 6.03 p.m. the order to disperse was repeated.

At 6.05 p.m. the soldiers raised their weapons and fired in the air above the heads of the crowd. The crowd fell silent, muscles tightened as fear spread from body to body, through bellies and bowels, but everyone clung to their positions.

‘They’re only blanks,’ a man swivelled around and called out to his comrades. ‘Blanks. That’s all.’ People nodded to each other. Just blanks, to scare them. They held their ground.

The soldiers lowered their weapons. The people sighed, in one great exhalation of air. One or two even laughed. Of course, these boys were their sons, their brothers, their cousins. Someone began to clap the soldiers, but then stopped.

The commander in charge wiped his upper lip. A minute had passed, according to the watch on his wrist. He gave the next order, as he had been told to do. The soldiers raised their guns and lowered the barrels in the direction of the crowd.

The commander gave his men the order to fire.

Among the first to fall was a teenage boy wearing a red T-shirt and green shorts. He went down face first under the Cotton Tree; his jaw hit the dirt with a crack, arms wrapped around his stomach, his legs began to perform a grim little jig as he lay in the dust. Someone close by bent down to help, saw the blood spreading like a shadow across the earth, red on red, and screamed.

The soldiers began to shoot indiscriminately. The crowd split apart as people scattered in every direction, pushing and grabbing each other, slipping in the blood of the fallen, silent, flailing, stumbling. From their bodies rose the thick odour of fear; it drifted up above the trees and the houses, where it hung in a cloud over the city for days.

12

By the time we reached the Cotton Tree the crowds were gone and the wounded dragged away. A knot of press men converged on the gates of State House, like a crowd gathered below a man threatening to throw himself from a rooftop. By now the world was alert to the possibility that one of the last democracies in Africa might be about to fall. All around the building soldiers remained in position, guns at the ready. We drove up Independence Avenue almost to the gates of State House before we were ordered to halt. Our two companions climbed down and we watched from the back seat while they argued and pleaded with some of the soldiers. Finally, they walked back to the car and started the engine. The gates of State House swung open and we drove inside.

Neither my mother nor our two companions had any idea of what had just occurred on the same spot or what would happen next; but whatever confusion our party felt was matched by that of the soldiers. They were under orders to stay at their posts and to hold the men inside until Brigadier Lansana and Albert Margai arrived at State House, but although the two men were expected imminently, hours had passed and yet there was no sign of them. The soldiers stayed on, with no idea what to do next.

My father appeared, walking easily and wearing a white shirt and grey trousers; he looked just as he did every day at home. He was alone and we stood in the courtyard of the prime minister’s offices while he kissed us and we gripped his knees. I held onto my mother’s hand. He told our mother he was fine; she should take us to our friends the Benjamins, where we would all be taken care of and perfectly safe in their house overlooking the city. ‘Don’t worry, my brothers and I will be OK.’

‘Won’t you come with us now?’

He refused: ‘I need to be with the others, with my colleagues. Ibrahim is here and so is Mohammed, we should stay together. You go on. I’ll see you all later. Ade and Bianca are there. You can send them my regards.’ He smiled and kissed us all again; his mood seemed light.

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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