50 

On Tuesday eight coffins, built of unfinished, bleached timber, were delivered to the gates of Pademba Road Prison. There were several witnesses to their arrival and the word soon spread around the city.

On Wednesday Mum was in downtown Freetown, at the travel agent booking her ticket to come to England and meet us at the end of term. Auntie Fatu had accompanied her. Mohammed Swartaka Turay was scouring the city. He had been to her small apartment above a garage in Wilkinson Road and found it empty. Mum had moved there after our landlord, Chief Sumano, was arrested. The chief's mother had been to plead with S. I. Koroma for her son's release. She told Mum what he had ordered her to do: ‘Get rid of Forna's filth.’ The two Armenian brothers who owned the garage were the only people who would take her on as a tenant, and they even waived the rent.

Mohammed Swartaka drove around town until he saw her car parked outside the travel agency. He stepped through the glass door just as she paid for her ticket. Leave the country, Yabome, he told her. My stepmother replied she was leaving anyway. Look She waved the ticket. No, he was insistent, you have to leave now. Somehow he made her understand: he persuaded the clerk to book her on the next available flight, departing at ten o'clock on Friday night.

Exactly eight months previously, on 16 November 1974, the jury at the trial in Court Number One of the high court retired for just one hour before returning a unanimous verdict. Guilty. All defendants on all counts. Judge Marcus Cole placed the black cap on his head and pronounced the sentence in a voice devoid of emotion. In the gallery the families of the defendants wept. Mum left the court, walked past the crowds, with Auntie Binty at her side, holding onto her own tears until she reached the sealed anonymity of the car.

The appeal, twenty-one days later, was turned down instantly. The matter was passed to the Mercy Committee. The Chief Imam led a delegation to see S. I. Koroma at his offices, as did some in the legal profession, belatedly stricken by their consciences. The protests were muted. Stevens had cut the tongue out of the populace. Instead people began to wear their hair in a new style: Mohamed Forna and the fourteen others. Seven braids descending on either side of the crown and a single braid in the centre, running from the peak of the forehead to the nape of the neck. Nancy Steele gathered her APC women's group together and marched through the streets demanding the executions be carried out in public.

At Christmas Mum drove with the three of us to State House and left us waiting in the car outside while she went to the gates and asked to see the president. ‘Will you get his autograph for me?’ I had asked stupidly. I continued to let the small pieces of knowledge I had acquired float on the surface of my awareness, refusing to draw them under for fear of drowning. ‘Don't you know who he is?’ Memuna asked me angrily as we watched Mum walking away from us towards the gate house. But I did and I didn't. I could not absorb the idea of a country in which the president was a man of hate. Mum waited for an hour at the gate house while we bickered and sweated on the plastic seats. Finally the president's office telephoned down: the president would not see her today. Or any day thereafter, as it turned out. Mum went back time and time again, always to be given the same message.

Outside Kamara Taylor's house we sat on the back steps and stared at our old mango tree. Memories flew up from the silt at the bottom of my consciousness: of how we used to pick the green fruit and sprinkle them with salt; of Milik telling his stories in the shade cast by the branches; of the solitary figure of the bodyguard sitting apart and alone. Mum left us there, warning us not to mention to a soul we used to live here. I looked around me, at the Ministers’ Quarters, the gardens, our life as it once was. It created an uncanny feeling, of real and unimagined déjà vu, of lives already lived, lives past and forgotten. I didn't know, then, everything that had taken place at that house on Spur Loop. I just wanted to tell someone that this was once my home.

Day after day we did the rounds with Mum while she pleaded for our father's life. Kamara Taylor would not see her; nobody would. We didn't go with her to S. I. Koroma's house, although Mum went to his office once with some of the wives of the other condemned men. It did no good, no good at all.

At Easter we spent our holidays in cheerless, chill Hackney with Mum's younger brother, a law student in London, in his student digs. In June, when we were all back at school, the Mercy Committee turned down the plea for clemency. All hope now rested with the president.

