Allah is Not Obliged (24 page)

Still following the
aide-de-camp
, we headed to the mass grave where the aunt’s body had been dumped. We bowed down by the grave to pray. The prayers were led by Yacouba, but Yacouba hadn’t finished saying the first ‘
Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar
’ when Sekou showed up, no one knew from where. And he piously crouched down. Sekou is Yacouba’s friend, the friend who could make white chickens appear out of the blue. Sekou was a grigriman and a money multiplier like Yacouba. The prayers were said by Yacouba in a voice so pure and clear that they went straight up to heaven. But maybe they weren’t accepted because out of the seven people around the mass grave where the aunt was buried, three of us were criminals. The seven people were: the doctor, the generalissimo’s aide-de-camp, Yacouba, Sekou, Saydou, Sekou’s coadjutor, and me, Birahima, the blameless, fearless street kid. The three criminals who feared neither God nor man on account of who Allah couldn’t accept the prayers were Saydou, Yacouba and Sekou. That’s why we had to say more prayers, more
suras
, lots more prayers for the repose of my aunt’s soul.

Now the road was straight, the road to Abidjan via Man was straight. There were five of us in Doctor Mamadou’s four-by-four Pajero. The doctor, his driver, Yacouba, Sekou and me. Saydou hadn’t come along, he didn’t want to come. At the last minute, he took his courage in both hands and asked the doctor a question.

‘Mahan was one of my aunts so I should have looked for her free, gratis, for nothing. But all the same you promised me a million CFA francs. And I got used to having the million and all the time I was travelling I could see myself as a millionaire. I was going to set up a grocer’s shop with that million. Now the aunt is dead, tell me, tell me straight, are you going to give me any of the million?’

‘Not a centime, nothing at all, because I have my mother’s funeral to organise,’ replied the doctor.

So Saydou turned away and said, ‘I’m staying here in Worosso so I can make the most of my rank as colonel.’

I was sitting in the back of the four-by-four, squeezed between Yacouba and Sekou. The big-time criminals were very happy. The folds of their trousers were heavy with purses full of gold and diamonds and the doctor had promised to help them in Boundiali so they could get their birth certificates changed. They could get new identity cards so they could openly practise their trade as money multipliers in Abidjan.
Walahé!

I was flicking through the dictionaries that I’d just inherited. Namely, the
Larousse
and the
Petit Robert
, the
Glossary of French Lexical Particularities in Black Africa
and
Harrap’s
. That’s when this brilliant idea popped into my calabash (my head) to write down my adventures from A to Z. To recount them with clever French words from
toubab
, colonial, racist, colonising French and big Black Nigger African Native words, and bastard nigger pidgin words. It was at that moment that my cousin, the doctor, said to me, ‘Tell me everything, little
Birahima, tell me everything you’ve seen and done; tell me how all this happened.’

I got good and comfortable, good and settled, and I started: The full, final and completely complete title of my bullshit story is:
Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth
. I went on telling my stories for a couple of days.

First off, Number one … My name is Birahima and I’m a little nigger. Not ’cos I’m black and I’m a kid. I’m a little nigger because I can’t talk French for shit. That’s how things are. You might be a grown-up, or old, you might be Arab, or Chinese, or white, or Russian—or even American—if you talk bad French, it’s called
parler petit nègre
—little nigger talking—so that makes you a little nigger too. That’s the rules of French for you.

Number two … I didn’t get very far at school; I gave up in my third year in primary school. I chucked it because everyone says … etc., etc.

Faforo! Gnamokodé!