Allah is Not Obliged (21 page)

Sister Aminata Gabrielle’s corpse threw the association of Sierra Leonean hunters into terrible confusion. Sister Aminata Gabrielle was a woman, but a woman who died a war hero.
The code of honour of the hunters demands that all those who die as heroes be treated as master hunters and buried with all the honours of a master hunter. But the rules said a woman couldn’t be buried as a master hunter. The question was put to the generalissimo of the hunters. His response was unambiguous (categorical, unequivocal). Though she was a woman, she had held out for two weeks against two regiments of hunters; she had killed nine hunters in nocturnal sorties and she had died capturing an armoured car. She richly deserved to be buried as a hero, a master hunter. She deserved it no matter what her sex.

That’s why Sister Aminata was given the funeral of a master hunter, of a great master hunter.

From the moment she was considered a master hunter, she was considered to have lots of
gnamas
(the avenging spirits of men and animals that you’ve killed). These had to be gathered up, and they were gathered up in a small gourd. The
sora
, the hunters’
griot
, came to deliver her funeral oration. The hunters, in order of rank, walked around the body. As the
sora
continued to sing the magical verses, the hunters walked round the body carrying their homemade rifles diagonally across their chests, marking the rhythm of the song by swaying their torsos, once to the left, once to the right.

After the dance, the corpse was immediately carried to the edge of the grave. Three master hunters came and bent over the grave of Sister Aminata. They removed her heart, gathered it up and, taking it, left the ceremony. Far from the ceremony the heart was fried, then placed in oil in a
kanari
. The
kanari
was sealed tight and buried in the earth.

As soon as the three master hunters had left, the hunters bid farewell to Sister Hadja, Gabrielle, Aminata, the excisor, the woman who was buried with the honours of a master hunter. All the hunters bade farewell, firing their homemade rifles into a pit dug parallel to the grave. It made an extraordinary cloud of smoke. While the grave was still smoking, the earth was drawn back over the body of Sister Gabrielle.

With the twilight began the vigil in the place where Sister Gabrielle had lived. During the vigil the hunters talked about the deceased as if she were still alive. Forty days after the death, in a ritual intended to purify and invigorate the soul of the deceased, the gourd was burned.

Every year, between early March and late May, the brotherhood of hunters organises the
donkun
cela. The
donkun cela
, or ‘rites of the crossroads’, is the most important ceremony of the brotherhood. During the ceremony, all the members of the brotherhood share a communal meal. At the end of the meal, the
dagas conons
are exhumed. The
dagas conons
are the
kanaris
containing the fried hearts of brave hunters. These hearts are consumed by the brotherhood in secret. It gives them passion and courage.

This is why people say, why everyone says, that the heart of Sister Aminata, colonel of the army of Sierra Leone, served as a delicate and delicious dessert at the end of a merry meal. (A merry meal is a meal during which lots of millet beer is drunk.)
Faforo! Gnamokodé!

As soon as the professional brotherhood of traditional hunters took control of the district around Mile-Thirty-Eight, happiness and us weren’t living in the same village any more. (That’s the Black Nigger African Native way of saying we weren’t happy any more.) We means Yacouba, the crippled crook, the grigriman, the money multiplier, and me, your humble servant, the blameless, fearless street kid. They searched us, stripped us down to our underpants, and took everything we had. When they got down to Yacouba’s underpants, instead of just finding his big arse, they found lots of little purses with diamonds and gold in them. Yacouba, the crippled crook, kept his savings underneath his
bubu
in his trousers. When they searched my underpants, they found gold and diamonds too, but it was nothing compared to Yacouba who looked like he had a massive hernia. That’s how many purses he had
round his waist and in the folds of his trousers. The hunters took everything he had, they took everything we had.

They shut us up in a pen. There were loads of us, soldiers, child-soldiers, women even. There were loads of us, the whole battalion of starving wretches that tag along in the wake of tribal war armies just to get a bit of manioc to eat. They penned us up in a pen where they gave us nothing to eat. We howled with hunger. Yacouba tried to use the fact he was a grigriman, but it didn’t wash, it didn’t work. Seeing as how we were getting hungrier and hungrier and screaming louder and louder and they couldn’t find anything to give us to eat, they let us go. After summary interrogations, they let us go. We were free, with no money and no guns we could use to extort anyone.

