Allah Is Not Obliged
by Ahmadou Kourouma; translated by Frank Wynne
Published by Anchor Books (May release)
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Reviewed by Beth Cummings
(This edition originally published in U.K. in 2006)
Birahama, a young Malinke tribal boy of West Africa, narrates this fascinating, amusing and horrific novel. When his disabled mother dies, his grandmother sends him with a shaman/con artist to live with his aunt in Liberia. While on the way to find her, they meet up with rebel armies and Birahama becomes a child-soldier. During his travails, his mantra becomes the Islamic saying "Allah is not obliged to be fair about the things he does here on earth."
In telling his story, Birahama offers details of village life, the deplorable state of medical care for his mother and others, and his ritualistic initiation into manhood. He shows the unfortunate results of tribal warfare and revolutionary coups on the citizens of Sierra Leone, Cote d'Ivoire and Liberia. The pathetic existence of the child-soldiers in these conflicts is described fully.
Armed with AK-47s, the child-soldiers are fed hashish to make them feel brave and then used as point men, lookouts, and cannon fodder by the adult members of warlord and revolutionary armies. In addition to their own precarious position, they witness and take part in all manner of cruelties. Yet throughout the telling, Birahama doesn't quite succumb to madness and remains genuinely likeable.
The book's author, the late Ahmadou Kourouma, grew up in Cote d'Ivoire and was familiar with the revolutions in that region. While the flow of story is frequently interrupted with term definitions that the narrator assumes the reader may not know, it grips with the excitement of a tale told by a child, in most sections. I found myself reading on even as I dreaded whatever new form of wartime atrocity that would befall the characters next.
It is not an easy book to read, but is well worth the effort to understand the human crisis of western Africa a bit better.
Armchair Interviews says: Hard to read for the violence against fellow man, but harder to put down because the story was so well told.