The town of Niangbo had been taken by four rebel bandits, the same four thieves that had kidnapped the bossman partners in Sanniquellie. They locked up the village chief and all the important people in Niangbo and then the four of them had stationed themselves at the four cardinal points of the town. They were the ones who had killed the child-soldiers. As soon as they’d legged it into the forest, all the villagers came out of their huts.
They organised celebrations. We were their liberators. On the village square the dancing was getting wilder.
You should have seen that bitch Onika play the liberator. It was worth the trip! There she was, sitting in the middle of everything with her son and her daughters-in-law on either side, lording it over everyone like a nabob, a mogul. The tamtam player came towards her, bowed down at her feet, and played in her honour. Right then, Onika let out a wild cry and threw herself into the circle of dancers, still wearing the stripes, the kalash, the grigris, the whole works. Her son and her daughters-in-law followed, followed her into the circle of the dance. The women lifted Onika’s arms into the air, two to each arm. Everyone started clapping like mad, singing and laughing like lunatics. The daughters-in-law and the son left Onika in the middle of the circle. She started the monkey dance. You should have seen that arsehole Onika jumping around like a monkey, turning somersaults like a street kid in her general’s stripes. She was drunk, totally and absolutely pissed. She was so happy, so proud of her victory. She was drunk on palm wine.
After her turn in the circle, she came and sat with her daughters-in-law and her son. They kissed her on the mouth. The clamour stopped. And Onika spoke.
She had her two grigrimen, Yacouba and Sogou, brought into the circle where she publicly congratulated them. Only through their wisdom had Niangbo been taken without much loss of life. The grigrimen were proud and happy. They walked round the circle fiddling with their grigris.
She had the two bossman partners who had been kidnapped brought into the circle. Onika told everyone why the kidnappers had not been able to kill the bossmen—it was on account of the grigris and the sacrifices! She kept on speechifying. The four thieves who had taken the town of Niangbo would be hunted down and arrested. Then they would be hacked limb from limb and bits of their bodies would be exhibited in every place they had committed their crimes to appease the wrath of the grigris. Soldiers were already hunting them. Eventually, they would capture them. Absolutely, inchallah, God willing … Amen!
Suddenly, two Mandingos in filthy bubus went up to Yacouba and shouted loud so as to get everyone’s attention.
‘You—I know. You before in Abidjan, you truck driver, you money-multiplier, healer, you many things. Walahé! Me know you, you name Yacouba …’
‘Bastard! Fool!’ Yacouba responded. He didn’t let the man say any more. ‘You shout so loud, everyone will hear.’ He took him aside and said, ‘If you recognise me again you don’t need to shout it from the rooftops. Onika will hear and that is not good for me.’
Yacouba did not want Onika to know everything he’d got up to in his bullshit life.
Then Yacouba realised that one of the Mandingos was his friend Sekou. Sekou who had come to visit him in his Mercedes Benz at the Yopougon teaching hospital in Abidjan. He was so scrawny that Yacouba hadn’t recognised him. Yacouba and Sekou kissed each other and reeled off the miles and miles of greetings Dioulas come out with every time they meet: ‘How’s your brother’s sister-in-law’s cousin?’ etc.
After a minute of silence, Sekou and his companion started talking about the people from their village who had landed up in fucked-up Liberia, and Sekou’s friend mentioned Mahan and her husband.
‘Mahan is my aunt,’ I shouted.
I tell you, right then, Sekou’s friend and me both started like hyenas caught stealing a goat.
‘Mahan! Mahan!’ cried Yacouba pointing at me. ‘She his aunt, Mahan this boy aunt, I look for her. Where she live? She live where?’
And we started rushing around like lunatics, like we all had diarrhoea. You should have seen Yacouba the crippled crook running round. We searched concession after concession, hut after hut. There were corpses outside some of the huts, all kinds of corpses, some had their eyes open like badly slaughtered pigs. We searched the huts to the north and the huts to the south until we were tired … Then we started to get demoralised. (‘Demoralised’ means your heart’s not in it any more, you don’t want to do fuck all any more.) We were standing there watching the flies flying over and back, not saying anything. Suddenly, Sekou’s friend stopped, leaned forward, then turned into a yard in front of a hut and roared like a bull, ‘Walahé! Walahé! This Mahan hut. Mahan inside here.’