The traditional hunters had no need of Yacouba the grigriman; they were grigrimen themselves. I was set free too. The professional brotherhood of traditional hunters, the Kamajors didn’t need child-soldiers. Their code forbade them from using children in wars. To fight in a war with them you had to be initiated as a hunter. For the first time, we (Yacouba and me) were confronted with the reality, the uncertainty, of tribal war.

It was only when we were confronted with all this uncertainty that I came to admire Yacouba’s resourcefulness for getting by. We left Mile-Thirty-Eight for Freetown. When we got there, he took three tree-trunks and a bit of straw and made a
paillote
(‘paillote’ means a straw hut). He set himself up in it as a shaman, a grigriman skilled at transforming speeding bullets into water. At first, we had it tough. I was
his coadjuter, his assistant. But in the end we had enough manioc to eat. It wasn’t a four-star hotel, but at least we had something to eat every day. It was at that point everything happened, proving once again that Allah never sleeps, that he’s always watching over the earth, that he’s always watching out for miserable needy people like us.

In the end, some kind of truce was reached between the forces of the democrat Tejan Kabbah and those of the four bandit warlords pillaging Sierra Leone. The ECOMOG forces commanded by the Nigerian bandit general, the men of the bandit leader of the Sierra Leonean forces, the forces of the warlord Foday Sankoh, and the forces of the warlord Highan Norman, minister of defence and leader of the Kamajors, the professional brotherhood of traditional hunters. Yes, a balance was reached between all these different freedom fighters, these rival factions, and then the IMF had to go and stick its nose in. The balance of power had been set at eight hundred Kamajors, fifteen thousand soldiers, twenty thousand guerrillas loyal to Foday Sankoh and a surreptitious number of ECOMOG forces. The soldiers in the regular army got a monthly allocation of forty thousand sacks of rice as part of their salary, and one dollar per soldier. The traditional hunters got an allocation of twenty sacks of rice. The IMF found out that the soldiers were eating too much rice and costing the international community too much money. (
Walahé!
Bankers are merciless, they have no heart!) The IMF wanted to scale back the number of soldiers from fifteen thousand to seven thousand and the monthly allocation from forty thousand sacks to thirty thousand. The soldiers grumbled
and swore by all their gods that they weren’t eating too much. It was just that whenever they tried to wolf down their meagre ration of rice there was always some family member hanging around, right where they were trying to eat. So, on account of African solidarity, the rice had to be shared between an infinite number of people. The IMF hadn’t counted on a fucked-up country like Sierra Leone doing African solidarity. The soldiers had the last word, they refused to reduce their forces; they categorically refused to accept less than thirty-four thousand sacks of rice per month.

In order to come up with the extra four thousand sacks of rice and distribute them (the difference between thirty-four thousand and thirty thousand), the poor democratic government of poor Tejan Kabbah was forced to increase the price of fuel across the whole country. But the increase in the price of petrol didn’t make much difference. The first month, it paid for three thousand sacks of rice, the second, only two thousand, and the third month, the month of May 1995, there was only money for five hundred sacks of rice. Five hundred sacks. After the officers had been served, the ordinary soldiers, the privates got nothing. The consequences weren’t long coming: on May 25, there was a
coup
. It was easier for the coup to take place on May 25 on account of how Tejan Kabbah was guilty of partiality. (‘Partiality’ means that Kabbah’s government was playing favourites with his own tribe, the Mende.)

It started at dawn on May 25, there were bloody clashes between ECOMOG troops and factions in the regular army. The elected president Tejan Kabbah jumped in an ECOMOG
helicopter
djona-djona
. The helicopter took him to Conakry, capital of Guinea, to dictator Lansana Conté, where he’d be safe. Once he got there, he had all the time in the world to demand that the members of the CDEAO return him to power. And it was a good thing that he ran away. Because after he’d gone, everyone in Freetown started shooting everyone else. ECOMOG boats from Nigeria were shelling the whole fucking mess. The shelling went on for two days and resulted in the best
coup d’état
—meaning the bloodiest—in the history of Sierra Leone, a fucked-up country that had seen lots of
coups
. More than a hundred dead. After two days massacring, things started to get organised. The new
junta
(a ‘junta’ means a revolutionary military council) dissolved parliament, suspended the constitution, outlawed party politics, and established a curfew. The
junta
set up the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council government (AFRC).

