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