Allah is Not Obliged (20 page)

I couldn’t join the elite child-soldiers, the young lycaeons. I wasn’t entitled to the double rations of food, loads of drugs, the triple salary of the young lycaeons. I was useless, a nobody.

I was part of the brigade in charge of protecting the mines. The people who worked in the mines were half-slaves. They got paid, but they weren’t free to leave.

Let’s go back to the government, to the politics of this fucked-up country of damned souls and
cacabas
(madmen).

On 17 March 1996, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah is elected with 60% of the vote. The democratically elected president moves into Lumley Beach Palace on April 15. In the palace he is alone face to face with his destiny, meaning—like all democratically elected presidents—face to face with the army of Sierra Leone. The palace is haunted by the ghosts of all his predecessors who ran away or were gunned down there. He can’t sleep; he sleeps the sleep of the caiman, one eye half-open. He thinks a lot about how to end the hostile standoff with the army of Sierra Leone.

Ever since the tenth century, there has been freemasonry in Sierra Leone, like in every other West African country. A freemasonry of hunters, of great initiates and of the most powerful sorcerers and seers, it’s called the Kamajor. Ahmad Tejan Kabbah thinks about the Kamajor, the association of skilled traditional hunters. He summons them to the palace. Kabbah talks tough with the hunters. The hunters agree to
put themselves at the service of the palace. The hunters trade their homemade rifles for AK-47s. From that day on, Kabbah, the elected president, can sleep with both eyes closed, sleep like a milkmaid’s baby. (A milkmaid’s baby sleeps in peace because he knows whatever happens he will have milk.) From that day on there were two camps and five players in the country. In the first camp, the democratically elected power, the Sierra Leonean army commanded by the chief of staff Johnny Koroma, ECOMOG (the peacekeeping force who never keep the peace) and the Kamajor or traditional hunters. The second faction was made up of Foday Sankoh’s RUF. In other words it was everyone against Foday Sankoh. There really were five players and two factions. But all the players kept coming and going in the vastness of Sierra Leone. All the players were busy bleeding the people of Sierra Leone dry.

We were at Mile-Thirty-Eight. (We means the crippled crook and me, the blameless, fearless street kid.) In the stronghold of the RUF, the stronghold of Foday Sankoh.

One night, just after the moon went down, a lot of whispering and hissing started up in the forest all around the camp right up close. No one took any notice. There was the crack of gunfire from the sentries. No one took any notice. Everyone went right on sleeping the sleep of a Senegalese champion wrestler who’s beaten every wrestler of his generation. There was gunfire every night on account of how every night you had thieves sneaking round near the mines. The intermittent gunfire didn’t stop the whispering.

By dawn, there were kalashes firing all over the village
and we heard the song of the hunters, taken up by a thousand voices. The camp was being attacked, surrounded by the Kamajors. Their trick was to arrive in the middle of the night and lay siege to a village and then attack at dawn. We were taken by surprise. We knew bullets couldn’t kill the hunters. The child-soldiers panicked and ran around crying, ‘The bullets can’t kill them! The hunters are bullet-proof!’ And then people were absconding in all directions in a mad rush. By noon, the Kamajors had cut off all the roads and taken all the battle stations. All our leaders had skedaddled.

The hunters, the Kamajors, organised a feast like they always do whenever they have a victory. They had AK-47s, but that’s the only modern thing they had. Their uniforms were tunics with thousands of grigris and claws and animal hair pinned to them and they all wore Phrygian bonnets. They were singing and dancing and firing their guns into the air.

After the feast, they took over running the camp, the huts, the mines. They gathered us, all us prisoners, together. I was a prisoner and so was my protector Yacouba. We were prisoners of the Kamajors.

The offensive mounted by the professional traditional hunters had cost the lives of six child-soldiers. I decided it’s my duty to say a funeral oration for one of the six; because he was the one who was my friend. At night, in the huts, he had time to tell me his journey lots of times. (‘Journey’, according to the
Petit Robert
, means ‘a process or course likened to travelling:
the journey of life.
’) I’m only saying his funeral oration because I’m not obliged to say a funeral oration for
the others. I don’t have to, same as Allah doesn’t have to always be fair about everything.

Among the dead was the body of Johnny Thunderbolt.

No kidding! No kidding! It was a teacher’s
gnoussou-gnoussou
that did for Johnny Thunderbolt, that led him to be a child-soldier. Yes, it was a teacher’s vagina that led him to the child-soldiers. This is how.

