She leaves her husband and two young children to claim the property and there gathers advice, understanding and history from the tales of her aunts, Hawa, Serah, Asana and Mariama Kholifa. The novel is framed by the experience of Abie, a mixed-raced Londoner who is left a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone. 'I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.' 'I talked to all of his daughters and collected the stories and details about how people lived,' she says. For a year, Forna left her South London home to immerse herself in the stories of the lives of her relatives in Magburaka, the family village where her grandfather Pa Roke had lived with his 16 wives.

The four women who narrate Ancestor Stones are made of equally stern stuff as they endure war, sexual exploitation, male betrayal, poverty and cultural disenfranchisement across a half-century. '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.

Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna