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My days were spent in the house, playing with our dogs Jack and Jim, and being guarded by Big Aminatta. I say ‘guarded’ because that is just about what she did: she pursued her many chores around the house, of which I was just one. Her task was to make sure I didn’t escape or run into trouble. She kept me within the confines of the compound by telling me of the devils lurking in the elephant grass beyond the screen of trees that marked the compound boundary. Devils with faces like gargoyles just waiting for the opportunity to feed on a child like me. At night she got me to clean my teeth with stories of cockroaches that crawled onto pillows and feasted on the crumbs left at the side of a sleeper’s mouth.
At that time we had two Old English sheepdogs. With their heavy coats they were hopelessly unsuited to both the humidity and the ticks that burrowed into their flesh, but they seemed to manage all the same. Given to us as puppies in Freetown, they were at first presumed to be mongrels until they grew into apparently full-blooded Old English sheepdogs. My mother called them Jack and Jim and they were the only pedigree dogs I ever saw or have ever seen since in Sierra Leone. I spent my days tumbling with Jack and Jim in the yard and kissing them on the nose, playing in the dirt until I contracted enormous tropical boils, which my father lanced for me from time to time, and generally ingesting enough germs to give me a lifelong immunity to hepatitis. In the evening our father came back long after we were all in bed. He literally worked every hour of the day.
Mornings, when our father went to the bathroom for his early constitutional, was our quality time together. The three of us followed him to the bathroom, carrying our colouring books, toys and stories. We sat on the floor around him, chatted, finished our drawings, showed him the work we had done the day before or persuaded him to read aloud to us. At some point I suppose he sent us on our way. I don’t remember that, only lying on the lino colouring a picture of a princess for him.
From my three-foot-high perspective, my strongest memory of my father is from the waist down: mid-grey slacks, open sandals. I remember the exact shape and hue of his toenails, his strong, muscular thighs and rounded bottom, but the face on the top remains a blur on top of a vaguely light-coloured, short-sleeved shirt and stethoscope. He had a beard at that time, but my memory of him only truly begins when he shaved it off a few months before we left Koidu for good. Most of the time our worlds barely collided, and those moments when they did were the most memorable.
A deranged woman was brought to the clinic. I guess she must have been in her forties, although she looked much older. She snatched at the lappa she was wearing and at her blouse, screamed and started like a mare, and behaved as though unseen hands were pinching her or, I thought, tickling her armpits and squeezing her sides like my uncles did to me in a way that both hurt and made me howl at the same time. The more I shrieked the more they thought I was enjoying it and continued. The family said she was bewitched and they couldn’t look after her any more, so our father put her in one of the rooms in our house, I think with the intention of sending her or driving her himself down to a mental hospital in Freetown. Later the same day I wandered past the window of the room where she was being held and saw her face staring at me behind the mesh of the fly screen. She shouted and her eyeballs reeled. I fled back to Big Aminatta.
Some time later in the afternoon she escaped. Nobody in the house knew how or when, but she couldn’t have been gone long. My father raced to the car and the three of us leapt in behind him, standing on the plastic seats and blaring at the top of our voices that we were off to look for the madwoman. My father drove at speed telling us to keep a look out; he seemed to be enjoying the adventure as much as we were. Everyone was making a riotous amount of noise and we felt no fear.
We hadn’t been gone long when we saw her. She was standing at the side of the road, on the balls of her feet with her back pushed hard against a tree. Her shoulders were drawn up high and she was shrieking. Above her the tree was in flower, decorated with splendid fleshy, coral heads framed by thick petals that grew upright, like hands reaching to the sky. The orange and pink colours made the flamboyant tree look as if it were alight with burning candles. From a distance I could see the woman was staring at a branch from the tree that was lying in the middle of the road. She seemed to be fixated on it, as though it were alive. When we drew nearer I saw the branch wasn’t what I thought at all, but a snake.
The car went straight over it, I felt the bump under my bottom and thighs. A moment later we were in reverse. My father kept going, changing gears backwards and forwards, until after a while I couldn’t feel the point where the snake’s corpse lay on the road any longer. When we were certain it was dead we felt like heroes who had vanquished a dragon.
In my mind’s eye the snake had been enormous, stretching the entire width of the road. As I grew older I thought perhaps I imagined it: no ordinary snake could really be that long. Now, I realise it was almost certainly a twig snake – six foot long, yes, but absolutely harmless. It wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with the madwoman except perhaps to get past her up the tree to lie in peace on its favourite branch.
