Allah n’est pas obligé

His name is Birahima, he is ten or twelve years old and, like many children, he plays with a toy gun. “It’s easy. You press the trigger and it goes tralala.” Except here, the weapon is real and the dead are countless. Birahima belongs to those orphans who have lost everything and, despite their young age, have no recourse but to become something like mercenaries in tribal wars that tear apart countries such as Liberia or Sierra Leone, the famous child soldiers.

The picture is atrocious: it is the reign of great banditry under the guise of supposedly revolutionary activities, massacres of civilian populations, the worst horrors. “But Allah is not obliged to be just with all the things he has created here below.” Everything is true, alas, in Ahmadou Kourouma’s book, which is not a document but rather a novel. What makes the horror recounted by a child even more striking, with terrible humor, which calls each person to account for their responsibilities and their bad conscience.