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

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

      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