Allah is Not Obliged (13 page)

While the negotiations were going on, General Onika was secretly planning to take Niangbo by force. Four days after the kidnapping, we, the child-soldiers, marched on Niangbo. We marched at night; during the day we stayed hidden in the jungle. To make sure we didn’t fuck up along the way, we weren’t given any supplies of hash and it got to where we were floppy as worms, weak on account of we needed hash. We were desperate, we didn’t know what to do, we were just wandering round begging for a little bit of hash, but for the two days and two nights it took to get to Niangbo, the order was strictly enforced.

Now, here we are at last on a Sunday morning, happy that
we’re finally on the outskirts of Niangbo. We made camp and they gave us masses of hash. We were the first ones to get there, the advance guard, the recon. We were dying to fight, we all felt as strong as bulls from all the hash and we all had faith in our grigris. Following behind, there was the platoon of real soldiers and, a bit farther back, General Onika’s mobile headquarters. The operation was being supervised by the general herself. She was determined to be there to personally punish the people of Niangbo. She brought her grigriman with her, her two grigrimen, Yacouba and her old grigriman whose name was Sogou. Sogou was a grigriman of the Krahn tribe. Rain and shine, he wore a band of feathers around his head and his waist. His body was painted with kaolin.

The assault began at dawn. We had crept as far as the first huts. Every AK-47 was manned by five child-soldiers. The first group attacked and to our surprise our first bursts of gunfire were answered by their bursts of gunfire. The people and the soldiers of Niangbo had been expecting us. There was no element of surprise. The kid manning the kalash fell down dead and another kid took over, then he fell down dead too. Then it was the third kid’s turn. When it came to the fourth one, he refused and we retreated, leaving our dead on the battlefield. General Onika’s entire strategy was in jeopardy. Grown-up soldiers went to the front line and brought back the bodies of the dead.

The child-soldiers—that’s us—had to go to the headquarters to have our protective grigris tested. We must have done something terrible that made the grigris ineffective: three
dead in the first exchange of fire. When Yacouba had tested the grigris, he told us that the child-soldiers had violated the taboos attached to the grigris. We had violated the taboos by smoking hash. Smoking hash is a taboo during wartime when you’re wearing war grigris. I was so angry I went red in the face. Well, no … on account of blacks like me don’t go red when they’re angry, that’s only for whites. Blacks get hot and bothered. I was hot and bothered I was so angry, I was furious. Grigrimen are charlatans. (‘Charlatan’ means ‘a quack or fraud who makes elaborate claims to skill or knowledge’, according to my
Larousse
.) It’s the truth! According to the grigriman, three kids were dead just because we smoked hash. Coming out with bullshit like that. It was unbelievable!

I cried for their mothers. I cried for all the life they never lived. Among the bodies, I recognised Sekou the Terrible.

It was school fees that had done for Sekou Ouedroago. It was school fees that had thrown him into the jaws of the alligator, into the ranks of child-soldiers.

Sekou’s father was a security guard at one of the luxury villas over in Deux Plateaux somewhere in Abidjan. When thieves broke into the prosperous man’s house, he accused Sekou’s father of being involved. Seeing as how there’s no justice for the poor man on this earth, Sekou’s father was sent to prison. For one month, two months, Sekou’s school fees didn’t get paid … After three months, the headmaster sent for Sekou and said, ‘Sekou, you’re suspended. You can come back when your fees are paid.’

Sekou’s mother was called Bita. Bita said to her son, ‘Wait
there, I’ll raise the money, I’ll get you the school fees.’ Bita sold cooked rice, and some of the building workers she sold to owed her fifteen thousand CFA francs. With fifteen thousand CFA francs, she would have enough to pay the monthly fees of five thousand francs. Sekou waited a whole week, then another whole week, but when there was no sign of any money Sekou thought about his uncle in Burkina Faso. His father had often told him that Boukari, one of his brothers, one of Sekou’s uncles, was a driver who had his own car and his own house in Ouagadougou. Sekou decided to go and ask his uncle with the car and the house in Ouagadougou for the school fees. He jumped a train (to ‘jump a train’ means you don’t pay the fare), but when he got to Ouagadougou he was arrested and sent to the Ouagadougou police headquarters.