Johnny Thunderbolt’s real name was Jean Bazon. He was called Jean Bazon when he was going to school in Man before joining the child-soldiers. In his third year in primary school, there was a podium in the classroom. The teacher’s desk was on the podium. It was hot, really hot and the headmistress let herself go, let the breeze up between her legs, opened her legs. Too wide. And the kids had fun crawling around under the desks having a good look at what was on display. Any excuse was a good excuse. They’d laugh uproariously, loud and full, about it at break time.

One morning in the middle of lessons, Jean dropped his pencil on the ground. Automatically, not for any bad reason (absolutely not), he bent down to pick up his pencil. But that day was not his lucky day, it was the moment the teacher had been waiting for. Someone had told her, or she’d just noticed the prank. She was hysterical, furious. (‘Hysteria’ is a state of great agitation bordering on madness.) ‘Pervert! Bastard! Pervert!’ she screamed. And she laid into him with anything she could lay her hands on, the ruler, her hands, her feet. She beat Bazon savagely, like an animal. Jean Bazon ran away. The teacher told a lanky boy named Touré to go after him. A couple of hundred yards on, Jean Bazon stopped,
picked up a stone and—wham!—he threw it right in Touré’s face. Touré dropped, dropped like a ripe fruit, dropped dead. Jean kept running like mad until he got to his aunt’s house. ‘I killed someone, I killed one of my friends from school.’ The aunt panicked and hid Jean with a neighbour. The police came looking for the young delinquent. ‘We haven’t seen him since yesterday,’ his aunt said.

In the middle of the night, Jean left Man for a nearby village on the road to Guinea. From there he was able to take a truck incognito (without being recognised) heading for his uncle’s place in N’Zérékoré in Guinea. It was not a quiet trip on account of the truck was stopped by road-blockers with kalashes at the Liberia/Guinea border. The road-blockers took everything they had, they even took parts of the truck. Then a bunch of guerrillas showed up and the road-blockers made a run for it. The passengers were picked up by the guerrillas and taken to their camp. The guerrillas told the passengers that those who wanted could go back to Man on foot, it was a two-day walk. Bazon thought: ‘Me go back to Man? Never, I want to be a child-soldier.’ And that’s how Jean Bazon joined the child-soldiers, where he became Johnny Thunderbolt.

What Jean Bazon did to earn the nickname Johnny Thunderbolt is another story, it’s a long story. I don’t feel like telling it and I’m not obliged to. The body of Johnny Thunderbolt was lying there and it made me sad, really sad. I cried my heart out to see Johnny lying there dead like that. All on account of the bullets not being able to kill the hunters and Johnny not knowing that it was the hunters attacking.
Walahé! Walahé! Bismillâh irrahmân ir-rahîm!
In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful!

There were women and girls at Mile-Thirty-Eight. The women did the cooking; the girls were child-soldiers like us. The girls had their own unit. The unit was run by a vicious cow who was trigger-happy with a machine-gun. (A ‘cow’ is a fat woman with bad manners.) Her name was Sister Hadja Gabrielle Aminata.

Sister Hadja Gabrielle Aminata was one-third Muslim, one-third Catholic and one-third animist. She was a colonel on account of she had lots of experience with young girls because over twenty years she’d excised nearly a thousand girls. (‘Excise’ is the part of the girls’ initiation where they amputate the clitoris.)

The girls all lived together in an old girls’ boarding school in Mile-Thirty-Eight. It was made up of about ten houses built around a rectangular concession. There was a sentry post at each corner of the cloister defended with sandbags. The sentry posts were manned day and night by girl-soldiers. The camp was surrounded by human skulls on stakes all round the boundary. That’s tribal wars for you. It was kind of a boarding school that Sister Aminata ruled with a rod of iron.

Reveille was at four in the morning. All the young girls did their ablutions (‘ablutions’ means ‘washing of the body as part of a religious rite’) and bowed for the Muslim prayer even if the girl wasn’t a Muslim. Because waking up early made the girls strong and the morning ablutions got rid of the smell of pee that always hangs around Black Nigger
Native girls. After the communal prayer, there was cleaning fatigue, then exercises, then drill. Sister Aminata yelled a lot during drill and thumped any young girl whose manoeuvres were half-hearted. Afterwards, all the girls lined up and marched down to the river at the double singing patriotic Sierra Leonean songs. At the river they all bathed in lots of water. They marched back to the headquarters at the double singing patriotic songs like when they left. After lunch, the girls did normal lessons: reading, sewing and cooking. Sister Aminata, armed with her AK-47, kept an eye on everything.