We drove home with the mad lady now sitting quite calmly between us in the back. The next day she went off to Freetown. I wasn’t there when she was taken away, and when I discovered she was gone, I missed her.
7 (#ulink_0288e32a-0003-57d9-8631-59648d8a8d9e)
My mud pies were too dry and the sides were crumbling. I’d sloshed water into the mess and begun to swill it all with a stick when Pa Roke showed up. He was my grandfather. Everything about him – the way he dressed in long embroidered gowns with a matching fez, or skull cap, his solemn bearing and formal manners – came from a different age of Africa, one that still existed among the rural people for whom life hadn’t changed in centuries, but was disappearing everywhere else.
Whenever my grandfather arrived he seemed to materialise out of nowhere. Although I’m sure he must have carried his clothes in a bundle, he never appeared to have anything resembling luggage. And when he walked into the compound there was no evidence of the means of transportation he had taken, no bush taxi disappearing in a whirl of dust, no car or bus. Not even a bicycle. He looked as though he had just come from the end of the road instead of Magburaka, where he lived, a whole day’s travel away. By necessity, since there were no telephones and no mail service to speak of, he arrived unannounced and would stay for a few days or sometimes a few weeks.
Because I was the only one at home and he seemed to have little to do during those visits except wait for my father, Pa Roke and I spent our days in each other’s company – although it’s true to say that there was very little contact between the two of us. Pa Roke sat around the house, calling occasionally to Big Aminatta to fetch and carry for him and for the most part ignored me, though it gave me some small pleasure to see Big Aminatta, my own constant nemesis, being ordered around.
Big Aminatta was in awe of Pa Roke, an awe which struck so deep into her core it even altered the way she walked. Usually she swayed her bottom and slid her flip-flopped feet across the floor so that they made an insolent sort of sound, like a market woman hissing through her teeth. In front of our grandfather she took short, fast steps and moved around at quite a clip. She was permanently bent at the waist, as though stuck in a half-curtsy and she never spoke to him, except to say, ‘Yes, Pa,’ keeping her eyes lowered all the while.
I suspect Pa Roke had little time for me. By my age most children were beginning to learn how to be useful. They were started on the smallest of errands, fetching and carrying glasses of water and passing items to their mother. European child that I was, at least in part, I did nothing all day except make mud pies and attempt to divert adult attention. Every now and again I felt Pa Roke watching me, but when I looked at him appealingly I never elicited much by way of response.
In the afternoon Pa Roke accompanied my mother and me on our rounds, taking my place in the front of the car while I was relegated to the back seat. My mother communicated to him using improvised sign language and practising the Temne she had picked up. Her Creole by that time was quite good too, and Pa Roke understood her a little. When all else failed she spoke loudly in English, affecting an African accent, smiling brilliantly. Pa Roke said little but nodded agreeably and smiled back at her, showing the gaps in his teeth, or rather, since he had so few, it would be more accurate to say he displayed the teeth in the gap of his mouth.
He and my mother rubbed along, watching each other through the veils of age, race, gender, language and culture. They seemed fond of each other in the way visitors like the locals in a new place, where everyone welcomes them and people are reduced to cartoons of themselves without nuance, detail or subtlety: a superficial world where everyone laughs and exchanges are full of feigned bonhomie.
When my father arrived home later in the day a transformation came over Pa Roke. He filled out into a real person, talking and laughing, suffering the occasional coughing fit. He even seemed to notice I was in the room and he asked my father about us, pointing in our direction every now and again.
Pa Roke wore mukay, pointed leather shoes, that men used as slippers with the back trodden down. He would slip them off and cross his bare feet at the ankle. Likewise my father took off his sandals. This signalled the beginning of their sessions. They talked for hours together in Temne, who knows what about, since I couldn’t understand a word they said. Perhaps they discussed the cases Pa Roke judged in the villages. My father once took my mother to Magburaka to watch Pa Roke sitting in the barrie and listening to the people’s grievances. One particular case involved a woman and three men. My father explained to my mother that they were watching a paternity suit. My mother tried to follow the proceedings for a while. Then she nudged my father and asked him whether the woman had been asked to name one of these men as the father. My father shook his head. No, he had explained, each of these men wishes to claim the child as his own. No man would ever give up a child that might be his.
