On this date in 1975, Dr. Mohamed Forna and other Sierra Leone dissidents were executed as traitors.
A medical doctor who entered politics and was Minister of Finance in the government of the All People’s Congress (APC) from 1968-1970, Forna grew disenchanted with the parasitical kleptocracy of Siaka Stevens and, with another ex-state minister, Ibrahim Taqi, helped to launch the opposition United Democratic Party.
The party was swiftly banned but Forna remained in the ranks of dissidents, until he was arrested in 1973. In a mass capital trial, 15 alleged “traitors” were condemned to hang — a harvest of souls reduced by about half in the interest of moderation.
Forna’s daughter Aminatta Forna explores the legacy of this horror in her memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water. (Review | excerpt) A former journalist, Aminatta Forna reconstructed events by interviewing the people involved in them, including the witnesses who supplied suborned evidence to doom her father.
The executions began at midnight on 19 July. I was asleep in my dormitory at school. The aeroplane carrying Mum was crossing the Sahara, thirty thousand feet up in the sky.
The first two men to die were soldiers. The civilians were executed in the order in which they were indicted by the court. Mohamed Forna, First Accused, my father, walked the length of the block, past the cells of his companions, towards the noose waiting for him behind the door at the end of the building. I close my eyes and imagine his final walk: his stride, just like my own; broad, flat African feet inherited by me; his handcuffed hands: long, strong fingers, slightly flared at the tip and reborn in my brother; the broad, intelligent forehead, the same brow I see in my sister every time we meet. The men were hanged every half an hour, the men in the other blocks told me. They could tell, you see, because the music and the sounds of the guards’ bacchanal died for a few seconds, then rose up again more clamorous than before. If you listened very carefully in the moments in between, you could hear the sound of the trap door.
…
The next day my father’s body, and those of the seven other men who had been hanged, were displayed in open coffins before the crowds outside Pademba Road Prison. Stevens had promised a public execution; in the end he had slaughtered them in secret and displayed his trophies afterwards. Under cover of darkness the bodies were removed, loaded into military trucks and driven out to Rokupa cemetery on the road to Hastings, where they were doused with acid and dumped in a mass grave.
On this day..
- 1943: The hanging of the twelve - 2020
- 1597: Anneke van den Hove, buried alive - 2019
- 1550: Jacopo Bonfadio, indiscreet - 2018
- 1783: Diego Cristobal Tupac Amaru, rebel heir - 2016
- 1762: Sarah Metyard and Sally Metyard, mother and daughter - 2015
- 1476: Hans Bohm, the Drummer of Niklashausen - 2014
- 1909: Dervish Vahdeti, for the 31 March Incident - 2013
- 2011: A day in the death penalty around the world - 2012
- 1776: Jamaican slave rebels - 2011
- 1824: Agustin de Iturbide, Emperor of Mexico - 2010
- 2005: Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, gay teens - 2009
- 1824: Alexander Pearce, cannibal convict - 2008
Although I’m 62 years old, today is the first time to know in detail about the death of your dear FATHER, may his SOUL REST in perfect PEACE. I can feel your pain……. my /our condolences. He lost his life fighting for his country, what a pity!!
The APC Today Is The Same As The APC Yesterday.
such were horrible times in history and we have not even learnt from such horror with politics going on awkward trends. Thanks for the post, I feel refreshed of the era even after the time span.