The putschists (‘putschists’ means a group of armed people who seize power) ask Johnny Koroma to be leader, to be president. Johnny Koroma accepts. They let him out of prison where they locked him up after the first attempted coup. They appoint Foday Sankoh vice-president and from his cell in Nigeria Foday Sankoh orders his personal guerrillas in the jungle to follow the junta’s orders.

Well, as soon as they heard about Vice-President Foday Sankoh, the whole unanimous international community condemned the coup, they came down hard. Everyone was sick and tired of fucking Sierra Leone and its fucking problems.

On May 27, following deliberations, the UN Security
Council, made a statement ‘deploring the attempt to overthrow the government and demanding an immediate return to constitutional order’. Important fact: the security council ‘calls on all African countries and the international community to abstain from acknowledging the new regime or supporting the authors of the coup in any way whatsoever’.

The thirty-third summit of OUA (Organisation de l’unité Africaine) heads of state took place in Harare, Zimbabwe, from 2 to 4 June. In its final resolution, the summit condemned the May 25
coup d’état
and demanded that the crisis be resolved under the auspices of the CDEAO

And the CDEAO, well, that’s Nigeria. Nigeria meaning the Nigerian dictator, the criminal warlord Sani Abacha. Sani Abacha who, more than anyone else on earth, had had it up to here with fucking Sierra Leone. Sani Abacha who’d been ostracised (‘ostracised’ means he was ignored) by heads of state after the assassination of representatives of the Ogoni people, an ostracised Sani Abacha who needs to get his virginity back (to find his lost innocence and set out on the right path), Sani Abacha the criminal dictator of Nigeria who wants to take over leadership of the region, Sani Abacha who wants to play the policeman of West Africa. For all these reasons, Sani Abacha sent a whole bunch of warships into the territorial waters of fucked-up Sierra Leone. And the warships shelled the city of Freetown, the martyred capital of this lousy country.

Nigeria and ECOMOG thought this would be a walk in the park, thought it could bring AFRC to its knees in a week, three at the most. That was a mistake. Johnny Koroma and
the RUF became a single force of resistance despite the damage and the massive destruction caused by ECOMOG forces.

June 13, Johnny Koroma called on the traditional hunters, the Kamajors. In the name of the mother country, of Sierra Leone, he insisted they bury the hatchet and fight side by side with AFRC against the occupying Nigerian forces. The Kamajors’ response, on June 27, was to launch a three-pronged attack on the 38th battalion in Koribundu two hundred miles south-east of Freetown armed with grenades and rocket-launchers. The ferocity of the attack forced the junta to send military reinforcements to Koribundu from Bô and Moyamba. As in Koribundu all the south-east districts became embroiled in these murderous offensives. The formal alliance between AFRC and the RUF against the Nigerians and the Kamajors aggravated the chaos and gave a new base to the RUF, who until that point had been opposed to any compromise. The international community reacted in two ways: intimidation and negotiation.

On the negotiation side, the CDEAO council of foreign affairs in an attempt to implement Security Council resolutions, created a ministerial committee made up of representatives from Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea and Ghana. Representatives of the OUA and the CDEAO were attached to this committee. This Committee of Four was responsible for monitoring developments in Sierra Leone and initiating negotiations with the junta with the aim of restoring constitutional authority in Sierra Leone.

On the intimidation side, they imposed and enforced sanctions. Lungi airport is occupied by Nigerian forces. It serves
as a major artillery base constantly bombarding the city. Sierra Leone’s territorial waters are rigorously patrolled by Nigerian warships that shell the city at random.

Sierra Leone is starved of everything, of food, of medicines.

The first consequence of the intimidation is a meeting between the CDEAO Committee of Four and a delegate from the junta. This meeting took place on June 17–18 on the twenty-third floor of the Hotel Ivoire in Abidjan. At the end of the meeting, the
communiqué
gives a faint hope that the elected president might get back his armchair as democratically elected boss. Johnny Koroma’s representatives show so much good will that the intimidation eases off and bombing scaled back. AFRC representatives are given time to go back home and come back with concrete proposals.