The door was half-open. Yacouba pushed. There was nothing in the hut. We went out to the backyard, and there—gnamokodé—there was a dead body thick with flies bigger than bees. The flies flew off with a drone like a low-flying plane, leaving the bloody body all exposed. Terrifically smashed up, the skull crushed, the tongue ripped out, the genitals delicately sliced off. It was—faforo!—the body of my aunt Mahan’s husband. We stopped dead and started to cry like little kids who’d pissed the bed again. There we were crying like a bunch of total arseholes when a man comes out of the hut and comes towards us. The man was a native, a Black Nigger African Native. He was trembling like a leaf in a storm.
‘Krahns did this,’ he said. ‘They don’t like the Mandingos. They don’t want Mandingos here in Liberia. The Krahns came. They smashed his head; they ripped out his tongue and cut off his cock. His tongue and his prick, to make their grigris stronger. His wife, gentle Mahan, she saw them do this, quickly she ran and hid in my hut. When the Krahns had left, positively left, I took her to the edge of the forest. Quickly she ran off into the jungle. Ran to the south … She is so kind, so gentle, Mahan.’
And the guy started sobbing too.
‘Where, where did she go?’ shouted Yacouba, ready to jump up and run after her.
‘Two days she is gone. You will not catch her; you will never find her now.’
We stood there flabbergasted (‘flabbergasted’ means ‘overcome with astonishment’). Totally demoralised. Things weren’t going well for my aunt: she was in deadly peril.
We went back to the square where a while ago people had been somersaulting and dancing like monkeys. Surprise! The party was over. It was total bedlam, chaos. Screaming and swearing and people going berserk.
Onika had just found out that the NPFL had taken advantage of her absence to launch an attack on Sanniquellie. It was a piece of cake, they seized the camp and all the loot without firing a shot (‘a piece of cake’ means it was easy). No problem, no resistance, they just marched right into Sanniquellie and now they were in complete control. Onika was like a madwoman. The tiny woman was coming and going and screaming and swearing and ordering people around with her stripes and her kalash and her grigris, the whole works.
The NPFL had wanted to seize the gold-mining town of Sanniquellie for ages. They’d attacked several times, but every time they were driven back with lots of casualties.
‘And now they exploit my absence with this trickery. They are spineless! NPFL are cowards. They are not men, they are gutless cowards!’ screamed Onika.
What could Onika do now? Her headquarters was under enemy control, her organisation was leaderless, she had no guns, no army except the small detachment she had brought for the Niangbo operation. With all the arsenal in Sanniquellie, the NPFL had mounted a fearsome defence. All Onika’s possessions, all her gold, had fallen into enemy hands.
Onika withdrew, sat down, her son and her daughters-in-law rallied round her. Soldiers, child-soldiers, joined them. Everyone huddled together, got into a circle, it was an organised concert of weeping. Everyone started sobbing. There we were, a bunch of criminals, crooks of the worse kind, crying like babies. You should have seen it, it was worth the trip.
After a long half-day of blubbering, everyone was hungry, everyone was thirsty. They pulled themselves together a
nd sat down. The little army lined up in two rows with Onika leading the way and set off, foot to the road, heading north to find ULIMO. That’s where ULIMO were, loads of them.
But we (we means Yacouba, the crippled crook, and me, the street kid) headed south. That’s the way my aunt Mahan went. All we’ve got for subsistence is our kalashes, on account of how Allah never leaves empty a mouth he has created.
Today, 25 September 199 … I’ve had enough. I’m fed up telling my life story, with piling up dictionaries. I’ve had it up to here with everything. Fuck off, the lot of you. I’m shutting up now, I’m not saying another word today … Gnamokodé! Faforo!