‘Where are your parents?’

‘My uncle’s name is Boukari, he’s got a car and a house.’

But finding a Boukari with a car and a house in a place as huge as Ouagadougou is like looking for a grain of millet with a black spot on it in a huge sack of millet. Sekou stayed in the police station for a week, waiting for the police to find his uncle. The second week, while the search was still going on, Sekou took advantage when the guard was distracted and escaped into big old Ouagadougou. He roamed around big old Ouagadougou. During his wanderings, he spotted a truck from Abidjan. There was nobody but the driver: his apprentice, his boy, had quit because the driver didn’t pay him. Sekou was quick to introduce himself as a kid who would work hard for no money. It was a done deal, the driver, whose name was Mamadou, hired Sekou to be his
new boy. Mamadou took Sekou behind the truck and in a low voice explained their mission. It was a very secret top-secret mission and Sekou was not allowed to breathe a word about it to anyone, ever. The truck wasn’t going to Abidjan at all, the truck was being used to secretly transport arms to the Taylor faction in Liberia.

The very same night, soldiers in civvies showed up (‘civvies’ are civilian clothes or normal clothes). The soldiers rented a hotel room for Mamadou and Sekou while they headed off to load up the truck. They came back to the hotel at four o’clock in the morning with the truck fully loaded. The shipment was completely disguised. The soldiers woke Mamadou and Sekou. One of the officers in civvies sat up front in the cab next to Mamadou and another one, also in civvies, perched next to Sekou on all the disguised crates. They headed for the Liberian/Ivoirian border. As soon as they got there, guerrillas—rebel fighters—appeared out of the forest. One guerrilla took over the driving from Mamadou and three got in the back of the truck with the cargo. They drove off with the officers while Sekou and Mamadou were invited to wait in a
maquis
, an illegal bar where rebels meet.

The owner of the bar was an alcoholic and a really funny guy. He was always laughing and slapping his customers on the back and farting all the time. While he was clowning around, four guys in balaclavas appeared out of the forest (a balaclava is like a hood but with a hole where your eyes are). They pointed a gun on Sekou and Mamadou, but before they kidnapped them they gave a message to the owner of the
maquis
, who was standing there shaking like a leaf.

‘We’re taking them hostage, the ransom is five million CFA francs to be paid by the government of Burkina Faso within five days. Otherwise, the hostages’ heads will come back on stakes. Understand?’

‘Yes,’ answered the bar owner, still trembling.

Blindfolded, Sekou and Mamadou were led through the forest to a
paillote
, a small straw hut, where they were tied to stakes. For the first three days, there were three guards who always seemed on the alert. By the fourth day, there was only one guard left and he fell asleep. Sekou and Mamadou managed to untie themselves and disappear into the forest. From the forest, Sekou emerged on to a road. It was a straight road. He walked along the road, not looking right or left. At the end of the road, there was a village and in the village there were child-soldiers. He went right up to the head of the organisation and said, ‘My name is Sekou Ouedraogo, I want to be a child-soldier.’

What Sekou did to earn his nickname ‘Sekou the Terrible’ is a different story, it’s a long story. I don’t feel like telling it and I’m not obliged to, and anyway it makes me sad, really sad. When I saw Sekou lying there all dead like that, I cried my heart out. And this had all happened, according to the lying bastard grigrimen, because of the hash.
Faforo!

Next to Sekou was the body of Sosso the Panther.

Sosso the Panther was a kid from the village of Salala in Liberia. He had a mother and a father. His father was a security guard and a labourer in a shop owned by a Lebanese man. Sosso’s father did all the work and more and every night he
got drunk mainly on whisky and lots of palm wine a go-go. Every night Sosso’s father came home drunk, so drunk he couldn’t tell his wife from his son. Every evening, as soon as the sun started to set, Sosso and his mother started trembling because the master of the house was coming home drunk, completely drunk, so drunk he couldn’t tell a bull from a billy-goat. And they were going to get what was coming to them.

