The Short Version
- Read by: Sara Auber handles Aminatta Forna's demanding personal narrative with precision and emotional restraint - the steady voice is the right choice for material this harrowing.
- At its heart: Post-colonial African politics, political persecution, family memory and investigative reclamation
- Vibe: Haunting, precise, and quietly relentless
- Short version: One of the most important African political memoirs available in audio format - Forna's investigation of her father's fate in Sierra Leone is both intimate family history and essential post-colonial record.
Aminatta Forna structures The Devil That Danced on the Water around two parallel investigations: a daughter trying to understand her own childhood, and a journalist trying to understand a nation. Both investigations converge on the same man - Mohamed Forna, her father, a Sierra Leonean politician of exceptional promise who was jailed as a prisoner of conscience, then executed by the regime of Siaka Stevens in 1975. As an audiobook at nearly seventeen hours, this recording is long enough to hold both of those projects simultaneously, and Forna is a writer disciplined enough to keep them from collapsing into each other. The result is a memoir that functions simultaneously as intimate family history and as an act of political witness with genuine historical significance for Sierra Leone and for the broader story of post-colonial West Africa.
The book begins in Forna's childhood - her memories of her father as a charismatic, principled man who stole her Scottish mother's heart and returned with her to Sierra Leone. These early sections are warm and vivid, establishing Mohamed Forna as a person before establishing him as a political symbol. He was among the first Black students to study in Britain after the Second World War, became a physician, returned to Sierra Leone with genuine idealism about what democratic governance could mean for his country, and entered politics at precisely the moment when parliamentary democracy in West Africa was giving way to authoritarian corruption of staggering scale. Forna does not romanticize him. She is clear-eyed about his choices, his absences, and the price his political commitments extracted from his family and from her specifically.
The sections dealing with her childhood experience of danger, exile in Britain, and the years of not knowing what happened to her father are written with what USA Today described as "harrowing, illuminating and thoughtful" precision. These passages establish the memoir as something more than family tragedy - as an account of what post-colonial optimism looked like when it collided with the political realities that followed independence. Forna grew up witnessing upheavals that no child should witness, and she writes about that period with the combination of memory and analysis that only distance and maturity allow.
Auber Holds the Memoir Voice and the Investigation Together
The investigative dimension of the book - Forna as an adult journalist tracking down witnesses, traveling into former rebel territory, and ultimately uncovering the conspiracy that reached into the highest levels of the Sierra Leonean government - gives the memoir its structural backbone. She forces the nation's politicians and judiciary to confront what happened to her father. That confrontation becomes a form of truth-telling that the memoir makes legible in ways that official history did not.
Sara Auber's narration handles this dual register - the intimate memoir voice and the investigative reconstruction - with consistent intelligence. The seventeen-hour runtime is not padded; the length reflects the genuine scope of what Forna is doing, and the structural ability she brings to the material keeps interest alive across the full arc. A reviewer who came to this audiobook after encountering Forna's novel The Hired Man reports being struck by how fully her narrative sensibility was already developed in this early memoir, which was published before she established herself primarily as a novelist.
One of the Most Remarkable Passages in African Memoir
Listeners unfamiliar with Sierra Leonean history will need to track a fairly complex political landscape - multiple factions, multiple governments, the broader West African context of decolonization and Cold War proxy dynamics. Forna provides context as she goes, but this is not a book that simplifies its subject for readers coming in cold. That complexity is appropriate to the material, but it means the memoir rewards sustained rather than casual listening. The rewards for patience are considerable: Forna's account of how the Sierra Leonean judiciary was forced to confront a specific conspiracy is one of the most remarkable passages in contemporary African memoir writing.
The emotional demands of the book are also significant. Forna is writing about the murder of her father by his own government, the destruction of a family across two continents, and the silence that surrounded those facts for decades. She writes with tremendous dignity, but the material is genuinely harrowing in the sections dealing with the aftermath of her father's execution and her childhood encounters with violence. Listeners for whom sustained engagement with political persecution and its personal consequences is difficult should approach accordingly.
Indispensable Context for Forna's Later Fiction
Readers of African political history and memoir will find this audiobook among the finest available in the genre. Forna's combination of literary precision, investigative rigor, and personal stake in the subject produces something that functions simultaneously as family memoir, political history, and act of witness. At seventeen hours, it is a substantial commitment, but one that earns its length through the depth and urgency of what it recovers from silence.
Listeners who have read Forna's subsequent fiction will find the memoir indispensable context for understanding her novelistic concerns and the emotional terrain she returns to across her writing career. And for anyone who wants to understand what post-colonial democracy looked like in West Africa at its most promising and most catastrophically corrupted, Forna's account of Sierra Leone and her father's place in it remains essential - a book of pain and anger written, as the original reviews noted, with remarkable dignity and beautiful precision.
Good to Know
Does this audiobook require prior knowledge of Sierra Leone's history to follow?
Forna provides context as the narrative unfolds, but listeners unfamiliar with West African post-colonial history will encounter a complex political landscape involving multiple governments and factions. The memoir is accessible to general readers, but some background in African decolonization history will enrich the experience significantly and help listeners contextualize the specific events Forna describes.
Is this audiobook suitable for listeners sensitive to political violence and family trauma?
The memoir deals directly with the execution of Forna's father by the Sierra Leonean government and the impact on her family across decades. Forna writes with dignity and literary control, but the material is genuinely harrowing in sections. Listeners for whom sustained engagement with political violence and personal loss is difficult should approach accordingly.
Is this audiobook connected to Aminatta Forna's novels, and does it matter which you listen to first?
The memoir is a standalone work published before Forna established herself primarily as a novelist. Readers who have encountered her fiction first find the memoir illuminating context for her novelistic concerns. Either order works; the audiobook stands entirely on its own as a complete and self-contained work.