4
We (we means Yacouba, the crippled crook, money-multiplier, Muslim grigriman, and me Birahima, the fearless, blameless street kid, the small-soldier) were heading south when we met our friend Sekou carrying a bundle on his head. We had parted company in Niangbo without saying our goodbyes. We were like Dioulas meeting in the forests of Liberia, greetings and more greetings, we reeled off miles of greetings. And when we got to the last of the last of the greetings, Sekou said something wonderful. Everyone in the universe was sick and tired of watching the Black Nigger African Natives of Liberia slaughtering each other like wild beasts drunk on blood. The whole world was sick and tired of watching the warlords who’d carved Liberia up between them committing atrocities (‘atrocity’ means ‘an appalling or atrocious crime’). All the people in all the countries all over the world were sick and tired of the warlords getting away with it and they wanted it stopped. So all the countries got together and went to see the UN and the UN asked the CDEAO to intervene. The CDEAO asked Nigeria to do humanitarian peacekeeping. (‘Humanitarian peacekeeping’ is when one country is allowed to send soldiers into another country to kill innocent victims in their own country, in their own villages, in their own huts, sitting on their own mats.) Nigeria is the most heavily populated country in Africa and has loads of soldiers they don’t know what to do with, so they sent their spare soldiers to Liberia with the right to massacre the innocent civilian population, the whole works. The Nigerian troops were known as the ECOMOG peacekeeping force. ECOMOG troops were now operating all over Liberia and even Sierra Leone and massacring people, all in the name of humanitarian peacekeeping. Apparently this is to create a buffer between rival factions.
Again we said goodbye to Sekou, the informant, thanked him and left him. We hadn’t walked far, not even a whole day, when we got to a camp controlled by supporters of Prince Johnson. There were human skulls on stakes all around the border of the camp, like all military barracks in the tribal wars.
Prince Johnson was the third big important rebel warlord. He had exclusive rights over large parts of Liberia. But he was a prince, meaning he was a nice warlord because he had principles. Oh, yes, wonderful principles. Because Prince Johnson was a man of the Church, a warlord with his head stuffed full of incredible lordly principles, the principles of an honest, disinterested freedom fighter. He had made a law that any warlord who liberated Liberia with a gun in his hand could not stand for election. It would be against ethics (‘ethics’, according to the Petit Robert, means ‘the rules or standards governing a person, morality’); it would be against decency (‘decency’, according to the Petit Robert, means ‘the quality of conforming to standards of propriety and morality’). Prince Johnson’s head full of principles had another lordly principle: a soldier does not loot, does not steal, but asks local people for food to eat. The craziest thing (I bet you won’t believe this!) is that he even puts his principles into practice. Walahé!
Prince Johnson’s principles mean that every guerrilla who arrived at his camp is locked up and stays locked up: and he’s forced to swear that he will fight to the death any warlord who tries to present himself for election by universal suffrage; any warlord who tries to be president; any warlord who wants to rule independent Liberia, the beloved mother country.
Yacouba and me were locked up for a week, in appalling conditions. After a week, we made the bullshit speech, because it didn’t mean we’re obliged. Nobody can be obliged to do anything because no one’s got the time to go round putting rebel fighters on trial for perjury in the fucked-up four-star chaos of tribal wars in Liberia (‘perjury’, according to my Larousse, means ‘the deliberate, wilful giving of false testimony under oath’). After they’ve given false testimony, every new arrival is tested, over and over and over by the grigrimen. He has to get naked as the day he was born and then he’s hosed down with some decoction. The decoction stinks of piss. Then a grigri and a cross are spun around his head. Two bearers snatch the grigri. Round the bearer’s neck hangs a huge crucifix with a dying Jesus on it. The bearer shudders and twitches and a lot of other stuff like that. And for what? To make sure the new arrival isn’t a devourer of souls. Prince Johnson didn’t need any soul-eaters, he already had too many of them in his district. It was a haven for soul-eaters. (Black Nigger African Natives claim that at night Black Africans turn into owls and take the souls of their nearest and dearest and go off and devour them in the branches of the great kapok trees, the tallest trees in the village. That’s the definition of devourer of souls, according to the Glossary.)
Yacouba and me got through all the tests and, luckily, we didn’t give them any misgivings about maybe being devourers of souls (‘misgiving’ means ‘a harmful doubt, real or imagined’). Because soul-eaters are beaten up and thrown out and locked up and tortured until they vomit up the knot of blood that every soul-eater has inside him. And I tell you, it’s not easy, it’s no easy thing for a devourer of souls to vomit up the knot of blood. He has to be whipped like a thieving dog and administered enough vomitive decoctions to give two horses diarrhoea (for Black Nigger African Natives who don’t know too much, ‘administer’ means to give someone medicine).
