![]() ![]() "Then when the celebrations are over, Pa Morlai says now we're going home, and Beyas says no." Forna slaps a hand on her knee, laughing at the audacity of this former slave who rejected this second form of servitude. When Pa Morlai set off across the hills of Sierra Leone with a calabash of gifts to woo back his wife, no longer a slave, she agreed to marry him again. She never saw him again.įorna warms to the telling, spreading her broad hands as her voice settles into the story's rhythm. ![]() He was taken from their home under armed guard one night in Freetown when Aminatta was aged 10. Mohamed Sorie Forna was a scholarship boy from a provincial village who trained as a doctor in Scotland and later became a finance minister in Siaka Steven's government. "Those are all the Fornas over there," she says, pointing to row upon row of relatives, patiently standing in the glare of an African sun.įorna's memoir about Sierra Leone was written, she says, "because I wanted to find out who killed my father". The award-winning author of The Devil that Danced on the Water, a memoir about her childhood, is showing me a hand-made gallery of aunts, uncles, cousins and the village school she has helped them build. Aminatta Forna's study in her elegant south-London home is filled with photographs of her family's village in Sierra Leone. ![]()
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