The voices we rarely hear in literature are those of the children of the men and women who have shaped modern Africa. The parents leave behind fulsome, instructive, self-justifying autobiographies as a matter of routine, but little is ever known of the plight of their offspring. Conditioned by the knock-on effects of their parents’ actions and causes, their careers are often made or destroyed by the way they carry that legacy, especially if that legacy includes personal tragedy.
A notable exception was In the Shadow of the Saint, Ken Wiwa’s remarkably frank book published a few years ago. The world had come to know his father, Ken Saro Wiwa, as the defender and champion of the Ogoni people in their cause to stop the multinational oil companies from wrecking their lands in southern Nigeria. Ken Saro Wiwa was eventually hanged by the military government and it was left to the young Ken Wiwa to confront his own conflicting emotions and soldier on with his father’s work.
Mohammed Forna had risen from being a popular and hard-working doctor in a small town to be the finance minister of Sierra Leone in the 1960s when the future looked rosy for a diamond-rich country. He had read medicine in Scotland, where he met and married Maureen, the mother of Aminatta, the author of this elevating book. He also acquired a strict Presbyterian father-in-law who never approved of the union. When Aminatta was born the grandfather drove his wife to the hospital in Bellshill, refused to go up to the ward and sat in his car in the car park and waited for his wife to return.
Mohammed returned to Sierra Leone and opened a clinic, but his real passion, his real calling, was for politics and his talents propelled him into a senior cabinet post.
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