at the ready. We drove up Independence Avenue almost to the gates of State House before we were ordered to halt. Our two companions climbed down and we watched from the back seat while they argued and pleaded with some of the soldiers. Finally, they walked back to the car and started the engine. The gates of State House swung open and we drove inside.
Neither my mother nor our two companions had any idea of what had just occurred on the same spot or what would happen next; but whatever confusion our party felt was matched by that of the soldiers. They were under orders to stay at their posts and to hold the men inside until Brigadier Lansana and Albert Margai arrived at State House, but although the two men were expected imminently, hours had passed and yet there was no sign of them. The soldiers stayed on, with no idea what to do next.
My father appeared, walking easily and wearing a white shirt and grey trousers; he looked just as he did every day at home. He was alone and we stood in the courtyard of the prime minister’s offices while he kissed us and we gripped his knees. I held onto my mother’s hand. He told our mother he was fine; she should take us to our friends the Benjamins, where we would all be taken care of and perfectly safe in their house overlooking the city. ‘Don’t worry, my brothers and I will be OK.’
‘Won’t you come with us now?’
He refused: ‘I need to be with the others, with my colleagues. Ibrahim is here and so is Mohammed, we should stay together. You go on. I’ll see you all later. Ade and Bianca are there. You can send them my regards.’ He smiled and kissed us all again; his mood seemed light.
My mother allowed herself to be reassured by our father’s words but, she discovered many years later when I was able to tell her otherwise, his easy manner was deceptive. He wasn’t free to leave, although in front of us he acted as though he remained of his own volition. The men had been warned that if they tried to leave the confines of State House they would be shot. The governor-general, the Queen of England’s representative, had relinquished responsibility and remained in self-imposed solitary confinement in his chambers. The radio played nothing but monotonous military music. The city was alive with armed soldiers and protesters had begun to take to the streets once more, as whispers carried the news through the city that once darkness fell Siaka Stevens and the other men held in State House would be taken away to an unknown fate. The country was in freefall.
Outside State House my mother waylaid a British journalist. He turned out to be the correspondent from Reuters. She tried to explain to him that Siaka Stevens wasn’t alone; there were others with him, including her own husband, but he brushed her aside.
That night our mother sat by the window of the Benjamins’ house on Old Railway Line Road watching the military headquarters at Wilberforce on the opposite hill. Truck after truck passed through the gates and down Motor Road into Freetown. Some hours earlier the Mercedes and our two friends from the APC had driven away, leaving us at the Benjamins’ comfortable home; they promised they’d be back with any news. After a meal and showers the three of us were put to bed in a room with the Benjamins’ own children.
Two old friends arrived: Donald Macauley, the lawyer who helped my father free the APC candidates in Kono, and Susan Toft, a teacher of anthropology at Fourah Bay college, an old friend of my mother’s from her days in Freetown. Moments after they arrived they found themselves trapped for the night when a brief announcement interrupted the music on the radio with news that the city was under curfew with immediate effect. Together with Ade and his Maltese wife Bianca, they tried to pass the time and, with less success, to distract my mother with continuous games of cards.
Inside State House food and water had run out and as the night deepened our father resigned himself to sleeping in his luxurious prison. The men were moved up to a drawing room on one of the upper floors and told to make themselves comfortable. When the doors closed they moved around the room, swiftly checking out their new surroundings, and discovered to their amazement that the soldiers had failed to disconnect the telephones. Within moments they were making calls. Ibrahim Taqi, the brand-new information minister, called his contacts in the foreign press and for the rest of the evening Siaka Stevens sat in the carpeted suite that ought to have been his own office, and gave interviews to western reporters, including those from the British Times and Reuters.
This was how the prisoners came to hear the rumour spreading through the town that they were to be smuggled out of the city later in the night, possibly to be shot. There was substance to the fear; a dark night, a cold bullet and an unmarked grave had already become the fate of several African opposition leaders. My father would have recalled how, in the Congo, the newly elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba was flown away in full view of the world, to be tortured and killed.
In the streets leading away from State House the protesters who had fled several hours before were re-forming into human barricades with the single idea of sealing all the exit routes and preventing the transportation of the prisoners. They tore up paving stones, knocked down roadside bollards and pushed cars into the street to create impromptu barricades. At the same time soldiers formed lines across the roads, effectively closing off the centre of town, and moved in on the protesters. The crowd was caught in a closing net. Hundreds of people took to the alleyways, trying to escape the military by running through the back streets where the trucks couldn’t pass. But there they found themselves confronted, not by soldiers, but by armed youths who wore bandannas and white vests bearing the palm tree symbol of the SLPP.
Our mother and her friends heard the gunfire up in Tengbe Town and they exchanged glances at each other round the table; our father and his colleagues heard it in State House, where they waited for dawn. The smell of cordite and tear gas swirled upwards on the currents of air.
By nine o’clock in Connaught Hospital the waiting room and beds were full; people lay bleeding in the corridors in rows all the way from the out-patients department to the operating theatre. The few doctors on duty set to work in the theatres, amputating limbs shattered by bullets. Even the plaster room was turned into a makeshift operating room. In the early hours of the morning a gang of SLPP youths, brandishing automatic weapons, ran through the hospital and burst into the theatres, intending to finish off their APC victims as they lay under the surgeon’s knife. The doctor in charge, unarmed and wearing bloodstained greens, confronted the ringleader with such ferocity that the attackers turned tail and slunk back into the night.
The official figures from that night stated that fifty-four people were shot and injured. Nine more were killed.
The next day Bianca and Susan found my mother sweating in her bed, reeling from nausea. Since arriving in Africa she had been given to bouts of malaria. Bianca took away the thick blanket my mother had wrapped herself in and directed the electric fan onto her. My mother was shivering uncontrollably and she felt chilled to the bone, but her temperature was spiralling upwards of one hundred degrees.
Outside the city was silent. No activity could be seen beyond the windows of State House; no more announcements were broadcast on the radio. We spent the whole day indoors. Donald and Susan went home and came by later in the afternoon. There was no more news: no newspapers; even the telephone lines were out.
In the evening the music on the radio stopped abruptly and the radio fizzed and sputtered for a moment. Finally a crackling voice became audible. Bianca crossed the room and turned the volume up. It was David Lansana. His voice, ponderous and heavy, filled the air. He declared the appointment of Siaka Stevens unconstitutional.
‘In order to prevent further acts of violence…civil war in our country, I have carried out my duty as first commander of the army of Sierra Leone and taken charge of the situation. The army is in control and you have my promise that I will do all in my power to see that justice is done.’ Here the broadcast ended. He had added nothing more than everyone already knew.
In the early hours of the following morning David