In her long career as an excisor, Sister Gabrielle Aminata had always refused, downright refused, to excise any girl who had lost her virginity. That’s why she got it into her head, during all the troubles and the tribal wars, that she had to defend the virginity of her girls at any price until peace returned to the beloved motherland of Sierra Leone. She defended it with a kalash. This mission to defend her girls’ virginity with a kalash was vigorously enforced without a grain of pity. She was like a mother to the girls in the unit, she was jealous and protected the girls in the unit from any advances, even from chiefs like Tieffi. Sister Gabrielle machine-gunned any girl who strayed from the path. And mercilessly machine-gunned anyone who raped any of her girls.

One day, a young girl was found raped and decapitated between three labourers’ camps. Eventually they found out the poor girl was called Sita and she was eight years old. Sita had been horribly killed in a way you wouldn’t want to see.
Even someone whose whole life is blood like Sister Hadja Gabrielle Aminata cried her heart out when she saw it.

For a week, a whole week, everyone rushed round trying to find out who was guilty of the crime. But in vain, nothing came of the investigations.

At the beginning of the next week, things started to go from bad to worse. Any workers who ventured beyond the camp at night to relieve themselves never came back. He’d be found dead the next morning, emasculated (with no penis) and decapitated like poor Sita with a note on him that read: ‘The work of the
dja
, the avenging spirit of Sita.’ The workers panicked. Child-soldiers were dispatched to guard them. Every night the child-soldiers were overpowered by masked figures who came and kidnapped workers from the camps. In the morning, the victims were found murdered, emasculated and decapitated like little Sita, and there was always a note explaining that this was the work of Sita’s
dja
.

The workers went on strike, some even went and hid out in neighbouring camps. It was no good, it didn’t work: wherever they went, death was following behind.

This was in General Tieffi’s time. General Tieffi, supreme master of the district and all its inhabitants, investigated the case himself and he eventually figured it out. He called an assembly of all those living in the huts, and Sister Gabrielle Aminata and her closest colleagues were invited. The women all arrived with AK-47s, and the colonel herself came in hajj dress, meaning dressed like a Muslim woman on her way back from Mecca. She carried her kalash under the frills of her skirts. That’s tribal wars that does that.

All afternoon there was a heated palaver. At sunset, the camp workers finally convicted some poor wretch. He was guilty of the death of little Sita. He and no one else. He was handed over to Sister Gabrielle Aminata. What she did to the poor wretch doesn’t need to be told. I don’t have to tell everything in my bullshit story.
Faforo!

When the Kamajors arrived at Mile-Thirty-Eight, some of them, seeing all these young virgin girls in one place, were drooling with desire, jumping for joy. Here were lots of girls to marry. Right away, Sister Gabrielle Aminata had a meeting with the general, the master hunter in command of the regiment of hunters. She told him she did not have any marriageable girls, only girls she had to keep on the path of righteousness. She intended to safeguard the virginity of all of her girls until peace came. When peace returned, she herself would excise the girls before returning them to their families where they would be ready to make proper, decent marriages. She warned him that she would ruthlessly and summarily execute any hunter who tried to corrupt one of her girls. Her threats had the lecherous hunters in fits of laughter. (‘Lecherous’ means ‘given to excessive indulgence in sexual activity’.)

One day, a girl ventured outside the compound. She was with her mother who had come to visit her. She was hunted down by lecherous hunters who caught her and took her to a cacao plantation. In the cacao plantation they raped her, gang-raped her. Sister Aminata found the girl lying in her own blood. Her name was Mirta, she was twelve years old. Sister Aminata Gabrielle went to see the generalissimo, the
master hunter, the leader of all the hunters of Sierra Leone. The generalissimo promised to investigate. The investigation didn’t go anywhere. Night and day, there was a hunter always loitering round the girls’ barracks. Sister Aminata was very suspicious of him. They lured him into a trap. They sent out a girl and she wandered around the compound. The hunter threatened her with a kalash and took her to the cacao plantation. Just when the lecher was about to jump on her, girls came out of the forest armed to the teeth and arrested him. They tortured the hunter and made him confess. He had been involved, well and truly involved in the gang-rape of Mirta. With a hail of gunfire, Aminata Gabrielle shut him up permanently. They threw his body over the wall of the camp into the next street, shouting indiscriminately (at random), ‘He was involved in Mirta’s rape.’ When the hunters saw their friend’s corpse, there was an outcry. The hunters rioted and attacked Sister Gabrielle’s compound, they laid siege to it night and day. Three times in one night, Sister Gabrielle herself walked out of the compound and spread panic among the hunters. Every time she came out, she killed at least three men. Enraged, the hunters showed up at the compound with an armoured car. Sister Aminata, in her hajj robes, carrying her kalash, managed to crawl as far as the armoured car. She climbed on to the hood and tried to kill the driver, but a hunter lying in ambush fired and she fell down dead. She died like a soldier.