A few days into his visit Pa Roke and I had lunch alone together. Everyone else was out: Sheka and Memuna at school; my father had a meal sent to him at the downtown surgery and my mother had plenty of other things to do. Before the meal my grandfather pulled out a small straw prayer mat with a picture of a mosque on it in black and red and laid it down on the ground. His mukay were left discarded on the tiled floor as he stepped onto the mat. He stood still with his hands at his side, his head bent, then he knelt, hands resting on his thighs, palms to the heavens in a gesture of supplication. It was beautiful to watch him kneeling and stretching his body out to touch the floor with his forehead with the grace of a water bird stretching its neck out across the surface of a lake.
A time would come when I would be made uncomfortable if I was caught in a room with someone who was praying, never knowing whether to go about my business and pretend I hadn’t noticed them or keep still out of reverence. My father was a Muslim, yet we had not been brought up in any particular faith. I had a Muslim name and all my relatives regarded me as a Muslim, but I had never been into a mosque or held a Koran.
It happened once that I came across Pa Roke at his midday prayers and the idea lodged in my head that I should be praying, too. So I knelt behind him, copying all his movements with no earthly idea what it all meant. Halfway through I began to feel foolish and decided to extricate myself, but that posed a new difficulty: to sidle away midway through prayers seemed sinful; at the same time I worried my grandfather might think I was making fun of him. I couldn’t make the decision, so I went on, standing, kneeling and bowing for what seemed like eternity. When he finished, he stood up, rolled his mat and walked away without looking back or acknowledging that I was there. I didn’t get the impression he was angry. Rather that he understood, better than I, the struggle that had played out in my young mind.
Pa Roke was used to eating with his hands, although sometimes he used just a spoon. Before his prayers and again afterwards he called for Big Aminatta to bring a basin of water and she held it, bracing under the weight, while he washed his hands elaborately and shook the water from his long fingers. We had a bathroom with running water, but it didn’t seem to occur to him to get up and go and use it He was just used to a different life, one in which one of the young girls in the family fetched him water from the stream every morning.
Lunch that day was groundnut stew and rice, made with plenty of hot cayenne pepper, chicken and beef stewed for hours in a stock thickened with finely ground peanuts, which Big Aminatta roasted and crushed using an empty bottle as a rolling pin. The local chickens were so tough she had to boil them up for ages with onions and tomatoes. But once cooked they were tender and full of flavour. She added small pieces of hairy, cured fish which gave off a strong, smoky taste. Groundnut stew was one of my favourite dishes.
Pa Roke worked his way through the food on his plate until there was nothing left but a small pile of chicken bones. These he picked up one by one, and devoured them methodically. First he bit off the soft tissue and cartilage. Then he slowly chewed the knuckles at either end. Finally, he cracked the fragile, splintering bone with his back teeth and licked out the dark marrow. When he had finished there was nothing, but nothing, left of the fowl to speak of. I had never seen anything like it
I was brought up to chew my bones; they were good for my teeth and the marrow full of vitamins. But I was sickened by the rubbery, slippery texture of the cartilage in my mouth and I left those pieces discarded on my plate. The grainy, soft ends of the bones I liked, but though I usually chewed them I stopped short of attacking the shaft of the bone with its sharp, jagged slivers.
I always called my grandfather Pa Roke. All my uncles, aunts and cousins did the same and even those people who were not related to us. It never occurred to me that this was not his name and I was well into adulthood when I made the discovery that Pa Roke wasn’t a name, it was a title: Pa Roke, Regent Chief of Kholifa Mamunta.
In the 1880s the chiefs of Temneland double-crossed a fearless young warrior by the name of Gbanka, whom they had hired to fight the Mende people and force open the trade routes to the Bumpe and Ribi rivers. Gbanka was born of a Mende mother and a Temne father. When he realised he had been cheated he went to his mother’s people, whom he had just defeated, and allied himself to them. There he swore a bloody revenge upon the Temne people and over the coming years he captured town after town in Temneland.
My great-grandfather Pa Morlai was a Loko and a warrior from Bombali. At the time Loko fighters were amongst the most skilled in the land. They had long-standing connections to the Mende people and an interest in the lucrative trade with the Europeans who sailed their ships far up the rivers into the interior looking for gold and ivory. When the Temnes fought back against Gbanka’s war boys, the Loko were drawn into battle on the side of the Mendes.
