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

wives of my father’s friends who, she thought, disregarded her, though she could never quite put her finger on the problem because it lay in what was missing from their welcome rather than what was present.

      Soon after we arrived Pa Roke, my grandfather, came to visit, bringing with him several live chickens, some sacks of rice and one of his junior wives. He cast an eye over my mother: ‘So you went to the sea and turned into a fish,’ he said to my father in Temne. He’d warned his son not to come back with a white wife. There were a lot of local families who would have liked to make a match. ‘How much did you pay?’ He meant how much was the dowry. She was young; her breasts hadn’t fallen yet.

      ‘Ten shillings,’ my father replied straight faced. That was what he’d been charged at the register office on the morning of the wedding. Pa Roke smiled: he was pleased. His son’s wife might be white, but she had come at a good price.

      In Koidu as we passed people waved and called out to my mother and me. Young men offered to carry her packages; shopkeepers ushered her over to look at the latest imported fabrics. Everyone recognised her. She was the doctor’s white wife. And there was only one white woman in Koidu. And only one doctor.

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      A few months after our clinic opened a battered bush taxi drew up in front of the house. There were quite a few people crammed inside; at first it was difficult to see exactly how many. They struggled out, among them a woman so emaciated and feeble that she couldn’t walk, as well as a boy of around eight or nine who looked as if he were unconscious.

      Our father came out and helped carry them into the surgery; it was obvious he was upset and angry: ‘Why do you bring them to me when it’s too late?’ No one replied. And he knew the answer: they had nothing, there was no way to pay a doctor.

      The woman was close to death. The boy, who was perhaps her son, had died in the back of the car a short while before: his body was still limp, no signs yet of rigor mortis. My father asked the family about the woman’s and the boy’s symptoms. Were there others? They nodded. Yes, they replied, there were many others in the village, too ill to make the journey.

      My father didn’t have a laboratory but it took him less than a minute to reach his diagnosis: what the people described was a cholera epidemic. He took his bag, swept up armfuls of drugs, threw them all onto the front seat of our Austin and left. The family sat in the back giving him directions to their village, cradling the body of the small boy wrapped in a sheet.

      My father didn’t come back until much later that night, until after he had traced the source of the contamination and persuaded the village headman to stop people using the water. It was never easy; there was often only one well or stream; people didn’t understand the basic principles of infection, spread and cure. Outbreaks of disease were almost always blamed on witchcraft. He taught them how, at the first sign of diarrhoea they should shake the gas out of a bottle of Fanta or Coca-Cola and drink it at room temperature. It was a simple trick: the equivalent of sugar and salts. But it was a life-saver.

      When my mother was alone in the city and our father was in the regions planning the clinic, a measles epidemic gripped Freetown. In Britain measles is an ordinary childhood illness; in Africa the same virus kills as recklessly and easily as a child tumbling a tower of wooden blocks. That year hundreds of children died. At Connaught Hospital they didn’t have space to admit any new cases. All three of us children were infected; spots even erupted down the inside of my brother’s throat. My father wasn’t due back for many days and there were no telephones up-country, no way to reach him. So my mother nursed us at home, letting us sip flat Fanta when we were too weak to eat anything else.

      Eventually a colleague of our father’s was reached and he drove over to see us. He put my brother on a drip and told my mother she had done just the right thing. She was so relieved when we began to improve after ten days that she ran across the road to Patterson Zochonis, the expensive and only department store in Freetown, where she bought us absurdly expensive Swiss maraschino cherry ice cream, and spooned it down our tender throats one by one.

      In Koidu there was so much to do and no other doctors with whom to share the load. The building of this clinic was the realisation of a simple dream for our father. Many of the western-trained doctors preferred to stay in Freetown and work in the larger hospitals. With a modest private practice on the side within a few years they could own a Mercedes and be waited upon by servants wearing white gloves, like Dr Panda and his wife. But our father had a vision that one day there would be a network of cottage clinics across the country. The success of our clinic was important to him and his motives were plain.

      When our father was a child during the war, a vaccination programme was announced. Scores of families left their villages to make the trip to the mission hospital. They settled on the rows of long wooden benches under the sun in the courtyard, alongside patients who arrived with other complaints. When the benches were full, the line continued along the walls and encircled the building. My father sat for hours on the ground, his back against the wall, listening for his name to be called. In front of him in the queue was an old man. When the Fornas appeared, the old man asked for help going to the toilet and he gave my father some cola nuts in thanks afterwards.

      The hours passed and when at last his name was called the old Pa seemed to have fallen asleep, so my father leaned over and shook him lightly. The man slumped over sideways and lay face up, blue cataract-filled eyes reflecting the sky. A few minutes later the orderlies pulled him up by the arms and carted him away. They were used to it: the old ones who died before they made it to see the doctor.

      Following Ndora’s death our father left the village to live with Teacher Trye. Soon after he left, a second tragedy struck his tiny family. A letter arrived in Bo, written by a hired letter-writer, informing Mohamed that his elder brother Morlai had died ‘of a headache’. He lay down one afternoon saying his head hurt and simply never got to his feet again.

      We never, ever turned a patient away. And if someone couldn’t pay, we treated them for free. It was hard to imagine, given the principles that governed our father, that the clinic was making money but remarkably it was.

      In the town there were a small number of extremely wealthy diamond dealers. They operated cheek by jowl with the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, who paid the government millions to exploit the country’s reserves, as well as the Diamond Corporation, a holding of the De Beers empire, who held the rights to buy the lion’s share of gems. Some independent dealers bought government permits allowing them to mine restricted quantities of gems. Others dispensed with the law and sent teams of their own men to dig illicitly in the restricted area. Many did both.

      After dark on most nights just outside Koidu hordes of young men and some women scaled the fences, easily avoiding the single SLST helicopter that patrolled the area with search lights. In the early morning they wriggled back under the wire, gritty brown diamonds wrapped in small pieces of cloth tied round their necks. The dealers paid their illegal diggers a retainer to bring the gems, which they then sold on through the official government offices or shifted illegally on the black market. The world of the dealers was a closed one, a tightly run business controlled by a few men who maintained a private code of honour designed to hold on to their monopoly and increase the sum of their wealth.

      The men who risked their health and liberty to dive hundreds of times to the bottom of the river bed and bring up pans of silt had no option but to sell the gems they found to their patron at the price he chose to give them. There were frequent accidents: several times we were all roused in the middle of the night or early morning because there had been a drowning. Sometimes the illegal diggers were caught and prosecuted – they were the only people who ever were. If their patrons couldn’t bribe the judge to let their man off, well, he’d be well compensated for doing time on behalf of the boss. In Koidu everyone knew their place.

      Regularly men would arrive at the clinic bearing notes which simply stated to whom the final bill should be sent – inevitably one of several Lebanese dealers: After my father had treated their ailments and given them drugs, he sent the bill