One night, they heard him in the distance, heard him in the distance singing and laughing and blaspheming (to ‘blaspheme’ is to say rude things about God). Sosso and his maman thought about what was coming and went and hid in the kitchen. When he got home and there was no sign of his wife and his son, Sosso’s father got even angrier and started smashing everything. Sosso’s mother came out of the kitchen trembling and crying and begging him to stop the massacre, but his father threw a cooking pot at her and she started bleeding. In tears, Sosso grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed his father who howled like a hyena and died.

The only thing left for Sosso the Parricide (a ‘parricide’ is a boy who kills his father) was to join the child-soldiers.

When you haven’t got no father, no mother, no brothers, no sisters, no aunts, no uncles, when you haven’t got nothing at all, the best thing to do is become a child-soldier. Being a child-soldier is for kids who’ve got fuck all left on earth or Allah’s heaven.

What Sosso did to earn the nickname ‘Sosso the Panther’ is a different story, it’s a long story. I don’t feel like telling it and I’m not obliged to, and anyway it makes me sad, really sad. When I saw Sosso lying there all dead like that, I cried
my heart out. And when I thought about the bullshit grigrimen saying it was all on account of us smoking hash at the wrong time it made me even angrier.
Faforo!

We buried them all in a mass grave. When the grave had been filled, we fired our kalashes. There’s no funeral orations when you’re on the front line.

Onika believed the grigrimen a hundred percent when they said that the three child-soldiers got massacred on account of smoking hash at the wrong time. The grigris of the child-soldiers needed to be re-energised. The ceremony had to be done on the bank of a river, and choosing the river was no easy thing because if one of the grigrimen said one thing the other grigriman disagreed. Onika was forced to shout and make threats before the shaman grigriman and the Muslim grigriman would agree.

Onika arrived with her son and her daughters-in-law and the rest of the members of the high command stood around them. The child-soldiers were brought out, all of the child-soldiers, about thirty of us. Me and some of my friends didn’t believe the grigrimen’s bullshit and we were laughing up our sleeves the whole time during the recharging (‘laugh up your sleeve’ means ‘laugh or rejoice in secret at another’s error’, according to
Larousse
). They lined us all up, then, one after another, they made all of us recite a short prayer:

We took off our grigris and put them in a pile. The pile was set alight, and the flames reduced its prey to ashes. The ashes were scattered on the water.

Then all the child-soldiers got naked, completely naked. It wasn’t very discreet seeing as how there were women there. There was Sita Baclay, Monita Baclay and Rita Baclay. When Rita saw us naked, when she saw me naked, it made her think about the lovely times we’d spent together.
Walahé!

The grigrimen passed down the line of child-soldiers, spat on the head of each of them, and rubbed the spit into our heads. Then the order was given for the child-soldiers to jump into the river. Which they did cheerfully, shouting and mucking around. After they’d jumped into the water and made a racket, the order was given to get out of the water. The child-soldiers all got out on the right bank of the river. They dried themselves off and—still naked—walked down the river to a small bridge by which they crossed back to the left bank, where they had left their clothes and their guns. They got dressed and lined up again. Me and some of my friends who didn’t believe in their bullshit grigris laughed up our sleeves.
Gnamokodé!

All this took twenty-four hours. We fooled the people of Niangbo into thinking we’d taken our dead and left, disappeared into the forest. Then in the morning, really early in the morning, there was another free-for-all. There was tons
of gunfire, but we still didn’t surprise them.
Tat-tat-tat
, they fired right back at us with long bursts of machine-gun fire. There we were again, lying flat on the ground. Two soldiers got shot in spite of all the bullshit Muslim grigris and shaman grigris. The first soldier was killed dead and the second was fatally wounded. No child-soldiers were killed this time, seeing as how the child-soldiers weren’t in the front line. Even though we attacked was from the south, near the river, not north of the village like the first time. They’d obviously put soldiers with kalashes all the way round the village. There we were again, lying on our bellies.

We needed a different strategy, something other than the bullshit grigris, but instead of racking her brains for a stratagem, Onika just sent for the bullshit grigrimen again. They gathered together some of the soldiers and a few child-soldiers including Tête Brûlée to talk about strategy. The meeting went on till it was dark.