With all the hash, we got hungrier and hungrier. Hash isn’t good when you’re hungry. So we ate all the fruit we could find and after that we ate roots and after that leaves. And even after all that Yacouba still said Allah in his infinite goodness never leaves empty a mouth he has created.
One of the child-soldiers was a girl soldier, her name was Sarah. Sarah was unique, she was pretty as four girls put together and she smoked enough hash for ten. For a long time back in Zorzor, she had been Tête Brûlée’s secret girlfriend. That’s why she came with us. Ever since we left Zorzor, they (she and Tête Brûlée) hadn’t stopped stopping to kiss each other. And every time we stopped she’d smoke some more hash and munch some more grass. We had hash and grass in abundance. In abundance because we’d cleaned out Colonel Papa le Bon’s stockpile. And she smoked and munched incessantly (‘incessantly’ means ‘without stopping’, according to my Larousse). She went completely crazy and started touching her gnoussou-gnoussou in front of everyone and asking Tête Brûlée to make love to her in public in front of everyone. But Tête Brûlée said no because we were in a hurry and we were hungry. Sarah wanted to rest. She slumped against a tree trunk to rest. Tête Brûlée really loved Sarah and he didn’t want to just leave her like that but we had people following us and we couldn’t hang about. Tête Brûlée tried to make her to stand up and come with us and she fired a whole clip cartridge at Tête Brûlée. Luckily she was all drugged up and she couldn’t see for shit so the bullets just disappeared into the air. In a rage, Tête Brûlée retaliated. He fired at her legs and disarmed her. She screamed like a suckling calf, like a stuck pig. And Tête Brûlée got all miserable, completely miserable.
We had to leave her there all alone, we had to abandon her to her sad fate, but Tête Brûlée couldn’t bring himself to do it. Sarah screamed her maman’s name and God’s name and everything and Tête Brûlée went over to her and kissed her and he started crying. We left them there kissing, with arms round each other and crying and off we went, foot to the road. We hadn’t got very far when Tête Brûlée showed up on his own, still crying. He had left Sarah alone beside the tree, alone with all her blood and all her wounds. The bitch (‘bitch’ means a cruel, wicked girl) couldn’t walk any more. The army ants and the vultures would make a real feast of her.
According to my Larousse, a funeral oration is a speech in honour of a famous celebrity who’s dead. Child-soldiers are the most famous celebrities of the late twentieth century, so whenever a child-soldier dies, we have to say a funeral oration. That means we have to recount how in this great big fucked-up world they came to be a child-soldier. I do it when I feel like it, but I don’t have to. I’m doing it for Sarah because I want to, I’ve got the time, and anyway it’s interesting.
Sarah’s father was called Bouaké; he was a sailor. He travelled and travelled, he did nothing but travel so much that you wonder how he found time to make Sarah in her mother’s belly. Her mother sold rotten fish in the big market in Monrovia and sometimes she looked after her daughter. When Sarah was five, her mother was knocked down by a drunk driver and killed. Her father didn’t know what you’re supposed to do with girls, so he gave her to his cousin in a remote village, who gave her to Madame Kokui. Madame Kokui had a shop and she had five children. She put Sarah to work cleaning and selling bananas in the street. Every morning, after she finished washing the dishes and washing the clothes, she walked the streets of Monrovia selling bananas and came home at six on the dot to put the stockpot on the fire and bath the baby. Madame Kokui was very pernickety about the accounts and very strict about what time Sarah got home. (‘Pernickety’ and ‘strict’ both mean ‘hard to please’.)
One morning, a little boy, a street kid, stole a bunch of bananas and made a run for it. Sarah ran after the little boy, but she didn’t catch him. When she got back to the house, she explained what had happened, but Madame Kokui wasn’t happy, not one bit. She screamed at Sarah and accused her of selling the bananas and buying sweets with all the money. Sarah told her it was the little boy who took them, but it was no use. Madame Kokui was still angry and wouldn’t listen to her. She whipped Sarah and locked her in her room with no supper and she said, ‘Next time, I’ll whip you a lot harder and I’ll lock you up for a whole day with no food.’