When Yacouba introduced himself as a big important grigriman, Johnson said a short pious Christian prayer and ended with: ‘May Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit ensure that your grigris are always effective.’ Johnson was a devout Christian. Yacouba replied, ‘Chi Allah la ho, they will be.’ (According to the Glossary, ‘Chi Allah la ho’ means ‘if Allah so wills’.) He, Yacouba, was a devout Muslim.
Johnson had a grigriman—a Christian grigriman. The grigriman’s incantations always contained passages from the Bible and he always had a crucifix around somewhere (‘incantation’ means ‘a formula used in ritual recitation; a verbal charm or spell’). Johnson was happy to meet Yacouba, a Muslim grigriman. He had never met a Muslim before. Now his guerrillas would be able to add grigris with verses from the Qur’an scrawled in Arabic to their Christian grigris.
Straight off, I was posted to the brigade of child-soldiers, small-soldiers, soldier-children with a kalash and a Para uniform that was too big for me. But the food was terrible, I mean really terrible. Nothing but boiled cassava and not even enough of that. Straight away, I tried to come up with a solution. I started by making loads of friends. Me and my friends were pretty resourceful. We stole food, we pilfered food. Pilfering food isn’t stealing because Allah, Allah in his inordinate goodness, never intended to leave empty for two whole days a mouth he created. Walahé!
Prince Johnson was a seer, a visionary. And you don’t argue with a visionary. You don’t take the words of a visionary at face value, you don’t unquestioningly believe what he says or promises. This is something Samuel Doe, the dictator, didn’t realise until it was too late. Far too late! He only realised it when he saw, saw with his own two eyes, saw in his own lifetime, saw his limbs being hacked off bit by bit, piece by piece. Like the parts of an old car you’re trying to fix.
Walahé! It was at noon, exactly at noon, that an ECOMOG officer showed up at Johnson’s camp, Johnson’s sanctuary in Monrovia. Prince Johnson was busy in prayer and penitence like he was every day at noon. He knelt on stones to pray, his knees were black and blue from the stones. He was in agony.
The officer announced that Samuel Doe in person was at ECOMOG headquarters,
right downtown in the centre of Monrovia. ECOMOG headquarters was neutral territory where warlords had to hand over their weapons before going inside. Samuel Doe had gone to ECOMOG headquarters by himself with no guns and ninety bodyguards who had no guns either, they were all empty-handed and powerless. Samuel Doe had gone into ECOMOG headquarters to ask the commanding officer to act as intermediary between him, Samuel Doe, and Prince Johnson. He asked one thing, only one thing of Johnson: a chance to talk. Because Liberia was weary of her children fighting. Now that Johnson had broken off relations with Taylor, Samuel Doe and Johnson could be friends. Doe wanted to negotiate with Johnson an end to the war in Liberia. The war had done great harm to the beloved mother country.
Johnson shouted, ‘Jesus Christ the Lord! Jesus Christ the Lord!’ He licked his lips. He couldn’t believe it, he couldn’t believe Samuel Doe in person was at ECOMOG headquarters. He gave thanks to Jesus Christ and all his saints. After a minute, he calmed down and spoke to the ECOMOG officer in the same kind of language Samuel Doe had used. He, Prince Johnson, was also weary of war. Samuel Doe was a patriot, and he, Prince Johnson, respected the patriot’s gesture. Prince Johnson would go to ECOMOG and kiss him, kiss him right on the mouth like a friend. In private, as friends and patriots, they could discuss the affairs of the dearly beloved and blessed mother country Liberia. And so on.
He told the officer to go on ahead, go back to ECOMOG headquarters and inform Samuel Doe of Johnson’s tribute. The officer did what he was told and Samuel Doe listened to these honeyed words and believed them. Calmly, smoking a cigarette, sitting in an armchair at ECOMOG headquarters, he waited for Johnson.
Allah is Not Obliged Page 11