Pa Morlai captured and became commander in charge of the town of Mamunta, in Tonkolili, deep inside Temneland. When finally Gbanka was captured and imprisoned by the British, who soon tired when the fighting began to disrupt trading, Pa Morlai left Mamunta to return to his village. Matoko was on the other side of the Katabai Hills and when Pa Morlai entered the home of his birth he was a wealthy man, bearing the spoils of his war, including a sizeable retinue of slaves.
Among those wearing the round wooden collar of the enslaved was a young girl of twelve or thirteen called Beyas. Pa Morlai presented Beyas as a gift to his mother Ya Yalie to raise – a companion who would help her around the house and in the fields.
Beyas was the daughter of Masamunta Akaik, literally Chief Big Beard, of the Kamaras, one of the ruling families of Mamunta. As a slave with an aristocratic bloodline she was a trophy. And as she went about her tasks she impressed Ya Yalie with the delicacy of her demeanour: one day, when Beyas was about fifteen and was maturing into womanhood, the older woman went to her son and suggested that he take Beyas as one of his wives.
Beyas and Pa Morlai had four children together: three sons and one daughter. The years passed but Beyas, now called Ya Beyas by everyone in recognition of her status as a mother, never grew accustomed to her life. For all that she was married to a big man, she was still a slave.
One day, more than twenty years after Ya Beyas arrived in Matoko, a trader appeared at the marketplace selling round baskets of different sizes. They were woven out of coloured raffia and known as shuku, which people used to store clothes or pack their belongings for journeys. At the sight of him Ya Beyas became distraught and none of her children, who had accompanied her that day, could fathom what had upset her so much. Ya Beyas waved them away; refused their solicitations. She wanted to talk to the basket weaver alone. For a few minutes the two conferred, then Ya Beyas, seemingly much recovered, returned home and did not speak of the matter again. In time the incident was completely forgotten – by everyone that is, except Ya Beyas.
The weavers of Mamunta are renowned for their basketry. Ya Beyas recognised the intricate weave, the bands of turquoise and mauve that made up the design, which came from her home. Secretly she had sent a message with the trader to take to her brothers (she was certain that by now Masamunta Akaik was dead), telling them she was enslaved in Matoko. She begged them to find her and redeem her.
It took a whole year for the basket seller to complete his travels and return to Matoko. When she began to expect him back Ya Beyas invented every kind of excuse to go to the market by herself. Eventually one morning she saw the man sitting behind his huge pile of shuku and her heart lifted. But the trader had failed in his task. He had nothing to say for himself except that he had somehow forgotten.
Not one of my elderly aunts, who recounted the story of Ya Beyas to me, could tell me how or why he should do so. But they were clear: he had forgotten. He had not been waylaid or confused, found her family had disappeared or never returned to Mamunta. He forgot. Perhaps, I thought to myself as I listened, he drank too much omole.
Again Ya Beyas begged him to take a message and the trader promised that this time it would get there. In the meantime she resigned herself to twelve more months in Matoko.
The trader was true to his word. Some months later two of Ya Beyas’s brothers, Pa Santigi Kamara and Pa Yambas Sana, arrived in Mamunta, splendidly attired in gold-embroidered robes as befitted their status, followed by retainers carrying everything required to formally redeem their stolen sister: a barrel of palm oil, a sack of rice, a cow, a sack of pure salt, a tie of tobacco leaves, one woven country cloth and four silver shillings. These gifts they presented in the barrie before the paramount chief, the elders and Pa Morlai. When the ceremony was over Ya Beyas was a free woman.
Ya Beyas wanted nothing more than to go back to Mamunta to see her family, but Pa Morlai was loath to allow her to leave. She might no longer be a slave, but as his wife she had to obey her husband. A sore on her foot had turned septic, and Pa Morlai insisted that she stay under the care of his healer until she could walk properly.
The seasons had run through twice more by the time Ya Beyas wore her husband down. He seemed to find an unlimited number of new reasons why she should stay in Bombali and he obliged her to do his bidding. At last he relented and agreed to the journey. Ya Beyas wanted her daughter Hawa to accompany her, but Pa Morlai imposed his will one last time and refused to allow it, for the young woman was betrothed to a youth in Matoko. He suggested she travel with their second son Saidu instead.
