Allah is Not Obliged (4 page)

When maman started to rot away, to really rot away, she sent for me and squeezed my left arm really hard with her right hand. I couldn’t escape and run away and be a street kid that night so I slept in the blanket with her and maman’s soul left her body at the first cockcrow. In the morning, maman’s fingers were holding on to my arm so tight that Balla and my grandmother and another woman had to use all their strength to drag me away from my mother.
Walahé!
That’s the truth.

Everyone cried and cried on account of how maman had suffered so much down here on earth. They all said maman would go straight up to heaven to be with Allah because of all the hardships and sufferings she’d had down here on earth and because Allah didn’t have any more hardships and sufferings left to give her.

The imam said that her spirit would be a good spirit, a spirit that would protect the living against troubles and evil spells, a spirit that should be worshipped and commemorated. Now maman is in heaven and she’s not suffering any more, so everyone down here on earth is happy. Except me.

Maman’s death makes me sad, even now it makes me sad. Because the accusations that the old kaffir men said were just lies, they were barefaced liars. And I had been a horrible, cruel son to her. I hurt maman, and she died with that hurt in her heart. That’s why I’m cursed and the curse goes with me wherever I go.
Gnamokodé!

*     *     *

For my mother’s funeral, on the seventh and fortieth days my aunt Mahan came from Liberia. (According to the
Glossary
, the seventh and fortieth days are the days on which ceremonies are held to the memory of the deceased.)

Mahan is the mother of Mamadou. That’s why Mamadou is my cousin. My aunt Mahan lived in Liberia, deep in the forests, far, far away from any road. She ran away to Liberia with her second husband because her first husband, Mamadou’s father, was a master huntsman. A master huntsman who yelled at her and cursed her and threatened her with knives and guns. He was what they call a bully. Mamadou’s father, the master huntsman, was a big bully. My aunt had made two babies, my cousin Férima and my cousin Mamadou, with the master huntsman. The name of the master huntsman, Mamadou’s father, was Morifing. But Morifing cursed and punched and threatened my aunt so much that one day she left him and ran away.

Everywhere in the world a woman isn’t supposed to leave her husband’s bed even if that husband curses her and punches her and threatens her. The woman is always wrong. That’s what they call women’s rights.

It wasn’t independence yet. My aunt was summoned to the office of the
toubab
commissioner in charge of the district. On account of women’s rights, the two children were taken from their mother and given to their father. To make sure that my aunt didn’t steal her children, to make sure she didn’t even see them, their father sent them to Côte d’Ivoire. He sent my cousin Mamadou to his uncle who was an important nurse. The nurse sent Mamadou to the white school in Côte d’Ivoire.

In those days there weren’t too many schools, so education was still worth something. That’s how Mamadou was able to grow up to be a big somebody, even a doctor.

Even though she got a divorce from the colonial
toubab
commissioner on account of women’s rights, and even though Morifing got to keep the two children, the evil huntsman was always trying to find my aunt and her second husband. Sometimes, in the night, he’d wake all alone and fire his rifle into the air and scream how he was going to kill them and hunt them down like deer if he ever set eyes on them. So my aunt and her second husband went far away from French colonies like Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire to hide in the forests of Liberia, because it is a colony full of American blacks where they don’t apply the French rules about women’s rights. Because the English they speak there is called pidgin.
Faforo!

The evil huntsman was not in the village for my mother’s funeral, because every year he left for months and months to go far away to different countries where he was still a bully and still hunted lots of wild animals to sell their meat. That was his work, his job. It was only because he was far away that my aunt came to the village to help us, grandmother, Balla and me, to mourn for my mother.

Three weeks after my aunt came to the village, there was a big family palaver in grandfather’s hut. (‘Palaver’ means ‘a traditional assembly where outstanding issues are discussed and decisions are made.’) At the palaver there was my grandfather, my grandmother, my aunt and a whole
bunch of other aunts and uncles. They decided, according to the laws of Malinké families, that because my mother was dead, my aunt would be my second mother. A second mother is also called a tutor. My aunt—my tutor—had to feed me and clothe me and she was the only person who was allowed to insult me and punish me and make sure I got a proper education.