Next time was the next day. Like every morning, Sarah went out with her load of bananas. The same little boy showed up with a gang of friends, snatched a bunch of bananas and ran off. Sarah ran after him. That’s what his friends were waiting for on account of they were just as much brats as him. When Sarah ran after him, they swiped the rest of the bananas (‘swipe’ means ‘to steal, to make off with’, according to my Larousse).
Sarah was in tears. She cried all day long, but when the sun started setting and she knew it would soon be time to go home and bath the baby, she decided to beg. To beg to get the money to pay back Madame Kokui. But sadly the drivers she begged from weren’t very generous and she didn’t have enough to pay back Madame Kokui, so that night she slept in the doorway of a shop called Farah among all the packages.
The next day she went begging again, but it wasn’t until the day after that that she finally got enough money to pay back Madame Kokui and by then it was too late. She couldn’t go back to the house now on account of how she’d already spent two nights sleeping rough. If she went back, Madame Kokui would kill her, kill her stone dead. So Sarah kept on begging and after a while she got used to the circumstances, and figured out she was better off begging than she had been with Madame Kokui. She found somewhere to wash, and another place where she could hide her savings and she went on sleeping in the doorway of Farah among the packages and the boxes.
She had been spotted there by a man, and one day he came and found her in the doorway of Farah. He introduced himself, he was kind and sympathetic. (‘Sympathetic’ means he pretended like he cared about Sarah’s problems.) He offered Sarah sweets and other stuff so Sarah trusted him and followed him to a covered market far away from the houses. That’s where he told her that he was going to make love to her gently and not hurt her. Sarah was scared and she started running and screaming, but the man was a lot faster and a lot stronger and he caught up with Sarah and knocked her down and forced her on to the ground and raped her. He was so vicious that he left Sarah for dead.
Sarah was taken to hospital and when she woke up the nurse asked her who her parents were. She told the nurse about her father, but not about Madame Kokui. The hospital people tried to find her father but they didn’t find him. He was travelling; he was always travelling. They sent Sarah to the nuns at the orphanage in the suburbs west of Monrovia and that’s where she was living when the tribal wars got started. Five of the nuns in the orphanage were massacred; the others got the fuck out on the double, no questions asked. Sarah and four of her friends had been prostitutes before they joined the child-soldiers, so as not to starve to death.
That’s Sarah, who we left to the army ants and the vultures. (According to the Glossary, army ants are black ants that are really, really voracious.) They were going to make a delicious feast of her. Gnamokodé!
All the villages along the way were deserted, one hundred percent deserted. That’s the way it goes in tribal wars: everyone abandons the villages where humans live and go and live in the forests where the wild beasts live. Wild beasts have a better life than people. Faforo!
As we came in to one of the deserted villages, we spotted two guys who took off, made a run for it like they were robbers. We chased after them, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in tribal wars. When you see someone and they run away, that means they’re trying to hurt you so you have to catch them first. The two guys had vanished into the forest. We fired lots and lots of bullets. It made an awful ruckus; it sounded like the Samorian wars all over again. (Samory was a Malinké chief who resisted the French invasions and whose sofas—soldiers—did lots of shooting.) Walahé!
One of the child-soldiers was a captain who was unique and everyone
called him ‘Captain Kik the Cunning’. Captain Kik the Cunning was weird. While we were just standing there by the roadside, Kik the Cunning ran right into the forest and headed left to try and cut off the fugitives’ path back to the village. It was cunning. But then, suddenly, we heard an explosion, and then Kik was screaming. We all rushed to him. Kik had stepped on a mine. It was a terrible sight. Kik was screaming like a suckling calf, like a stuck pig. He was screaming for his mum, for his dad, for all and everyone. His leg was in bloody shreds and hanging by a thread. It was a sorry sight. He was sweating huge drops of sweat and bawling, ‘I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die like a fly!’ A kid like that, giving up the ghost like that, it’s not a pretty sight. We made a makeshift stretcher.
Kik was carried back to the village on the makeshift stretcher. One of the soldiers had once been a nurse. The nurse thought Kik should be amputated immediately, at once. Back in the village, we laid Kik on the floor of one of the huts. It took three guys to hold him down. He screamed, he struggled, he called for his maman, but the nurse cut off his leg anyway, right at the knee. Right at the knee. He threw the leg to a passing dog. We propped Kik up against the wall of the hut.