Pa Morlai waited in his house in Matoko for Ya Beyas to return, but the rains came and went and there was no sign of her. Unlike his wife, who had learned patience, Pa Morlai was not born with a great deal and his small store soon ran out. One morning he rose, walked to the door of his house, snapped his fingers to summon his retainers and ordered them to begin preparations for a journey. Within a short time he and his entourage were ready and they set out, back across the Katabai Hills to Temneland, carrying with them a large calabash.
In Mamunta Pa Morlai stood before Pa Santigi’s house, knocked and waited. After a few moments he knocked again. The third time the door was answered and he entered.
In front of him walked a delicate girl, his youngest niece, who carried the tremendous calabash on her head. Under the weight of it her neck swayed like a pawpaw tree overburdened by fruit. The room within was full of people. Trembling, the girl laid the calabash at the feet of Pa Santigi, who sat cross-legged on a low stool. He looked inside and helped himself to a few of the cola nuts before passing the rest around the assembled company. After a few moments he looked expectantly at Pa Morlai, the conqueror now turned supplicant, who cleared his throat and announced his business.
‘I have seen a flower,’ he said, using the customary words of a prospective bridegroom in the house of his beloved. ‘And that flower is growing here, in the house of the Kamaras.’
Pa Santigi gave a signal and three girls were brought forth. The first one advanced and stood before Pa Morlai. Her face was covered by a cloth and he carefully raised it. No – he shook his head. Each woman was presented and each time, even though they were fresh and lovely, he looked at the woman he had been offered, declined and waited.
The three young women left through the door and stood outside, where their muffled giggles could be heard in the stately silence of the room. A fourth figure appeared at the door: rings of age thickened her waist and her neck; as she moved she dragged her foot slightly. Pa Morlai had no need to raise the cloth that covered her face. He nodded. ‘Here is my flower.’
In front of her gathered family – elders, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces – Ya Beyas paused; then she bent and picked up the calabash. With that gesture she accepted Pa Morlai as her husband, not as a slave, but as a free woman. She sat on the floor next to her elder brother with the calabash containing her dowry on her lap.
Inside Ya Beyas’s wedding calabash were cola nuts, a symbol of friendship; bitter cola nuts to represent hardship; a prayer mat; a head of tobacco for the elders who would counsel the couple through the highs and lows of married life; atara alligator pepper which, if the seeds were kept in the pod, would for ever bring peace to a union; and a needle and thread, to remind the bride of her wifely duty. And finally, at the bottom of the pot, in gold, silver and precious stones was the measure of her worth as a woman.
A few days after the ceremony Pa Morlai prepared to leave Mamunta for Matoko. He went to Ya Beyas and told her he planned to leave. He assumed she would accompany him, but he was careful to couch his command as a request. ‘So, Beyas, it’s time for you to say goodbye to your family. We should leave for Matoko in a few days.’
Ya Beyas looked at her husband. Pa Morlai was nearly seventy, an old man, and she was already middle-aged. She let her eyes linger on his face, his eyes, his mouth. He was her captor, her owner, her husband and the father of her children. She looked down and replied slowly, barely audibly: ‘No, my husband. I will not.’ This was Ya Beyas’s sole act of defiance in her entire life: a life lived as a daughter, sister, slave and junior wife.
And so Pa Morlai returned alone to Matoko, where he died some years later. Ya Beyas stayed in Mamunta, with her son Saidu. And no one knows, to this day, whether Pa Morlai and Ya Beyas ever laid eyes on each other again after their wedding day.
8 (#ulink_8177e8a4-daf7-5545-bc3b-316ae40e7990)
Once Pa Roke noticed me. I was following a line of ants across the ground to the entrance into their nest, a hole by the roots of the mango tree. Above me the trunk of the tree seethed with ants. I was placing obstacles in the path of the column to see whether the ants would break formation. When Pa Roke’s shadow fell across me, I had just laid a long stick on the ground in front of them.
I fancied I knew how the ants communicated with each other. When the giant obstacle suddenly appeared across their path, a couple of ants raced each way some distance down the length of the stick. They were the scouts. The others, the bearers, waited patiently with their loads. The scout ants came back and reported that there was no way of going round the object, it would take too long. They would have to climb over. The other ants waved their antennae in agreement, or so I imagined. And without delay an advance party set out up and over the stick.
