Allah is Not Obliged (22 page)

The second round of negotiations in Abidjan opened on 29 and 30 July 1997, back on the twenty-third floor of the Hotel Ivoire. It was supposed to be about the process of reestablishing constitutional order. Surprise! The junta’s new proposals are completely in opposition to the points established in the first round of talks on July 17. Now the junta wants to suspend the constitution and stay in power until 2001. The committee expresses its deep disappointment. The negotiators don’t allow themselves to be disconcerted by the junta’s U-turn. In accordance with the committee’s decisions of July 26 at Conakry, the committee suspends negotiations and calls for full sanctions. Ostracised by the international community, the junta is under constant pressure.

From the start of August 1997, Sierra Leone is ravaged by
continuous fighting. It’s caught between the bombings of the formidable ECOMOG forces and bullying from the Kamajors. It’s destabilised, isolated from the CDEAO. To alleviate internal and external pressures, the junta attempts to relax the vice grip. It requests the help of Guinea in restarting the talks suspended on July 29. The unrepentant dictator Lansana Conté receives a Sierra Leonean delegation at the Petit Palais in Boulbinet on August 9; the delegation is headed by Johnny Koroma’s uncle, ex-president Joseph Saïdou Momoh. From the talks, it emerges that the junta is ‘disposed to continue negotiations with the Committee of Four mandated by the CDEAO with a view to restoring peace’ and loud and clear it says that the date of November 2001 announced for the restoration of civil government is negotiable. It’s a question of establishing a timeline for transition.

Round about then, on August 27–28, the twentieth CDEAO summit takes place in Abuja, Nigeria, to discuss the role of ECOMOG in resolving the crisis in Sierra Leone. The summit calls for more sanctions. Nothing but sanctions.

From September 1997, Sierra Leone is starved of food and fuel. It is hit by a dramatic recession which translates as a complete collapse of all economic activity. If the sanctions are disastrous for the economy, the war is just as damaging to sanitation in the country. On top of the shells from Lungi airport occupied by Nigerian forces, strategic points of the capital are bombed causing significant damage. The strict patrolling of territorial waters makes it impossible for boats, trawlers and fishing boats to move.

In response, the professional classes—the civil servants,
the teachers, the doctors and the students—launched a campaign of civil disobedience, triggering government meltdown on top of the economic crisis. There’s no anything, no medicines and especially no fuel.

The situation is disastrous, it couldn’t be worse than it was.
Walahé!
That meant it was good for us.
Faforo!
Us, Yacouba, the crippled crook, money multiplying grigriman, and me, Birahima, the blameless, fearless street kid, the child-soldier.
Gnamokodé!
We were called up, we took up our duties straight away.

Yacouba, the crippled crook, hopped around on one leg shouting, ‘
Walahé!
Allah is on our side.’ We could go back on duty. Yacouba was appointed grigriman and I went back to being a child-soldier.

The child-soldiers went back to the usual mission, spying. During the spying missions, the hunters killed three child-soldiers. Among the dead child-soldiers there was Siponni the Viper. I’ve decided to say Siponni’s funeral oration because I want to. It was playing truant that did for him, for Siponni. He was in third year of primary in Toulepleu school. He’d already repeated the year twice on account of he didn’t go to school much. He played truant after truant, until one day he had it up to here and he jacked it all in and sold everything. Pencil, copybook, slate, all and everything, even his schoolbag. And he bought bananas with his profits. Okay. He did all that in the morning, but then in the evening there was the problem of going home. How could Siponni go home
without his schoolbag? He’d get flayed (‘flayed’ means beaten) by his mother and step-father. He’d get flayed and he wouldn’t get any food. No, Siponni couldn’t go home. Where could he go? He wandered around and came to a hotel. He saw a big Lebanese guy coming out. He introduced himself to the Lebanese guy as a kid with no maman or dad who was looking for work as a boy. ‘No father, no mother, here’s a kid I can get to work for free,’ the Lebanese guy muttered to himself and hired him straight off.

