The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest

One of the most interesting books from Africa in recent years . It must have taking courage just to write the memoir. It's a great novel that I enjoyed!

Since I learnt of this book from literary reviews I had hastened to find time to zero-in on it. I have not been disappointed. Aminatta writes with such penetrating brilliance that only a born-gifted can produce. The pathos of her father's demise hung heavily on her and with time this must have unleashed a superb creativity embracing analysis and synthesis. She took the lid off the 'golden bowl' of her parents' matrimonial woes, just as she took a swipe at the creoles and mendes for their various shortcomings, leaving the temnes unscathed. Some gross inaccuracies found their way into an otherwise well researched piece, such as there being several hospitals in Freetown at a certain time that catered only to Colonial Masters and their Creole civil servants. Wrong. Hill Station Hospital was for the Colonial Masters. Others contented themselves with Connaught and the Annex, both people from the provinces and Freetown dwellers. She may have been misinformed, probably by a Creole-Phobe.Otherwise her reconteur of the incidents surrounding the 1967 election fiasco,everyday life in Freetown and the Provinces,the time she spent in Britain and Nigeria all adds to slot her into the category of ' an exuberant mind with effusive outpourings', taking into consideration she was only about 6 years old at that time. As a Sierra Leonean who,during his teenage years, traversed the areas described in her book and observed much of the events both from near and afar, I can only say "Well done, Aminatta".I applaud her work, I could not put it down until I reached the end, and I make bold to say this is compulsory reading for any and all with Sierra Leone in mind. Finally,I totally enjoyed her descriptions of things in and around the domestic environ and she won me over with one sentence..."I hated the smell of wet chicken feather and scalded skin ". I hated it too. Ked E. James, M.D. Petal,Mississippi,, USA.

I first heard about this book travelling in Uganda where it was recommended to me. It is the story of a woman, Aminatta Forna, who sets out to discover the truth behind her father's execution in Sierra Leone in 1975 for treason. As she traces and lays bare her country's past and the events which led Sierra Leone into civil war, so she gradually discovers that her father's death was nothing less than a judicial murder. Her family's fate and the country's fate are intertwined. And in both case the intervening years have produced only silence. Silence from those responsible for her father's death ( and compellingly she tracks down the survivors one by one). Silence, too, from a generation who were complicit in the death of a nation, who reaped the benefits of a kleptocracy, including the many who cast themselves in the role of 'good men who did nothing'. The same story is played out wherever tyranny has succeeded: from Amin's Uganda to Pinochet's Chile. Every succeeding generation must learn to hold past generations accountable, to ask of each and every one: 'what did you do to prevent this?'. It is the only way to break the cycle. It is an important book for all these reasons and also because it is disturbingly, beautifully, hauntingly written.

I came across the book by accident, while browsing in a bookstore and I was so ashamed at how little I knew about the political history of neighbouring Sierra Leone, having grown up in Nigeria. This book opened a whole new world for me, it is easy to dismiss the events in the country now as one of Africa's woes, but looking at the events which led to the country's downfall from the point of view of someone from my generation, puts it in another perspective. Forna uses prose so richly to describe the events that formed a nation and also her own immediate family. I recommend that anyone who was born into post-colonial Africa read this, especially if you now choose to live outside of the continent, for reasons best known to you. Well done, Aminatta, the spirit of your father lives on in you.

A wonderful story of a daughter writing her father's story -- just one of the many intertwined stories about post independence politics in a West African state.