Then we started searching all the huts. One by one. Thoroughly. The villagers had run away as soon as they heard the machine-gun bullets we were firing. We were hungry and we needed something to eat. We found chickens. We chased them and caught them and wrung their necks and then we roasted them. There were kid goats wandering around too. We slaughtered them and roasted them too. We took anything worth eating. Allah never leaves empty a mouth he has created.
We searched every nook and cranny. We thought there was nobody there, absolutely nobody, so we were surprised to find two cute kids whose mother hadn’t been able to take them with her in her frantic escape (‘frantic’ means ‘violent and desperate’, according to my Larousse). She just abandoned them, and the two kids had hidden under some branches in a pen.
Among the child-soldiers there was a girl named Fati. Like all the girl soldiers, Fati was really cruel. Like all the girl soldiers, Fati smoked too much hash and was always fucked up. Fati dragged the two kids out of their hidey-hole under the branches and ordered them to show us where the villagers hid their food. The kids didn’t understand a word, not one word. They were too little. It was twins and they were only about six years old. They were scared. They didn’t understand what was going on. Fati decided to scare them, decided to fire her machine-gun into the air but, on account of she was totally fucked up on hash, she completely machine-gunned the kids with her AK-47, leaving one of them dead and the other one wounded. The bullets had ripped his whole arm off. Fati broke down and cried because you’re not supposed to hurt twins, especially little twins. The gnamas of twins, especially when they’re still kids, are terrifying. (‘Gnamas’ are the shadows, the avenging spirits of the dead.) Gnamas like that never forgive. It was sad, really sad. Fati would be forever hunted by gnamas, the gnamas of little twins, and all because of the fucked-up tribal wars in Liberia. She was finished; she was going to die a terrible death.
Yacouba told Fati that the grigris would not protect her any more on account of the little twins’ gnamas.
Fati cried, she cried her heart out, she howled like a spoiled brat; she wanted proper grigris. But even though she cried, Fati was done for; she had no grigris to protect her. That’s how it goes.
After accidentally going and murdering two innocent kids, we couldn’t stay in the village, we had to get out of there fast, get out gnona-gnona (according to the Glossary, ‘gnona-gnona’ means ‘on the double’). We left Kik leaning against the wall of a hut and ran off, foot to the road, gnona-gnona.
We left Kik to the mercy of humans in the village the way we left Sarah to the mercy of the animals and the insects. Which of them was better off? Definitely not Kik. That’s wars for you. Animals have more mercy for the wounded than humans.
OK, since we knew that Kik was going to die, that he was as good as dead, we had to do his funeral oration. I’d like to tell it because Kik was a nice kid and his passage wasn’t long. (‘Passage’ is the path a kid follows in his whole short life on earth, according to my Larousse.)
The tribal wars arrived in Kik’s village at about ten o’clock in the morning. The children were at school and their parents were at home. Kik was at school and his parents were at home. When they heard the first bursts of gunfire, the children ran into the forest. Kik ran into the forest. And the kids stayed in the forest all the time they could hear the gunfire from the village. Kik stayed in the forest. It was only the next morning when there was no more noise that the children dared to go back to their family huts. Kik went back to his family hut and found his father’s throat cut, his brother’s throat cut, his mother and his sister raped and their heads bashed in. All of his relatives, close and distant, dead. And when you’ve got no one left on earth, no father, no mother, no brother, no sister, and you’re really young, just a little kid, living in some fucked-up barbaric country where everyone is cutting everyone’s throat, what do you do?
You become a child-soldier of course, a small-soldier, a child-soldier so you can have lots to eat and cut some throats yourself; that’s all your only option.