The next day, Siponni left Toulepleu with his new boss heading for the town of Man. After a couple of weeks working for Feras, his new boss, Siponni noticed that Feras made loads of money and kept it all locked in a wardrobe and never let the key out of his sight. But one night when he was going for a shower, Feras hung up his trousers with the key in them. Siponni took the key, opened the wardrobe, took the briefcase full of money. He went and hid the briefcase in the garden before coming back to say goodbye to his boss. The same night, an old man called Tedjan Touré found him with the briefcase stuffed with cash. Tedjan Touré said he was Siponni’s mother’s brother, his uncle. Tedjan kept the briefcase and first thing in the morning they took a truck to Danané. There, Siponni stayed with a friend of Tedjan’s. Months went by. One day, Tedjan Touré showed up looking heartbroken. After lots of embarrassed explanations he got to the point. The briefcase had been stolen. That’s right, stolen. Even with all the looking heartbroken and the long explanations Siponni was still sceptical. Siponni asked a few questions and Tedjan answered them. It was impossible, Siponni
didn’t believe Tedjan’s story and decided he wasn’t going to be pushed around. He didn’t waste any time, he went straight to the nearest police station to denounce himself as a thief and grassed up Tedjan for receiving stolen goods. The police went looking for Tedjan and brought him to the police station. They tortured him and made him confess. They took both of them (Siponni and Tedjan) to prison. Tedjan to the big prison and Siponni to the kids’ prison.

In the children’s prison, Siponni met Jacques. Jacques had heard about the child-soldiers in Liberia and Sierra Leone and all he dreamed about was being a child-soldier. He passed on his enthusiasm to Siponni. The two of them decided to go to Liberia, to find the child-soldiers. They waited for a chance to escape, they found it when the prison team went to play against a parish team in a village a few kilometres from Man. Siponni and Jacques took their opportunity and did a runner. They ran deep into the jungle. After much wandering they found the guerrillas. The guerrillas gave them guns and lessons in how to use a kalash. There they were child-soldiers. That’s how Siponni got to be a child-soldier.

How did he get the nickname ‘the Viper’? For a lot of different things, including the trick he played on Sobresso village. The other child-soldiers were attacking head on. How did Siponni manage, how did he slip past the villagers and get behind them? He cut off their escape. They capitulated, they gave up all resistance and were beaten. Siponni surprised them and betrayed them like a snake, like a true viper.

*     *     *

We fit in well into Johnny Koroma’s army. Johnny recruited shitloads of child-soldiers (‘shitloads’ means lots and lots) because things were getting worse and worse and child-soldiers are good when things are going bad. The child-soldiers were getting crueller and crueller. They had to kill their parents to get initiated. They proved by their parricide that they’d given up everything, that they didn’t have any ties on earth, any other home except Johnny Koroma’s family. The leaders in Johnny’s army were getting crueller and crueller, more and more
bele-bele
(tough). To prove it, they’d eat the hearts of their victims, of victims who fought bravely before they died. They’d point out the cannibal, they were afraid of him, and the cannibal was proud of being thought of as cruel, capable of any inhumanity. (‘inhumanity’ means barbarism and cruelty.)

We were in Sourougou’s troop. Sourougou was a leader in Johnny Koroma’s army. We were heading west when—surprise!—we ran into Sekou, our luckless friend, heading east. With Sekou was his own coadjutor, the loyal little Bakary. We broke step with the troop; we took them to one side. Just to get it into your heads, Sekou was a vicious crook, Yacouba’s friend. What was Sekou doing in this
kasaya-kasaya?
(‘kasaya-kasaya’ means country madhouse). Sekou was the marabout who had taught Yacouba the secrets of the grigriman and money multiplier back in Abidjan. He was the guy who out of the blue (‘out of the blue’ means suddenly) could pull a white chicken clucking out of the sleeve of his
bubu
.

Yacouba wasn’t happy to see him on account of, one, he was competition, and, two, every time he’d seen him, it was
always to listen to his troubles. Sekou walked like a guy with a hernia (someone with a big hernia on his
bangala
) on account of having so many, so many bags of gold and diamonds in the folds of his pants. Sekou was just like Yacouba before he got searched by the hunters. Like him, he carried all his savings on him, round his waist and in the folds of his pants.
Faforo!
Looking at him I couldn’t help myself, I burst out laughing. He got angry. He didn’t let us reel off the miles and miles of greetings that Dioulas, that Mandingos (like they say in pidgin), rattle off when they meet. He said he was surprised to see us heading west. ‘All the Dioulas, Malinkés, Mandingos in all of Liberia and all of Sierra Leone are heading east. Why are you going west?’ he asked us.

