Allah is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma Read Free Book Online Page A

chicken out of his sleeve can make piles of money and heaps of dollars. He didn’t say no. And actually, we met him a couple of times in the inhospitable jungles of Liberia and Sierra Leone.
    That’s all I’ve got to say for today. I’m fed up talking, so I’m going to stop.
    Walahé! Faforo! Gnamokodé!

2
    When people say there’s tribal wars in a country, it means that big important warlords have divided the country up. They’ve divided up all the money, all the land, all the people. They divide up everything and the whole world lets them, everyone in the whole world lets them kill innocent men and children and women. And that’s not all! The funniest thing is that the warlords are all using desperate measures to hang on to all the things they’ve got, but the same warlords are doing everything they can to get their hands on more stuff (according to the
Larousse
, ‘desperate measures’ means ‘all-out physical force’).
    In Liberia, there were four big important warlords: Doe, Taylor, Johnson and the Hajji Koroma, as well as a bunch of small warlords. The small warlords were doing their best to be big warlords. And everything in the whole country hadbeen divided up. That’s why they say there was tribal wars in Liberia. And that’s where I was going. And that’s where my aunt lived!
Walahé!
It’s the truth!
    In tribal wars and even in Liberia, the child-soldiers, the small-soldiers, don’t get paid. They just kill people and steal everything worth stealing. In tribal wars and even in Liberia, the soldiers don’t get paid. They massacre the people and keep everything worth keeping. So as they have enough to eat and all the other stuff they need, the child-soldiers and the real soldiers sell off everything they steal really cheap.
    That’s why in Liberia you can get everything really cheap. You can get cheap gold, cheap diamonds, cheap TVs, cheap four-by-fours, cheap guns and AK-47s or kalashes. Every, every fucking thing is cheap.
    And when everything in a country is cheap, dealers flock to that country (according to
Larousse
, ‘flock’ means ‘to arrive in great numbers’). Dealers who want to get rich quick all go to Liberia to buy and exchange things. They go with a fistful of rice, a tiny bit of soap, a bottle of petrol, a couple of dollars or even a few CFA francs, because everybody needs them and nobody’s got them. They sell the stuff they bring or trade it for cheap merchandise and bring the cheap merchandise back to Guinea or Côte d’Ivoire and sell it to the highest bidder. That’s how you make big money.
    It’s on account of all the big money that you see hundreds of men and women in N’Zérékoré swarming round the
gbakas
leaving for Liberia. (‘
Gbaka
’ is a Black Nigger African Native word. You can find it in the
Glossary of French Lexical Particularities in Black Africa
, and it means a car or a vehicle.)
    And whenever a country is doing tribal wars, everyone travels in convoys. (A convoy is when you’ve got lots of
gbakas
travelling together.) Everyone came to Liberia in convoys. There’s motorbikes up front and at the back of the convoy. On the motorbikes there are men armed to the teeth ready to defend the convoy, because as well as the four big important warlords, there are lots of small important warlords who do road blocks and stick-ups (according to my
Larousse
, a ‘stick-up’ is when you take by force something which is not legally yours).
    So we go to Liberia in a convoy and to make sure we don’t get in a stick-up, we have a motorbike riding up front and that’s how we set off.
Faforo!
    There he was, this little guy, in pidgin they say a kid (according to my
Harrap’s
, ‘kid’ means ‘a boy or young man’). Anyway there was this little guy standing right slap bang exactly at a turn in the road and the motorbike that was supposed to be protecting us didn’t manage to stop dead when this little kid signals to stop. The two guys on the motorbike thought