At Pademba Road eight of the prisoners were taken up to the cells closest to the gallows. The others were moved to cells below. Those on the lower floor began to be given exercise privileges. One day, when the guards were busy, Abu Kanu climbed up to one of the windows on the upper storey of the block. Knowing what was to come, he and my father said goodbye. In all the time they had been in prison together, throughout the trial and the sentencing, Abu had never seen his friend shed a tear. My father had told him, ‘When I cry I will cry only for my children.’ The remainder of the time my father lay there alone, wearing a dark-blue sweater with the letter C crudely cut out of white canvas and stitched onto the front, rising to eat the single plate of rice pushed under the door every day.

What must it be like, I have often wondered, to find yourself at the mercy of your enemy? One after the other, he watched the hopes retreat into the darkness. Was there ever a moment when he did not think of it? Did he ever manage to forget, to dwell on happier thoughts? What were his regrets, if there were any at all. And what did he say in his prayers? Who among us can imagine what it feels like to lie alone at night while the thoughts chase sleep away, to escape into dreams for a few hours, and to awaken into those elusive moments of peace, grasp them briefly in your fingers – before they are plucked away? Even though, far away, the palest light of dawn brightens the sky, the blackness descends once more to shroud the vivid colours of the dreams. No one ever asks a condemned man these questions – or perhaps they do but receive no reply. For what words could describe the wait until the end?

In the afternoon of 18 July the condemned men were taken out of their cells into a separate room and weighed. Each of the weights was recorded in a large ledger. That afternoon my father and Ibrahim Taqi stood at the small square of window in their cell doors and sang to one another – an old tune, one that my mother taught herself to play on the guitar and the five of us liked to sing together in Koidu:

‘Hang down your head, Tom Dooley,

Hang down your head and cry,

Hang down your head Tom Dooley,

Poor boy, you're bound to die.’

It was Bai Bai Kamara who whistled the tune for me the day we sat in the restaurant together in Freetown, three verses the whole way through and the refrain. In 1975 he cried: ‘Stop singing, Doctor,’ from his cell below them. ‘This is a bad night. Pray! Pray instead of singing.’ He was suffering from malaria; he let go of the bars of his window and fell back to the floor. Sometime in the early evening Bai Bai Kamara, Unfa Mansaray, Albert Tot Thomas and Abu Kanu were moved out of the block and taken to cells in Wilberforce.

As darkness fell the sounds of merry-making began to rise from the prison courtyard to the ears of the men in Wilberforce, Clarkson, Howard, Blyden, in the female block and in the condemned cells. Music played from a transistor radio as the executioners and guards swallowed liquor and palm wine delivered in quantities to the prison. In the hours leading up to midnight they grew drunker and drunker.

Sometime that evening our father sat down and wrote a letter to his wife. He asked her to trace our natural mother and thanked her for her efforts to save his life. From memory he itemised everything he owned: some proceeds from the rice business and shares in two or three local companies, a bank account in England containing a few thousand pounds set aside for our schooling. He left it all to us, his three children. Ibrahim Ortole, I noticed when I read the will again much later, owed him a considerable sum of money.

A little after ten o'clock Mum boarded her flight at Lungi. The British Caledonian plane taxied down the runway and lifted off into the gathering clouds of the rainy season. She stayed in her seat throughout the flight, neither read nor ate, refusing the solicitations of the air hostesses.

The last person to speak to our father, with the exception of his fellow prisoners and his executioners, was Dwight Neale, the journalist who had once been in prison with him. While we accompanied Mum on her visits to State House, our father refused to beg Stevens for his life. Instead he used the paper and pen supplied to him for his mercy plea to compose an account of his life from boyhood to his death, relating his hopes for the country, his experiences in politics and the guiding principles that caused him to relinquish his position. He carefully created a factual account of the part he had played in the country's recent history, a testimony that would outlive him. To the case against him he devoted no more than a page, pinpointing the lies of Morlai Salieu and Bassie Kargbo.

The executions began at midnight of 19 July. I was asleep in my dormitory at school. The aeroplane carrying Mum was crossing the Sahara, thirty thousand feet up in the sky.

