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The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest |  | Author: Aminatta Forna
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Seller: redcarpetbooks
Rating:  10 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First edition.
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.3
ISBN: 0871138654
Dewey Decimal Number: 966.404092
EAN: 9780871138651
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Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
 Beautifully & movingly written blend of memoir. journalism, history August 14, 2005
Crescent Dragonwagon (35 isolated acres in the Green Mountains of Vermont; formerly, for 33 years, the Arkansas Ozarks)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Finding/discovering a vanished father. Untangling a terrible and terrifying, deeply saddening history of a place, personal and poltical, on which colonialism, broken promises, fear, racism, and inter-tribal rivalries and conflicts have all trod. What happens when ideals, hope, and education run up against such a history. The close-up, precise remains of a child's memory, feelings, and confusions overlaid with an adult daughter's detailed investigative and journalistic skills. All of these are part of this compulsively readable book, which tells the story of a family, a country (Sierra Leone), and a world torn apart and painstakingly, to whatever extent possible, reconstructed --- at least in the author's own hard-won understanding. I am a white American who happened on this book by accident. I love and respect memoirs where the author is transparent of heart and mind, especially in the context of a larger societal, political, or situational challenge. This book met these criteria with stunning precision. I could not put Aminatta Forna's courageous book down, and have been recommending it to everyone I know.
A conspiracy of silence July 14, 2003
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
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 usually never take the time to review a book May 12, 2007
Jennifer Phan (East Bay Area, CA USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book is fabulous. It is fabulous because it is accurate, interesting, and well-written. I am just a little older than the author and grew-up in Sierra Leone during much of the period described. I recall the Siaka Stevens years as a teen, I vaguely recall the execution of her father. Interestingly, I read another book about the first year that I was there and in that book, there was a reference to that hanging. I am a nonfiction junkie and read mostly books on mathematics--my field, but Aminatta has a keen way of describing Sierra Leone and the interactions of the politics. I read this book very quickly, in a few days during the work week. I have also read her other novel. I must say that this memoir is the best, in my opinion. Compared to the memoir A Long Way Gone about the Sierra Leonian boy soldier, this book by Aminatta is at a much higher level. It holds a longer period of time over which the plot is developed leading up to that war. It is her search to understand and in that respect the reader is searching right along with her. Read it!
Lived in West Africa in the 70s - Read this!!! June 29, 2003
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
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 Brilliant Piece. One to treasure.Well done, Aminatta. November 14, 2007
Ked E. James
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
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