The lives of ants could hold me spellbound for hours. There were the regular black ones that everyone knew. Then there were the tiny red ones – they were the ones that gave you stinging bites. If you stood near their nest they swarmed up your leg and sank thousands of tiny teeth into you, leaving painful red marks. Several times the size of the ordinary ants were the giant ones, which could be either red or black. They were harmless, but discouragingly large. Overall the black ants were by far and away the friendlier of the species.
There were ant hills all over the surrounding country. Acre upon acre turned to moonscape by the giant moguls, often interspersed with termite hills that towered over the ant hills like giant stalagmite fortresses. War raged constantly between the armies of the termites, the red ants and the black ants. They killed, captured and enslaved each other.
I once saw red ants swarming over one of the big black ants; it staggered like a bull brought down by a pack of wild dogs, helpless as the red ants began to eat it alive. When it stopped struggling they carried it away, still twitching, even though it was several times bigger than each of them. Much later I learned that the only two species who wage war against their own kind are ants and men.
Pa Roke watched me for a short while and then he beckoned to me to follow him. We went a little way to the edge of the compound where the earth was soft and sandy. There were several funnel-shaped holes, each barely an inch across. Pa Roke waved, indicating to me to crouch down and watch. He picked up a dried leaf and broke off a fraction of the tip and dropped it over the rim of the tiny crater.
‘What is it?’ I asked. Pa Roke put his finger to his lips.
For a few seconds nothing happened. We waited. I began to think there was something wrong with Pa Roke. But when I glanced up at him to check, he pointed impatiently back at the ground. I looked back and the piece of leaf was gone. A second later it came flying out of the hole and landed on the ground by my feet. I started. Pa Roke laughed, a short hoarse sound. He looked genuinely amused.
A small, black ant wandered by. Pa Roke used the edge of the leaf still in his hand to ease it over the edge of the hole. As the ant slid down the sandy incline, it began to scrabble desperately, raking the smooth sides as it failed to find a grip. When it reached the bottom it waved its antennae around, apparently trying to get its bearings. I knew now what was going to happen. There was a tiny flurry. The ant reared up and then disappeared beneath the sand, its angular legs the last to go under.
‘Ant lion,’ said Pa Roke. And he got up and nimbly stepped back up to the house, his robes flapping behind him like a great bird.
I fetched a stick and poked around the sand in the hole. I wanted to save the ant. I unearthed an insect the shape of a miniature armadillo; it was still holding on to the ant, which had accepted its fate and stopped kicking. But freed from the earth the ant seemed to fight with renewed vigour. The ant lion gave up, retreating back under the sand while the ant hobbled away: a crumpled body on broken legs.
In Mamunta, Pa Santigi, brother to Ya Beyas, decided to run for the forthcoming chieftaincy elections. The chieftaincy rotated between the three ruling families and the last ruler had died some months before. Now the elders were busy organising elections for a new king, though since the arrival of the British there were officially no more kings, only paramount chiefs. When the protectorate was brought under British colonial rule the newly installed governor declared the only recognised sovereign from that day on was Victoria, Queen of England.
Ya Beyas’s son Saidu helped in the elections, canvassing votes for his uncle among the people of the outlying villages. Now a grown man with two wives, he had moved away from Mamunta and farmed at a small settlement called Rogbonko. He spent many days and weeks on the campaign trail, sometimes taking his two children to accompany him.
Nearing the crucial run-up to the election, Pa Santigi’s campaign began to run out of funds. The uncles needed to raise cash in the fastest way possible and they decided to sell their nephew Saidu into bondage to a wealthy farmer in Mayoso. There he worked long days and slept in the fields at night alongside other indentured men and prayed that his uncle would win the election and redeem him as soon as possible.
A year later Saidu found himself living in the forest, taking part in the kantha of his uncle, now Chief Masamunta Kanakoton of Kholifa Mamunta. Though still young his political skills and commitment were evident and Saidu was to be honoured with the title Pa Mas’m, chief minister and principal adviser to the new king. For months the king and his ministers stayed hidden beyond the darkness of the trees in the sacred bush, where they learned the principles of governance from the elders and took part in induction rituals carried out by the secret society, the Poro.
At the end of this came the three-day kathora, the ceremony to install the new ruler. On Chief Masamunta’s head sat the stiff, embroidered head-dress; on his chest lay a heavy necklace of amulets and animals’ teeth and he carried a long, forked staff covered with leather and adorned with fragments of leopard skin. He led his cabinet forward into the village to the barrie and they circled it thrice before they entered and took up their places.
