The Devil That Danced on the Water, by Aminatta Forna

Christopher Hope is dazzled by the courage and clarity of an African portrait of childhood, conflict and exile

Once there was an African state called Sierra Leone. Its tale is briefly told. It began as a British colony, then came independence, a coup, a dictator, civil war and collapse. End of story. Neither its former colonial master, nor its African neighbours, many similarly despotic, broke the conspiracy of silence until the very end. When at last Sierra Leone was so choked in blood it could no longer be ignored, African peace-keepers, and then British paratroopers, with uncertain assistance from the United Nations, moved in. It was too late to save anything or anyone, but they mounted a kind of graveyard watch. If anything marks Sierra Leone it is the time-tested ugliness of its decline and the familiarity of its fate.

Aminatta Forna observes, with the rueful honesty that distinguishes The Devil That Danced On The Water, that people grow restless when told the story of yet another failed African state. They feel – and who can blame them – a bemused boredom. But perhaps the fault lies not in the stories but the tellers. Too much fudge, too many lies. Until now: because Forna has written a book that is impossible to forget, or to confuse with any other memoir of tyrannical times. The writer is the daughter of a British mother and a Sierra Leonian father; she is native to both countries – and to neither. Her father, Mohammed Forna, came to Aberdeen in the Fifties. He trained as a doctor, and carried off the daughter of a disapproving Presbyterian family back to Freetown, and a clinic in the bush.

Forna was one of the great spirits of modern Africa, a man of shining courage – and incorrigible naiveté. He became a minister in the government of Siaka Stevens, the tyrant of Sierra Leone, an oaf of hair-raising cruelty and mind-numbing stupidity. Forna was hanged by Stevens on trumped-up charges of treason in 1975.

Forna has made her home in Britain but her heart is in Sierra Leone. She is well-placed to observe the oddities of racial typing that her father's generation and, later, she and her sisters, experienced in Britain. Just as she calmly notes the essential differences of her British mother in Sierra Leone, a white woman who stood out as an interloper, she is superb on the particular pain of exile: "a life apart, life on hold, life in waiting".

This is an obsessive, driven, refreshing book about Africa, despotism and exile. It is also a beautifully drawn portrait of childhood, and the ruses, stratagems, and sheer bloody-mindedness that Aminatta used to keep her young self safe, and sane, in a world ruled by murder, marriage and constant movement. The interloping adults who burst in and out of her childhood ranged from new stepfathers, to dictators, to those familiar entrepreneurs (Tiny Rowland makes a dashing appearance) who have always battened on the riches of Africa. They still do so, stripping a forest here, a diamond field there, aided and abetted, as the first slavers were, by African despots who would sooner hang their ministers, and hack off the hands of their citizens, than put food in people's bellies.

The Sierra Leone Aminatta Forna loves, and the father she lost, seem gone beyond recall. But she glues them back together from a few sharp shards of memory. It is the recourse of the abandoned child, writing back into life what has been taken away. The result is a memorial teeming with life, anger, love. It is built on a fierce determination that the best service she can pay her father is to remember him back into existence; to track down every single ageing, dying or lying witness she can find, and prize from them details of what happened – at his trial, in the condemned cell, on the day of his execution.

This doesn't make The Devil That Danced On Water a dispiriting book. On the contrary, it lets in light. It is a triumph of life against the odds. And in its conclusion there is a sanity that is, simply, majestic.

Christopher Hope's new novel, 'Heaven Forbid', is published by Macmillan