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The Devil That Danced on the Water
Aminatta Forna
A Daughter's Quest
Grove Press
December 2003
On Sale: December 18, 2003
416 pages
ISBN: 0802140483
EAN: 9780802140487
Paperback (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Aminatta Forna’s intensely personal history is a passionate
and vivid account of an idyllic childhood that became the
stuff of nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals
of postcolonial Africa, danger, flight, the bitterness of
exile in Britain, and the terrible consequences of her
dissident father’s stand against tyranny. Mohamed Forna was a man of impeccable integrity and
enchanting charisma. As Sierra Leone faced its future as a
fledgling democracy, he was a new star in the political
firmament, a man who had been one of the first black
students to come to Britain after the war. He stole the
heart of Aminatta’s mother, to the dismay of her
Presbyterian parents, and returned with her to Sierra Leone.
But as Aminatta Forna shows with compelling clarity, the old
Africa was torn apart by new ways of Western parliamentary
democracy, which gave birth only to dictatorships and
corruption of hitherto undreamed-of magnitude. It was not
long before Mohamed Forna languished in jail as a prisoner
of conscience, and worse to follow. Aminatta’s search for the truth that shaped both her
childhood and the nation’s destiny began among the country’s
elite and took her into the heart of rebel territory.
Determined to break the silence surrounding her father’s
fate, she ultimately uncovered a conspiracy that penetrated
the highest reaches of government and forced the nation’s
politicians and judiciary to confront their guilt. The Devil
That Danced on the Water is a book of pain and anger and
sorrow, written with tremendous dignity and beautiful
precision: a remarkable and important story of Africa.
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