Everyone decided that I should go to Liberia to live with my aunt, because here in Togobala I never went to the French school or even to the Qur’anic school. I was always skipping classes to be a street kid or to go hunting in the forests with Balla, who was teaching me hunting and animism and magic instead of teaching me the holy word of Allah from the Qur’an. My grandmother didn’t approve of what Balla was teaching me. She wanted to send me away, far away from Balla, because she was afraid I would grow up to be a Bambara kaffir
feticheur
, and not a proper Malinké who performs the five daily prayers.

Grandmother tried to encourage me, to persuade me to leave Balla, by telling me that in my aunt’s house in Liberia I would have rice and meat with
sauce graine
to eat. I was happy to be leaving because I wanted to eat lots of rice with
sauce graine. Walahé!

But the council of the elders told my grandmother and my grandfather that I was not allowed to leave the village because I was still a
bilakoro
. (
Bilakoro
is what you call a boy who hasn’t been circumcised and initiated yet.) You see, it’s different in Liberia, there’s lots of forests and the people that
live there are called bushmen. (According to the
Glossary
, ‘bushmen’ means ‘men of the forests—an offensive name given to forest dwellers by the peoples of the savannah’.) Bushmen are people of the forests who aren’t Malinkés and who don’t know about circumcision and initiation. So the council said I had to stay until the dry season, when I was part of the first group of
bilakoros
to be prepared for circumcision and initiation.

One night, someone came and woke me, and we walked and walked and at dawn we all arrived at a clearing on the edge of the jungle at the place of circumcision. You don’t have to have been to the place of circumcision to know that they cut something off. All the
bilakoros
dug a little hole and sat in front of it. The man who was performing the circumcisions came out of the forest carrying as many limes as there were
bilakoros
. He was very tall and very old and he looked like a blacksmith. He was also a powerful
feticheur
and a mighty shaman. With every lime he cut, a boy’s foreskin fell. He came to me and I closed my eyes and my foreskin fell into the hole. It’s really painful, but that’s the Malinké tradition.

All the boys slept near the village in a camp deep in the dense thicket where we lived for two months.

During those two months, they taught us things, lots of things that we were obliged never to reveal to anyone ever. That’s why it’s called initiation. I would never talk to anyone who was not initiated about the things I learned during initiation. On the day we left the sacred forest, we ate a lot and
danced a lot, and we weren’t
bilakoros
any more: we had been initiated so now we were men. Now I was allowed to leave the village and nobody could object or complain.

So there we were, my aunt, who was my second mother or tutor, and me, Birahima, a fearless and blameless boy, both ready to leave for Liberia when suddenly, one night, as the fourth prayer was being said, we heard shouting and gunfire coming from my aunt’s first husband’s hut. Everyone in the village was yelling that the bully huntsman was back. My aunt was terrified, she didn’t stop for a second, she disappeared into the night, right into the forest without me. It was only two weeks later, when we knew my aunt had arrived back safely to her husband in Liberia, that my grandmother and the elders of the village started looking for someone who could go with me to my aunt’s house in Liberia.

In our tribe, everyone knows the names of the people from our village who are now big-shots with lots of money in Abidjan, Dakar, Bamako, Conakry, Paris, New York, Rome; some of them are even living in countries far across the Ocean where it’s always cold like America and France. A person who gets to be a big somebody is also called a hajji, because every year they go to Mecca and over there in the desert they slit a sheep’s throat during the big Muslim feast called
la fête des moutons
that is also called
el-kabeir
.

That’s why everyone in the village knows about Yacouba. Yacouba is from Togoballa but now he was a big somebody in Abidjan and did the big hajj there in his big starched
bubu
.

One morning I woke up and everyone in the village was saying that Yacouba had come back during the night. But they all had to keep quiet and not say anything about Yacouba being back. They all knew that the man who had arrived back in the village was really called Yacouba, but now they had to forget the name Yacouba and call him Tiécoura instead. Every day, five times a day, they saw him going to the mosque but no one was allowed to tell anyone else that they had seen Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura with their own two eyes (when someone has one name but you’re supposed to call them by a different name it’s called ‘alias’). Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura had been in the village for two moons and nobody called him Yacouba any more and nobody even asked why a big somebody like him had come back to the village.

