Allah is Not Obliged Read Online Free PDF

dead, my aunt would be my second mother. A second mother is also called a tutor. My aunt—my tutor—had to feed me and clothe me and she was the only person who was allowed to insult me and punish me and make sure I got a proper education.
    Everyone decided that I should go to Liberia to live with my aunt, because here in Togobala I never went to the French school or even to the Qur’anic school. I was always skipping classes to be a street kid or to go hunting in the forests with Balla, who was teaching me hunting and animism and magic instead of teaching me the holy word of Allah from the Qur’an. My grandmother didn’t approve of what Balla was teaching me. She wanted to send me away, far away from Balla, because she was afraid I would grow up to be a Bambara kaffir
feticheur
, and not a proper Malinké who performs the five daily prayers.
    Grandmother tried to encourage me, to persuade me to leave Balla, by telling me that in my aunt’s house in Liberia I would have rice and meat with
sauce graine
to eat. I was happy to be leaving because I wanted to eat lots of rice with
sauce graine. Walahé!
    But the council of the elders told my grandmother and my grandfather that I was not allowed to leave the village because I was still a
bilakoro
. (
Bilakoro
is what you call a boy who hasn’t been circumcised and initiated yet.) You see, it’s different in Liberia, there’s lots of forests and the people thatlive there are called bushmen. (According to the
Glossary
, ‘bushmen’ means ‘men of the forests—an offensive name given to forest dwellers by the peoples of the savannah’.) Bushmen are people of the forests who aren’t Malinkés and who don’t know about circumcision and initiation. So the council said I had to stay until the dry season, when I was part of the first group of
bilakoros
to be prepared for circumcision and initiation.
    One night, someone came and woke me, and we walked and walked and at dawn we all arrived at a clearing on the edge of the jungle at the place of circumcision. You don’t have to have been to the place of circumcision to know that they cut something off. All the
bilakoros
dug a little hole and sat in front of it. The man who was performing the circumcisions came out of the forest carrying as many limes as there were
bilakoros
. He was very tall and very old and he looked like a blacksmith. He was also a powerful
feticheur
and a mighty shaman. With every lime he cut, a boy’s foreskin fell. He came to me and I closed my eyes and my foreskin fell into the hole. It’s really painful, but that’s the Malinké tradition.
    All the boys slept near the village in a camp deep in the dense thicket where we lived for two months.
    During those two months, they taught us things, lots of things that we were obliged never to reveal to anyone ever. That’s why it’s called initiation. I would never talk to anyone who was not initiated about the things I learned during initiation. On the day we left the sacred forest, we ate a lot anddanced a lot, and we weren’t
bilakoros
any more: we had been initiated so now we were men. Now I was allowed to leave the village and nobody could object or complain.
    So there we were, my aunt, who was my second mother or tutor, and me, Birahima, a fearless and blameless boy, both ready to leave for Liberia when suddenly, one night, as the fourth prayer was being said, we heard shouting and gunfire coming from my aunt’s first husband’s hut. Everyone in the village was yelling that the bully huntsman was back. My aunt was terrified, she didn’t stop for a second, she disappeared into the night, right into the forest without me. It was only two weeks later, when we knew my aunt had arrived back safely to her husband in Liberia, that my grandmother and the elders of the village started looking for someone who could go with me to my aunt’s house in Liberia.
    In our tribe, everyone knows the names of the people from our village who are now big-shots with