Aminatta Forna: The Devil that Danced on the Water

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

In Africa, politics and violence are inseparable, Sierra Leone's Finance Minister was ominously warned by a fellow politician in 1969. In light of that country's recent history, where in the late 1990s rebels implemented Operation No Living Thing and began mutilating and slaughtering thousands of Sierra Leoneans, it seems the issuer of that warning really knew what he was talking about.

Yet that Finance Minister, Dr Mohamed Forna, father of the author and the hero of this "daughter's memoir", never believed it had to be so although, as we see, he was shortly to become a victim of the very man who issued that bleak assessment.

Forna was an intellectual, a British-educated doctor compelled into politics by the realisation that the solution to the many health problems experienced by the rural people he tended lay beyond the talents of any doctor.

He was a brilliant, driven man who in these pages seamlessly morphs from barefoot student at the local missionary school to boarder at Sierra Leone's English-modelled Bo School, medical student in Aberdeen, Scotland, impassioned founder of a medical clinic in rural Sierra Leone, political aspirant, internationally feted finance minister, and outcast and victim of the political violence he refused to countenance.

But it was as a father that Aminatta Forna, still a child at the time of his death, knew him - adored, attentive, although often absent. In early 2000, 25 years on from the night he was taken from their home by two unknown men, Aminatta, now a journalist, returns to Sierra Leone from London to clear his name of the treason charges constructed against him, for which he was executed in 1974 along with 14 other opponents of the Government, their bodies covered in acid and dumped in an unmarked grave.

The story of her search for truth, which makes up the second part of the book, is chilling as she takes testimonies from the men who gave "evidence" against her father, and becomes fully acquainted with the web of treachery, torture, lies and fear that led so many to betray her father. The line of culpability stretched right up to "the master of it all", Siaka Stevens, whose party Forna had joined and become prominent in as a passionate idealist, only to discover an underlying culture as violent as the party they had replaced in power.

The first part of the book recounts Aminatta's first 10 years - which were the last years of her father's life - and what a life!

Aminatta was born in Scotland, the youngest of three children, her mother a "bonnie" Scottish lass who had been just 19 when she first became pregnant. The subsequent marriage of Maureen and Mohamed appalled her middle-class parents, and her father ceased contact for several years. "There are black women for black men, Chinese women are for Chinamen and, for all I care, green women for green men," he growled.

The family moved to Sierra Leone when Aminatta was just a few months old, and soon after Forna set up a medical clinic at remote Koidu, a town built on rich, alluvial diamond fields in the east of the country.

Maureen - whose white skin, Aminatta later realises, "earned her deference and contempt in equal measure" - worked hard supporting her husband's dream of a clinic that never turned anyone away. But the marriage turned sour and eventually, ostensibly for safety reasons, Maureen took the children back to Scotland where they lived in a caravan not far from Aminatta's grandparents' house.

By the time she was six, Aminatta had moved house nine times: back and forward between Sierra Leone and Britain, and then, when her mother married again (a white New Zealander, a United Nations official), to Nigeria. A terrible "colonial mentality" emerges. "I don't want you to talk to the African girls any more," Maureen tells Aminatta. "I want you to remember that you're half white." Soon, her father comes and claims custody of the children.

Aminatta spends months in an English boarding school, a particularly cruel fate for a lonely, mystified child. There, the racism is casual, brutal. Her best friend excludes her from a birthday party because "my dad doesn't like black people".

But, while racism is an inevitable theme, it's revealed in a peculiarly detached way. Most of these things were happening to a child who was uninformed about the world, an innocent, and Aminatta handles this childhood self with great skill and empathy, without trying to impose an adult's sensibility.

There is real excitement and horror: with her mother and siblings, three-year-old Aminatta drives in a Mercedes through the streets of the capital Freetown just hours after a massacre on the day her father was first elected to Parliament; with her stepmother and siblings, six-year-old Aminatta flees Sierra Leone on the night her father is arrested.

The 1960s were an extraordinary time for Africa, and laid the groundwork for many of the catastrophes that have happened since. The colonising powers withdrew leaving those impoverished, divided countries to their independence. Easy prey for Western lenders, with few trained specialists, "Africa had to make do with what she had", Forna writes in this moving, wonderfully visual account.

Flamingo, $24.99