Gradually, Kik became a child-soldier. (According to my Larousse,‘gradually’ means ‘continuing steadily by increments’, one thing or one word or one action leading to another.) Kik was cunning. The cunning child-soldier took a shortcut. Taking a shortcut, he stepped on a mine. We had carried him on a makeshift stretcher and propped him up, dying, against the wall of a hut. We had abandoned him, left him, dying, in the middle of the afternoon in some fucked-up village, to the tender mercies of the villagers. (‘Tender mercies’ doesn’t mean what it says; it means ‘attention or treatment not in the best interests of its recipients’.) To their tender mercies, because that’s how Allah decided he wanted poor Kik to end his days on earth. Allah is not obliged to be fair about everything, about all his creations, about all his actions here on earth.
The same goes for me. I don’t have to talk, I’m not obliged to tell my dog’s-life-story, wading through dictionary after dictionary. I’m fed up talking, so I’m going to stop for today. You can all fuck off!
Walahé! Faforo! Gnamokodé!
3
ULIMO is the name of the faction loyal to the bandit warlord President-Dictator Samuel Doe, who got himself hacked limb from limb. He was torn limb from limb on a misty afternoon in Monrovia the terrible, capital of the Republic of Liberia, independent since 1860. Walahé!
The dictator Samuel Doe started off as a sergeant in the Liberian army. He—Sergeant Doe—and some of his friends were fed up with the arrogance and the contempt that the Black Nigger Afro-Americans, or Congos, showed for the indigenous people of Liberia. ‘Indigenous people’ are the Black Nigger African Natives ‘originating and living or occurring naturally in an area’. They’re different from Black Nigger Afro-Americans who are ‘descendants of freed slaves’. The descendants of the slaves, also known as Congos, acted just like the colonists in Liberia. That’s how my Harrap’s defines ‘indigenous people’ and ‘Afro-Americans’. Samuel Doe and some of his friends were fed up of all the injustice that rained down on the indigenous people of Liberia in independent Liberia. That was why the indigenous people revolted and it was why two indigenous people plotted an indigenous conspiracy against the arrogant colonials and the Afro-American colonialists.
The two indigenous people, the two Black Nigger African indigenes who organised the military coup were Samuel Doe, a Krahn, and Thomas Quionkpa, a Gio. The Krahns and the Gios are the two main Black Nigger African tribes in Liberia. That’s why people say the whole of independent Liberia rose up against the arrogant colonials and the Afro-American colonialists.
Luckily for them (the rebels), or maybe because they made fitting sacrifices, the military coup was a complete success. (According to the Glossary, ‘fitting sacrifices’ means that Black Nigger African Natives make lots of
bloodthirsty sacrifices for good luck, but they only have good luck if their sacrifices are fitting.) After the success of the military coup, the two rebels and their followers dragged all the VIPs, all the Afro-American senators from their beds and took them all down to the beach. On the beach, they stripped them down to their underpants and tied them to stakes. When the sun came up, they shot them like rabbits, in front of the international press. Then the conspirators went back to the city. In the city, they massacred the wives and children of the men they’d shot and had a huge carnival with lots of hullabaloo, outrageousness, drunkenness, etc.
Afterwards, the two chief conspirators kissed each other on the lips like civilised men and clapped each other on the back. Sergeant Samuel Doe promoted Thomas Quionkpa to the rank of general, and Sergeant Thomas Quionkpa promoted Sergeant Samuel Doe to the rank of general. But since there could only be one leader, one head of state, Samuel Doe declared himself president and undisputed and undisputable leader of the unitary and democratic Republic of Liberia founded in 1860.
It came at exactly the right moment, just like salt in soup, because it happened just before a summit of heads of state of the CDEAO (Community of West African States). Liberia is part of the CDEAO. Samuel Doe, with his general’s rank and his title of head of state and his Para uniform and his pistol hanging from his belt, jumped on a plane. He jumped straight on to a plane as head of state to take part in the summit of heads of state of the CDEAO. The summit took place in Lomé. But in Lomé, things turned sour. When Doe arrived armed to the teeth, the CDEAO heads of state got scared. They thought he was a lunatic so wouldn’t allow him into the summit. No way. They locked him up in a hotel for the duration of the summit with a complete ban on sticking his nose out the door or drinking any alcohol. After the summit was over they stuck him back on his plane and sent him off to Monrovia, his capital. Like an ouya-ouya.
Allah is Not Obliged Page 8