42 

I should have guessed, back then, how badly things were going when Mum turned to sara.

Mum, Santigi, Morlai, Musu and Esther knelt in a semicircle around an Alpha. The Alpha sat with his eyes closed and his palms turned upwards. In the centre of the gathering stood a basket of eggs and a cockerel with its feet bound. The bird's eye, as bright and hard as a marble, darted this way and that. The Alpha's monotonous chants, like the humming of a trapped bee, rolled around the walls of the room, gathering momentum, dropping to a quiet murmur a moment later. I stood still, caught on my way from the yard to my room, not certain of whether to go forward or back. Only Morlai opened his eyes and glanced at me. The Alpha kept his eyes shut, his lips barely moving as he prayed. I dropped to my knees and crept forward. I knew instinctively this ceremony was being performed for my father.

When the prayers were over the Alpha took the eggs and the cockerel and put them into his bag. Then he took three scraps of paper, prayers written in Arabic script, and bound them in string and cloth. The first of the shebe he tied to the branches of the mango tree at the back of the house, the second he concealed beneath the foundations. The third he said should be buried outside Pademba Road. Morlai agreed to accompany the Alpha to the prison gates. He kept his distance, he told me, as the Alpha, dressed in his long blue gown, approached the tall metal gates. He watched while the man tried to kick a hole into the earth with his heel and drop the shebe into it. But he failed and attracted the attention of the guards. In an instant they seized him and set upon him, then and there, in the middle of the busy street. Morlai slipped away.

A few days later I found another Alpha in the house. This one was sprinkling holy water in the corners of the sitting room.

Now we were in a new millennium. Even in Freetown people had mobile phones and e-mail; an Internet café had opened in the centre of town. Yet Yabome had still not relinquished her respect for the traditional beliefs. Earlier in the afternoon I had returned to the house to find a sheep chewing the small patch of lawn at the front of the house. A white sheep with a single black ear. A ewe.

Sorie Dawo had a dream, you see. He had seen me dressed in white, at the top of a Christmas tree, he said, like a fairy. I was talking. There were hundreds of white people gathered around the base of the tree listening to what I had to say. Sorie Dawo went to his Alpha, who divined the dream. The woman at the top of the tree will one day be very successful, said the Alpha, and many people will listen to what she has to say. But in order to ensure my luck I had to make an offering: ‘A male sheep. White. Seven white cola nuts. One piece of white shirting,’ Sorie Dawo repeated.

Mum had determined to perform my sara, even before Auntie Memuna, on a visit to the house, told us my father had received the same sara. He hadn't carried out the ceremony for good fortune by the time he was arrested. After that I found Sorie Dawo's warning hard to ignore. What harm could it do, I told myself, to go along with it all?

Later, in the evening, we sat on the balcony, the sound of the crickets overtaken by the hum of the generator. On the days when there was mains electricity the evenings were noticeably more peaceful. The streets had begun to empty as the curfew approached; most people had already arrived back home.

The sara sheep was gone. Yabome told me her sister had promised to go to the market on Saturday and look for a white ram. Presently she spoke: ‘You know what happened to them all, don't you?’

‘Who?’ I said, knowing full well.

‘These people. All of them. Every single one.’ I knew what was coming next. For a lot of people here it was enough, but not for me. Yet who could fail to be impressed by the dramatic irony in Bambay Kamara's final moments, summarily executed without trial by the NPRC in 1992, accused of plotting against the new military government – from his cell in Pademba Road Prison. The soldiers took them all down to the beach early one morning, tied them, blindfolded them and shot them. The charges were trumped up, of course. Even those who hated Bambay believed he was murdered. But, live by the sword . . .

‘S.I. paralysed.’

‘Paranoid, do you mean?’ I asked.

She caught my drift. ‘Paralysed and paranoid, both. Away in his house, for a long time he was like that. He wouldn't let anybody see him.’ S. I. Koroma died convinced Siaka Stevens was trying to kill him. He had suffered a gruesome car accident in a Mercedes loaned to him by Stevens. The accident had happened at a village on the way to Magburaka, where S.I.’s convoy was headed during the violent election campaign of 1977. Makari was the seat of one of the men who had stood trial alongside my father, Chief Bai Makari N'Silk. Months later, following medical treatment in Germany which was only partially successful, he struggled back to work, desperate to hold on to his position. Stevens liked to make jokes at his vice-president's expense. All man de fom sick for no dae cam wok, S.I. dae fom well for cam wok. Most people pretend to be sick to get out of work; S.I. is the only person who pretends to be well so he can come to work. Stevens snubbed S.I.’s years of faithful devotion, electing the dull-witted Joseph Saidu Momoh as his successor instead. S.I. suffered a stroke and retreated behind the walls of his home. Mum had seen him just once, sitting in the back seat of his parked car outside Choithrams supermarket, drooling from the corner of his mouth while people gazed in at him through the window.

And Christian Kamara Taylor? He died in the provinces after a long illness, a public death painfully lacking in dignity.

‘Can you imagine lying like that, in the back of a truck, without even enough money to get a car to take you to a hospital? People coming to stare at the corpse in the rain. Look at Kamara Taylor!’ Yabome snorted and sat back with a look of grim satisfaction.

‘I don't suppose he knew much about it,’ I commented. Although perhaps, I thought, if Sierra Leone had even the most basic medical care he might have made it. Those who could afford it flew out of the country to hospitals in Europe. Kamara Taylor was evidently down on his luck. He had gone to a traditional healer, too late. The truck hired to carry his body to Freetown had broken down.

‘People here believe nothing happens for nothing,’ concluded Yabome emphatically.

It didn't end there. N. A. P. Buck, the government prosecutor, lost his mind a few years later and was seen wandering the streets. Marcus Cole's son died in a car accident. The judge himself was killed ten years on, when the car in which he was travelling collided with a stolen vehicle and overturned on the road from Gatwick Airport into central London. The whispers reached me then and had never stopped. You see, you see, the believers murmured quietly. Hakeh. Divine justice: it catches up with everyone in the end.

I didn't argue with Yabome. The truth was I didn't care what happened to those people. It wasn't enough for me. It would never be enough for me. My preferred justice was of a different kind, a more worldly justice altogether. What about all those ordinary people in this country who lived and died in prosaic and yet unimaginable poverty? They had done nothing to deserve their fate except to be born in the wrong country in the wrong class.

And what of Siaka Stevens, the master of it all, who died in his bed and whose obituaries, full of praise, were published in the British newspapers?