Weeks later the new Pa Mas’m returned to Rogbonko only to find that in his absence his two wives had quarrelled badly. Ya Monday G’bai, a mature widow inherited by Saidu from an uncle on his passing, had departed. According to custom she left her son, also the message that she had gone back to live in peace with her own family. Now Yima, Saidu’s spirited and mischievous younger wife, claimed for herself the role of first wife to the Pa Mas’m.
It was Ya Yima who, passing through Rothomgbai one day on her way back from Mamunta (where her husband now kept a second home in order to attend to his court duties), noticed a girl standing by the side of the path carrying a water jug. There were four miles more to Rogbonko and Ya Yima asked the child for a drink. As she watched the girl quickly pour the water she was impressed by the girl’s demure manner. Yima made enquiries. She found out the child’s name was Ndora; she was the daughter of Yamba Soko Serry and Digba Kamara and the great-granddaughter of a chief.
It was at Ya Yima’s instigation that Ndora became Saidu’s sixth wife and went to live in Rogbonko. Ya Yima herself made all the arrangements. For the first few years Ndora helped the older wives around the house. She fetched water for her husband in the mornings. Late in the day she joined the other young girls down by the stream in the deep channel that ran behind the clay brick houses; they scrubbed clothes, pounding them against the rocks, creating a froth of suds, while cascades of water drops made rainbows above their heads, flashing the same vibrant colours of the kingfishers on the opposite bank.
Some time after her first blood showed, Ndora went to her husband’s room. On the first occasion she was carried, according to custom, on the back of one of the senior wives. From then on she spent three nights with Saidu in turn with each of her co-wives. Ndora’s first son she named Morlai and suckled him for two years. The second child, another son called Mohamed, was born after the harvest in the month of tarokans, a year after Morlai began to eat his first mouthfuls of pap.
Ya Yima was entranced by Ndora’s fat, bright new son. After Mohamed was weaned she insisted on taking over care of the baby herself and, ignoring Ndora’s protests, she brought the child into the big house she shared with Saidu. Ndora was left outside. Yima passed her time playing with the little boy, while Ndora worked long days in the fields side by side with the other junior wives and the indentured men. Sometimes on her way home, she would go by and take little treats to her son: a catapult she made herself or a little piece of canya made of rice flour, sugar and peanuts.
Months passed and still Ya Yima kept little Mohamed by her side. She brushed aside all Ndora’s entreaties. Didn’t she take good care of him? Besides Ndora was so busy. And the little boy was happy, said Ya Yima.
When all else failed Ndora determined to bypass her senior wife’s authority and beg her husband in order to have her child returned to her. Saidu, by now, was used to Ya Yima’s wilfulness. It came as no surprise she had upset a co-wife; nevertheless he did not expect to have to intervene in their concerns. He told Ndora he would handle the matter himself, to be patient and not to worry. But when Ya Yima refused to listen to even his efforts to persuade her, he lost his temper and ordered her to return the boy to Ndora.
Ndora sent her son to join his brother Morlai at the home of an aunt in Rothomgbai. One night a snake crept into the hut where several children lay sleeping side by side on a mat. A few minutes later Mohamed woke screaming, with two small puncture wounds on his foot. The poison lodged in his foot: he survived, though nearly lost the foot. Not one of the other children was harmed. A diviner was brought in and an investigation mounted. There was only one explanation: witchcraft. Suspicion fell on many and rumours rustled through the villages: Who had seen a soul stir? What old grudges were borne? Who else might fall ill? Nothing was ever proved.
Realising the folly of his actions had put his own son in danger, Saidu immediately brought the child back to Rogbonko into his own home, and returned him to the arms of Ya Yima.
Two years later war broke out in Europe. Up in Rogbonko at first it had little impact. But after the British lost control of the Mediterranean and were forced to route their supplies bound for the east through Africa, they were attracted for the same reasons as the slaving ships two hundred years before to Freetown’s deep natural harbour. Men from the protectorate were recruited to fill the demand for cheap labour, including many from Mamunta and the surrounding villages. Thousands more were drafted to fight the Japanese in the jungles of Burma. There was an even greater demand for produce for export and yet the prices offered by the colonial rulers never improved. With the extra hands gone from the fields, life grew hard for everyone in the villages.
