Aminatta Forna saw her father for the last time in the summer of 1974. She was 10 years old. Mohamed Forna was a mild-mannered, British-educated doctor but beyond that, he was a man devoted to the fledgling democracy in his native Sierra Leone, he’d risen to the position of Finance Minister. But one year after his daughter last saw him, he was hanged, executed with seven others, on trumped up charges of treason.
Twenty-five years after his death, Aminatta Forna, as a BBC journalist, returned to the country of her childhood to investigate the circumstances surrounding her father’s life, and the trial that ultimately sealed his fate. Then she wrote a book about it: The Devil that Danced on the Water. Aminatta Forna, and a daughter’s search for truth in Sierra Leone.
Aminatta Forna will be speaking tonight at 6:00 pm:
Harvard Information Center in the Holyoke Center
1350 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
free and open to public
sponsored by the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at Harvard University & Harvard Bookstore
Guests:
Aminatta Forna, BBC journalist and author of The Devil that Danced on the Water.