We didn’t have time to answer, he told us that something extraordinary had happened in Liberia and Sierra Leone. All the Africans, natives and black savages from both countries, plus the racist American blacks from Liberia, plus the black creoles from Sierra Leone had all ganged up on the Malinkés, the Mandingos. They wanted to chuck them out of Liberia and Sierra Leone, to throw them out and send them back to where they came from. They wanted to boot them all out or massacre the lot of them on account of racism. A Malinké warlord called El Hadji Koroma from Liberia (not to be confused with Johnny Koroma from Sierra Leone) had decided to save the Malinkés. He was gathering them all together in the villages to the east, that’s why all the Malinkés were marching east.

Yacouba said he never heard anything about this in Sierra Leone in Johnny Koroma’s army. He, Yacouba, was doing fine,
was doing very well, thank you, as chief Muslim grigriman, and he was feared and respected by everyone. He hadn’t felt the slightest danger and he was going to keep marching west with Sourougou’s troop. He didn’t believe Sekou’s words, he didn’t believe them.

Sekou replied that if Yacouba didn’t believe, that was his business. But my aunt Mahan believed about the danger of the Black Nigger African Native from all over Liberia and all over Sierra Leone. She’d left with a group of Malinkés heading east to the enclave of El Hadji Koroma. (An ‘enclave’ is land or territory within the boundaries of another country.)

We were
makou
. (We were really surprised.) That meant, that meant that my aunt was in the east, in Koroma’s enclave, El Hadji Koroma. We totally had to save her. We had to desert the army, desert Johnny Koroma’s troop. We left Sekou and his coadjutor foot to the road of the damned (condemned to the fires of hell) to the east. We’d join them later; we needed time to duck out (to ‘duck out’ means to cleverly slip away).

We took advantage of a rest stop to make ourselves scarce, to do a runner. Two days later we headed east, towards the Ivoirian border. We had our kalashes hidden under our
bubus
. That’s tribal wars that does that. To make sure it was crystal clear he was a grigriman, a big-shot Muslim grigriman, Yacouba hung loads of grigris round his neck and lots of amulets on his arm. They dangled round his calves. I had a whole lot of amulets hanging from me too and I had a half-open Qur’an in my hand. So much so that all the black savage Liberian natives we met on the way were so scared they got
off the road
djona-djona
and stood on the roadside to let us pass.

We walked on like that for three days. On the fourth day, at a fork in the road, we came nose to nose with my cousin Saydou Touré. The cousin was extravagantly armed. At least six kalashes, two hanging round his neck, two hanging from each shoulder, and ammunition belts wrapped all round him, and chains of grigris on top of the ammunition belts. He had a beard and his hair was tousled (‘tousled’ means in a mess). Even though he looked all disgusting, I threw my arms round his neck, I was so happy to see him.

After we hugged, I looked the cousin up and down, down and up, curiously. He stared at me and with a scary laugh he said, ‘In a
kasaya-kasaya
country like Liberia, you need at least six kalashes to deter people (‘deter’ means to discourage someone from action). My cousin Saydou Touré was the biggest brawler, the biggest liar, the biggest drinker in all the northwest of Côte d’Ivoire. He drank so much, he fought so much, that he was forever on trial, forever in prison, he was never out of prison more than one month in six. My other cousin, Doctor Mamadou Doumbia, had taken advantage of one of cousin Saydou’s rare periods of freedom to send him on a perilous mission. In desperation (as a last resort) he asked him to go and find his mother, my aunt Mahan, in fucked-up Liberia over there. He would give him a million CFA francs if he could find her. Saydou gladly accepted. Aunt Mahan was the poor woman we’d been looking for ourselves for more than three years all over tribal war Liberia. We were happy to see cousin Saydou. We decided to all go together.

Cousin Saydou Touré was a storyteller (a storyteller is someone who substitutes invented stories for real life), a liar. He loved Doctor Mamadou Doumbia, who often sent him money when he was in prison. He talked about him all the time with lots of tenderness, with friendship and love.

When he was seven, little Mamadou Doumbia had walked eighty kilometres with an old freedwoman and a little girl. Back then, Black Nigger African Natives were still stupid. They didn’t know anything from anything: they gave food and lodging to any strangers who showed up in their village. And Mamadou and his two friends were given food and shelter on the house (‘on the house’ means for free) the whole ten days of their journey.