The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir. Aminatta Forna

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.