The first two men to die were soldiers. The civilians were executed in the order in which they were indicted by the court. Mohamed Forna, First Accused, my father, walked the length of the block, past the cells of his companions, towards the noose waiting for him behind the door at the end of the building. I close my eyes and imagine his final walk: his stride, just like my own; broad, flat African feet inherited by me; his handcuffed hands: long, strong fingers, slightly flared at the tip and reborn in my brother; the broad, intelligent forehead, the same brow I see in my sister every time we meet. The men were hanged every half an hour, the men in the other blocks told me. They could tell, you see, because the music and the sounds of the guards’ bacchanal died for a few seconds, then rose up again more clamorous than before. If you listened very carefully in the moments in between, you could hear the sound of the trap door.

Dwight Neale, who stayed with the men until the last, left the prison after the final execution. The nightly tempests of the rainy season had started. He walked through the darkness, through the pouring rains of the storm, impervious to the wet, to the lightning that lit the streets and the answering bellow of thunder. Reaching the East End, he found a shebeen and sat there drinking until dawn, when he stumbled, soaking wet and cloudy with alcohol, into his office. Inside his jacket pocket was the letter my father had given him, which would not come to light until the twentieth anniversary of his death, when Siaka Stevens was dead, the APC had been overthrown and the country was on the brink of war.

The next day my father's body, and those of the seven other men who had been hanged, were displayed in open coffins before the crowds outside Pademba Road Prison. Stevens had promised a public execution; in the end he had slaughtered them in secret and displayed his trophies afterwards. Under cover of darkness the bodies were removed, loaded into military trucks and driven out to Rokupa cemetery on the road to Hastings, where they were doused with acid and dumped in a mass grave. Amnesty International alone protested the killings.

At school in Surrey I woke up and gazed at a cloudless sky from my bed in the alcove. Mum was waiting for us downstairs. She had come straight to the school from Gatwick. I was surprised and pleased to see her there.

The next I remember is sitting in a chair in the corner of Brian and Mary Quinn's sitting room in St Albans and listening to Brian as he talked about my father. He spoke as though he were delivering a speech. The room was spacious and formal, with sliding doors onto the gardens, a pale carpet, embroidered cushions and polished claw-foot tables loaded with photographs contained in silver frames. The last time I had been in this house was with my father. I stared out of the window at the sloping lawn, while Quinn's voice rumbled through me. He was describing my father's qualities. I began to cry, knowing what must surely be coming. I wanted him to stop his speech and tell me if something terrible had happened to our father, yet at the same time I could not bear to hear it and I wished, more than anything else, for him to carry on talking for ever.

I knew it and I still would not believe it. When Quinn had reached the end I asked: ‘How did he die?’

I can see Quinn's expression now. A Scot, he was always a controlled man. I witnessed the momentary blankness, the recovery that preceded the answer: ‘Stomach ulcers. He contracted stomach ulcers. In the end it became very serious.’ It was all he could come up with in the moment and it wasn't a very convincing answer, but it was enough for me.

For a year thereafter, whenever I had to tell someone that my father was dead I gave the same explanation, forcing myself to ignore the baffled, sometimes incredulous expression of my listener. I buried the knowledge as deep as I could and it struggled to emerge. I developed nervous tics: a sound halfway between a cough and a hiccup that I could not control, a compulsive twitch in my forehead that gradually spread to the whole of my face. I fought the knowledge and it fought me.

That summer Mum rented a one-bedroom apartment in London, in Manor House. At the back was a small garden. We had no friends, there were no parks or places to go nearby and so for several weeks Sheka, Memuna and I spent the days digging the flower beds and clearing weeds. Mum's friend Auntie Joy, who lived in Kent, came to visit us. I was very fond of her and we sometimes spent exeats from school in her lovely house with its garden full of roses and rhododendrons. I grasped her hand and pulled her outside to show off our handiwork. I remember her stricken face as she stood at the kitchen door, and now I am able to see the garden through her eyes: devoid of sunlight, earth exposed and dark, barren flower beds in which the local cats defecated; no birds, not a single flower, tree or shrub. We had sweated and laboured hard to create a garden in which nothing grew at all.

Once I went to Rokupa. The cemetery had long disappeared, cleared to make way for government-promised new low-cost housing units that in the end were never completed. I bought some oranges from a woman sitting with her companion at the side of the path in the shade of one of the few trees, skinned oranges stacked on a tin tray before her. She told me her name was Agnes. In turn I gave her mine. ‘So, Aminatta, you have come to see our place,’ she replied.

