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

it was a road-block so they opened fire and there’s this kid, this child-soldier, lying there, fucked. Dead, totally dead.
Walahé! Faforo!
    There was a second, a minute, of silence before the storm. And then the whole forest all around us started spitting, the
tat-tat-tat tat-tat-tat tat-tat-tat
of AK-47s. So when the
tattat-tat
of the kalashes started up, the birds in the forest could tell something wasn’t right, so they all took off and flew away towards more peaceful skies. The AK-47
tat-tat-tat
sprays allover the motorbike and the guys on the motorbike, the driver and the other guy who was all
faro
on the back with his own kalash. (‘
Faro
’ isn’t in the
Petit Robert
, but it’s in the
Glossary
and it means ‘showing off’.) So now the driver and the guy acting all
faro
were both dead. Absolutely, one hundred percent dead. But there’s still AK-47s going
tat-tat-tat
-ing!
tat-tat-tat
ing! And you could already see all the destruction all over the road—the burning motorbike and bodies all AK-47ed and all the blood, lots and lots of blood, the blood just never got tired of flowing.
Faforo!
All this just kept happening and happening, the sinister
tat-tat-tat
music kept going (‘Sinister’ means ‘serious, scary, terrifying’).
    Let’s start from the start.
    Mostly, things don’t happen like that. Mostly, the bike or the car or whatever stops dead when the kid makes the signal and doesn’t go past him even one inch. When it happens like that, everything goes smoothly, very smoothly.
Faforo!
The kid, the child-soldier, who’s about as tall as an officer’s cane, chats to the guys on the motorbike protecting the convoy. They get to know each other a bit, laughing and joking as if they drank beer together every night. Then the kid whistles, then he whistles again. Then a four-by-four truck comes out of the forest all covered in camouflage leaves. A four-by-four full of kids, child-soldiers, small-soldiers. Kids about this tall … as tall as an officer’s cane. Child-soldiers showing off, their kalashes, their AK-47s, slung over their shoulders, all dressed in Para uniforms. All dressed in parachute gear way too big for them, so the uniforms are falling down roundtheir knees, and they’re swimming in them. The funniest thing is that there’s girls, genuine girls with real AK-47s showing off. But there aren’t too many girls. Only the cruel ones: only the one’s who’d stick a live bee right in your eye. (When someone is really cruel, Black Nigger African Natives say ‘they’d stick a live bee right in your eye’.) Then you’d see lots more child-soldiers dressed in the same uniforms, with the same guns, but walking out of the forest, or hanging off the cars and chatting to the people in the convoy like they were best friends who did their initiation together. (In the village, doing your initiation together means you’re really good friends.) Then the four-by-four truck drives to the front of the convoy and they all head off together.
    Then, you arrive in a camp that belongs to Colonel Papa le Bon. Everyone in the convoy gets out and goes into Colonel Papa le Bon’s hut. They unpack everything, weigh everything, measure everything on account of the taxes and duties are based on how much all the stuff is worth. There’s a lot of palaver and arguing and after a while you reach an agreement. Then you pay and pay and pay. You pay in kind, with rice, manioc, fonio (‘
fonio
’ is a food also called
acha
, or ‘hungry rice’). You can even pay with American dollars, real American dollars. Then Colonel Papa le Bon organises an ecumenical mass. (In my
Larousse
, it says ‘ecumenical’ means a mass where there’s Jesus Christ and Mohammed and Buddha.) So anyway, Colonel Papa le Bon organises an ecumenical mass. There’s lots of blessings and stuff. Then he goes his way and you go your way.
    That’s the way it’s supposed to happen. Because ColonelPapa le Bon is the representative spokesman