Ndora began to lose weight. The white doctors at the hospital failed to heal her, so the family turned to their own medicine. The day came when Ndora couldn’t climb up off her sleeping mat. Fearing the worst the family sent for the healer, Pa Yamba Mela, at the house Pa Mas’m provided for him in the Fornas’ compound.
Pa Yamba Mela arrived at Ndora’s bedside carrying his divining thunder box. He was as handsome as he was terrible; it was he who smelled the odour of magic behind the snakebite on Mohamed’s foot and again when the boy was struck with smallpox some years later. People for miles around claimed Pa Yamba Mela could even draw thunder out of the sky to strike wrongdoers down. Indeed, it had been known to happen to some errant souls who had committed God knows what crime. They were found lying in the fields or under a tree during the rains. Some died; the others were never the same again.
The medicine man knew immediately he had found the culprit. Only by confessing to dabbling in witchcraft could Ndora save her own life; she had become ensnared in the power of the rites she had tried to use for her own purposes and now she was being consumed from within. All day Pa Yamba Mela stayed with her mouthing incantations and exhorting the dying woman to admit her guilt, even as the delirium overwhelmed her. Finally, just before her last breath slipped over her lips and mingled with the air, Ndora confessed.
Shortly afterwards Chief Masamunta passed away and his spirit flew home to Futa Jallon, the home of the Temne kings. Before he was interred his head was removed, to be preserved and buried alongside the next king, whose own head would be buried with the next and so on in perpetuity. Chief Masamunta’s Pa Mas’m, Saidu Forna, presided over the burial rituals and was afterwards elected to take the place of the dead ruler: he was anointed Pa Roke, Regent Chief of Kholifa Mamunta.
While the other children were raised by their mothers, my father grew up in my grandfather’s house. And so, even though Mohamed was only the younger son of a junior wife, Pa Roke came to favour our father above his other children.
It may have been the weekend. At any rate, unusually for the time of day, my father was in the house. The sun was high, so it must have been early afternoon, at the time when everyone had just eaten lunch. At the back of the house Big Aminatta filled the dogs’ bowls with scraps from the table and put them out in the yard.
‘Daddy?’ A moment later I trotted to my father, who was sitting on the veranda with my mother. I scarcely allowed a moment to slip past before I began again: ‘Daddy?’
‘Yes, Am.’
‘Jack’s making a funny noise.’
Everyone followed me round the side of the house. I was right. There was Jack, the Old English sheepdog, standing with his head low, his stomach in spasms, heaving violently. With each painful contraction he gave a wheezing noise and a sort of hacking bark. He looked like dogs do when they are trying to be sick, but I’d never heard one make that noise before.
Jack had a chicken bone stuck in his throat. The walls of his oesophagus were torn and with each effort he made to dislodge it the sharp fragment of bone tore deeper into the wall of muscle. The pain must have been terrible. My father grasped the dog and, gripping Jack between his legs, bent over and prised his jaws open. Then he plunged his hand deep into the dog’s throat. You could see him feeling down inside the dog’s gullet. He pulled his arm out and tried again, over and over. And Jack just let him. He didn’t snap or wriggle; he submitted as though he already knew this was his only chance at life.
Minutes seemed to pass. The whole family watched and waited. There was nothing anyone else could do.
When my father realised the bone was too deeply embedded and it would take an operation to free it, he went to fetch his medical kit. There was no vet in Koidu. By this time Jack was feeble and had begun to whimper. My father took out a needle and syringe and gave Jack a dose of the anaesthetic normally reserved for humans. The hacking and whimpering stopped. Jack’s body relaxed and he stopped breathing.
For most of my life that image was all I could summon of my earliest years. I was very young the day Jack died but I remember vividly the sight of my father standing over him with his arm down the dog’s throat.
Afterwards my parents explained to me what had happened, although I wasn’t overly distraught because I didn’t have any understanding of what death meant. Gradually as the days went on I watched Jim prowl the yard looking for his brother and playmate, or lie listless in the shade and howl at night.
The next time Pa Roke visited and I saw him demolishing a chicken bone I thought: How come Jack dies and Pa Roke doesn’t?
Soon after that Pa Roke left us and returned home, departing as he came. He walked to the end of the road and vanished into the wind.
9 (#ulink_8e3f57e8-d2bf-5935-8813-043815b24b27)
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.