The place they call Rokupa is a flat expanse of cracked, red earth scattered with the husks of unfinished houses. Rows of clay bricks, carved from the soil, were baking under the sun. People had long given up on the government and were building their own homes. I followed the path away from the orange seller to where I had been told the cemetery once was. I passed a pair of men digging a hole with long-handled spades and arrived at a vast area of open, litter-strewn scrub. Ahead of me were the hills of Freetown; behind me a steeply sloping path to a small fishing bay and the sea. In the centre stood a small green monument, a pavilion with arched latticed windows and a white domed roof, rather like the minaret of a mosque. The grass rustled in the wind blowing off the sea. I could hear children shrieking and the sounds of the people meeting the fishing canoes as they arrived. The sun was high and burned down on me; the air was dry, acrid underneath. Rokupa lay on the edge of Freetown's industrial zone and the harsh vapours of chemicals mixed with the scent of the earth.

I stood still. I was alone. The dust dried my cheeks and bit into the back of my throat. I had always imagined my father was buried in a grave with a headstone, somewhere in Magburaka, perhaps. The silence over where my father's body lay I had long equated with the greater silence that smothered everything about the past. It had taken me until I was in my twenties to ask my stepmother the question and to discover that the authorities had claimed the bodies of the executed men, saying they belonged to the state, denying the families even the dignity of burying their dead – and the people the possibility of a shrine.

From somewhere behind me came the sudden, shrill cry of an animal in pain. I turned round. A gang of children were gathered, heads together, kicking something on the ground – it sounded like a small dog or a puppy. I walked towards them, planning to intervene. A woman sitting on the steps of her house saw me, called me over, asked in a challenging voice what my business was in Rokupa. I told her I was looking for the place where my father was buried. Oh, she grunted and looked abashed. When I turned round both the children and the dog, if that is what it was, had gone. There was nobody there except a little girl sitting alone in the dirt.

I needed to discover where in this huge expanse the bodies were buried. Was I walking above the bones of my father? A woman carrying a load of wood on the top of her head passed me by. I thought for an instant of asking her if she knew anything about what had happened here, but she was too young. Most of the people who lived here now were Temnes. Dura began to ask on my behalf. People gathered around us. An elderly man carrying a bundle of plastic bowls remembered the night the army sealed off the graveyard and arrived in trucks, working by torchlight in the darkness. There were fewer houses there then; most of the place was bush. The people were warned not to leave their homes. In the morning the locals came out here to look. He pointed to the place where they noticed the earth had been disturbed: for a long time a giant breadfruit tree had grown there.

After I had spoken to the old man I walked on. Once I had visited a clairvoyant, who described my father's death: ‘Suddenly falling through the air, so light-headed. Thank God it's all over.’ We had both stared at each other in shock. I prayed she was right. What did I want to mark my father's memory now: a headstone? A plaque? A monument? Blocks of stone or concrete that would crumble away in this lonely place.

Honour and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part: there all the honour lies. ’Give my love to the children,’ he had written in his last letter, ‘and tell them that short though my life has been, they will be proud of me when the truth of the last ten years will be known to all.’ Stevens had him convicted of treason, killed him, poured acid over his bones, tried to erase every trace of him; he wanted to destroy everything my father had represented, the ideals of men like Mohamed Forna and Ibrahim Taqi. Well, now I had the knowledge. Four months later I sat down in my London study and I began to write. His story. My story. Our story. The first ten years of my life and the last ten years of his.

I realised I had been standing in Rokupa for over an hour. I turned to go. As I made my way back to the car I caught sight of the little girl I had seen sitting on the ground. She was swaying under the huge weight of a plastic container of water balanced on her head. Her cotton dress had slipped off one shoulder, her feet were bare and I could hear the soft patter as the soles of her feet touched the earth. Fine red dust covered her skin, glistening like dark gold. Every few steps a dozen or so drops of water splashed out of the open neck of the container, showered around her, miniature rainbows fell onto the sand. She looked at me and smiled.

I remember her now, as I write, the little girl who once was me. If I concentrate my will I can still summon her, sometimes. She is there, the girl who believed there was a place somewhere on this earth, a place where a devil came down at dusk to dance alone on the water.