Since they couldn’t find anyone in the village to take me to my aunt’s house in Liberia, one morning after prayer Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura, the big somebody hajji said he would take me to Liberia. He said he wanted to go with me because he was also a money multiplier. A money multiplier is a marabout that you give a little handful of money to one day and another day he gives you back a big fistful of CFA francs or even American dollars. Tiécoura was a money multiplier, but he was a marabout fortune-teller too and a marabout who made grigris.

Tiécoura was in a hurry to get away because everybody said that, with all the tribal wars and everything in Liberia, marabout money multipliers and shamans and healers and grigri makers could make lots of money and even American dollars. They earned a lot of money in Liberia because there
was nobody left except the rebel warlords and people who were too scared to die. A warlord is a big-shot who’s killed lots of people and has his own country with villages full of people that he’s allowed to kill anytime he likes for no reason. With all the rebel warlords and all their people, Tiécoura knew he would be able to do business there with no trouble from the police like he got in Abidjan. He was always in trouble with the police for all the work and all the business he did in Abidjan, Yopougon, Port-Bouët and different villages in Côte d’Ivoire like Daloa, Bassam, Bouaké and even Boundiali in
Sénofou
country up in the north.

Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura was a real big big-shot, a genuine hajji. When he was circumcised, he left the village to sell cola nuts all over the bushmen villages in the forests of Côte d’Ivoire like Agloville, Daloa, Gagnoa or Anyama. In Anyama he got rich by shipping lots and lots of baskets of cola nuts to Dakar by boat. By wetting beards (that means bribing people, also known as paying
baksheesh
), by wetting the beards of the customs officers, Yacouba’s cola nuts got on the boat in Abidjan and off the boat in Dakar without paying a penny in taxes or duties. If someone tries to export cola nuts and doesn’t bribe the customs officers in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, they have to pay lots of import taxes and duties like government levies and they don’t make a penny for themselves. Yacouba’s cola nuts—which he never paid a penny tax on—were sold off to the highest bidder in Senegal with loads of profits. With all the profits, Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura got rich.

As soon as he was good and rich he took the plane and
went to Mecca so he could be a hajji, and the minute he was a hajji he came back to Abidjan to marry lots of women. To be able to marry lots of women, he bought lots of concessions and businesses in Anyama and other godforsaken holes in Abidjan, like Abobo. Once he’d bought the concessions, he had a lots of empty houses and empty space, so all his parents and his friends, and his parents’ friends and his friends’ friends, and his wives’ parents came to stay in the rooms to get well fed and have lots of palavers. Whenever he wasn’t praying, Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura sat under an appatam all day listening to all the palavers (an ‘appatam’ is a small building on stilts with a roof of thatched palm leaves which serves as shelter from the sun). He’d spend all day discussing stuff under the appatam in his big starched
bubu
and saying lots of big-turbaned hajji proverbs and suras from the Qur’an.

This one month, he was so busy listening to the palavers and dealing with all the shit from the palaverers that he completely forgot to remember to wet the beards of the customs officers for a boatload of cola nuts, but it got shipped anyway and arrived in Dakar.

In Dakar, the dock workers were on strike and the dockers and the customs officers just left the cola nuts to rot away on the boat while Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura went on blethering under the appatam. The whole boatload of baskets of cola nuts was completely fucked, completely ruined, they were only good for chucking into the sea, and Yacouba lost all the money he had. In French, when that happens, you’d say that Yacouba was ruined and totally bankrupt.

When you’re ruined and bankrupt, the people from the
bank come and ask you to give them back all their money, the money that they were kind enough to lend you, and if you don’t pay them back them immediately, they take you to court. Then, you have to wet the beards of the magistrates and judges and stenographers and lawyers in the courts at Abidjan, because if you don’t they find you completely guilty. If they find you guilty, you have to wet the beards of the bailiffs and the police, because if you don’t they seize all your stuff and all your houses.