Review: The Devil That Danced On The Water By Aminatta Forna Essay, Research Paper

The truth about Daddy The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir Aminatta Forna 409pp, HarperCollins When western television screens began to show women and children with amputated limbs, and other devastating evidence emerged of the descent into violence in Sierra Leone’s civil war in the late 1990s, the crude explanation was that a generation of drug-fuelled youths had been incited by diamond-hungry Lebanese and Liberians to rebel against the corrupt and incompetent status quo. Aminatta Forna’s story of her father’s execution on trumped-up treason charges, 25 years before anyone had heard of the Revolutionary United Front, gives a more personal framework for understanding the horror of the 1990s in the linked wars of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. Mohamed Forna was probably the most brilliant man of his generation in Sierra Leone – a doctor trained in Scotland, a finance minister who became a spokesman for many poor developing countries, and an opposition leader who embodied the hopes of Sierra Leoneans that independence would bring health and education to all. At the end of the 1960s, on the brink of his political career, he was warned by the powerful politician who would be his nemesis that he had perhaps spent too much time in England. Dr Forna, he said, had failed to understand that in Africa, “politics and violence were inseparable”. Extreme orchestrated violence was already the norm of the two dominant political parties in Sierra Leone. Coups, arrests, exile and more violence followed. For Aminatta, the youngest of his three children, Dr Forna was the adored and attentive Daddy who commanded her total loyalty through the family and political upheavals that dragged her through nine homes in six years. In the first half of the book she conveys vividly both the joy of her life with her parents in small-town Sierra Leone on the cusp of independence, and the cold years in a caravan park in Scotland, followed by a boarding school in England. In Freetown she lived in an extended family, keeping company with cooks who told endless stories. She evokes this life with a true eye for description of a vanished world. The girls’ boarding school, where her best friend casually told her that she could not invite Aminatta to her party because her father “doesn’t like blacks”, was a terrible place for a child living with loneliness and incomprehension. But the deepest incomprehension underlying everything in young Aminatta’s life was caused by the slow disintegration of her parents’ marriage – the rows, the silences. Overt racism surfaced inside the family and undermined her own identity when her mother married a white UN official after a quick divorce in Mexico, and then told Aminatta not to play with “the African children” any more. Her Scottish mother, or Real Mum as the children called her, disappeared from their lives except for one Christmas card each after Dr Forna sued for custody and took his children home to Freetown. At first the warm, embracing life they had known there before was poisoned by battles with their new stepmother, Auntie Yabome, who sacked their favourite friend in the house, the steward, and beat six-year-old Aminatta. But Yabome emerged as a heroine as the trap closed around Dr Forna. She managed to smuggle the children out of the country and make a life for them in England, showing bravery and loyalty that marked Aminatta for life. Her cooperation for this book has made it possible to unravel the strange story of the elaborate plot that framed Dr Forna. In the second half of the book, Aminatta returns to Sierra Leone as an adult, a journalist, determined to uncover the truth of her father’s death. Like Gillian Slovo, who in Every Secret Thing went back to South Africa and confronted her mother’s presumed killer, she was impelled to meet the men who betrayed her father. She tracked down almost everyone who was used to build the shabby and unconvincing case against him, based on statements made under torture (later disavowed) and pure fabrications by the police. It was agonising work. Her interviews with broken men are extremely moving, and tell everything of the world that vanished with her father. As Slovo wrote about herself, Forna was “a child of secrets”. As an adult she wanted to put together the jigsaw of her father’s political secrets, but she had not foreseen the personal impact. “I had spent 25 years in ignorance and one year gradually uncovering some of the truth, and yet now I could barely recall what it felt like not to know,” she writes. “It was as though this terrible knowledge, of the lies and the manipulation, the greed and the corruption, the fear and violence had been with me for ever. So this is innocence lost, what it feels like. The country had changed, I had changed – as for the past, it was irrevocably altered.”