Allah n'est pas obligé [Mass Market Paperback]

 

 

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Orphaned following the death of his mother, Birahima, ten or twelve year old self-declared "fearless blameless street kid", leaves his native village in Ivory Coast to find his aunt in far away Liberia. He is accompanied by Yacouba, "money multiplier", shaman and "gri-gri man", a man who makes amulets for whatever religion seems appropriate at the moment and claiming to protect the wearer from hostile bullets from the other side. They are caught up in the middle of West Africa's brutal civil wars of the nineteen nineties. Having little education and no training, Birahima joins the hordes of child soldiers, fighting for whatever faction supplies them with food, weapons, protective amulets (gri-gri) and hashish. Ahmadou Kourouma, highly respected award winning Ivorian author, has created with ALLAH IS NOT OBLIGED a vivacious, often hilarious, but also disturbing and thought provoking novel.

Published in 2000 in its original French, it was likely the first of fictionalized or factual accounts capturing the life of child soldiers in West or East Africa. Written in the voice of a boy with less than three years of schooling, and with limited French, the author uses his protagonist to convey much more than the intimate reflections of one of the "small soldiers" and what the youth describes as his "miserable existence". The young hero, like the author, is Malinké, an ancient and powerful West African civilization with its own unique language. Birahima shares his story in an unusual and often slang-type French. The author uses this approach to give the reader a flair of the idiomatic Malinké expressions that are full of vivid imagery, curious connotations and convey its distinct African logic. To help the reader understand the young narrator, he explains French, African and pidgin terms and phrases in brackets, using several dictionaries and phrasebooks Birahima has acquired at some point. French terms or concepts are often interpreted in his own child-like way to benefit his African readers, he states. While this initially interrupts the flow of the narrative, it gives Birahima's account a very personal, conversational and often humorous touch. His language does not lack in vulgarity when conveying the often objectionable and brutal reality he encounters. "My characters must be credible and to be credible they must speak in the novel as they speak in their own language..." the author explained in a 1999 interview. The translation by Frank Wynne does convey both the narrative and the odd language quirks expertly.

A ten (or 12) year old boy has only a limited horizon and narrow understanding of the politics of his country and geographic region. Growing up in extreme poverty, however, while being confronted with the corruption, violence and power grabs around him, makes him an astute and sarcastic observer. Birahima's journeys bring him face to face with the vicious commanders of some of the most cruel dictators in the region. Each of them relies not only on the effectiveness of arsenal of guns - 'kalashs', AK 47s, being the weapon of choice given to the child soldiers - but any "magic" such as gri-gris, or religious ritual they can muster or buy. Birahima learns to understand the intricacies of power as well as the futility of the traditional powers. His comments are astute. At the same time, kids are kids; he and the other child soldiers need bonds of affection and emotions can run high when one of theirs is killed or punished.

As the story progresses, the author mixes Birahima's voice, relaying his experiences as a "small-soldier", with that of a more adult narrator who provides the factual context of the complicated historical sequence of events in, primarily, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Aware of the lack of detailed knowledge most people have of these events, it is helpful to relate these to the reader - a technique Kourouma has used in his previous novels also. Here as in those Kourouma has always tackled social injustice, whether during colonial times or since with the corruption and cruelty of West African dictators being one of his target subjects.

With ALLAH IS NOT OBLIGED, the author raises important questions about the absurdity of war, of the power structures that lead to them and the suffering of the innocent people caught up in them. It was Ahmadou Kourouma's last published novel; the author died in December 2003. [Friederike Knabe]

Ahmadou Kourouma is one of my favorite novelists, and in the rarified world of African literature his works stand out as gems. This work received plenty of critical acclaim in the French and francophone African media, and won a major literary prize. "Allah N'est Pas Oblige" is a very stark tale, told in the form of a first-person narrative by a West African child soldier recounting the horrors he has witnessed in his short lifetime. The narrator is essentially a window into events rather than a full character, although Kourouma makes his literary voice interesting by throwing in occasional dictionary references, as though the words were coming from someone just in the process of discovering them.

This stylistic innovation, however, doesn't make up for the book's shortcomings. Its characters are simply foils to whom bad things must happen, and as such they aren't very interesting. The author plays fast and loose with recent African history, too, blaming the rise of Sierra Leone's RUF thugs on his old bete noir, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, and even putting the old man at a meeting with the RUF's commander in the late 1990s. Perhaps he has already forgotten that "Le Vieux" died in 1993... but anyway. My greatest disappointment is that there is almost none of Kourouma's usual satire or wit here. It is as though he set out to write a story "ripped from the headlines," taking advantage of the most shocking acts of brutality in West Africa's dirty postmodern wars (and there've been a lot) to pique the public's interest. This is a cheap trick, and it's beneath him, not to mention most of his readers.

I finished "Allah N'est Pas Oblige" with a feeling of sadness, not only for child soldiers and their victims, but for one of my literary heroes whose career seems to have entered an uninspired, barren patch. Sometimes I wonder whether he had somebody ghost-write this book for him; I almost hope that he did.

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