Allah is Not Obliged Read Online Free PDF Page B

lots of money in Abidjan, Dakar, Bamako, Conakry, Paris, New York, Rome; some of them are even living in countries far across the Ocean where it’s always cold like America and France. A person who gets to be a big somebody is also called a hajji, because every year they go to Mecca and over there in the desert they slit a sheep’s throat during the big Muslim feast called
la fête des moutons
that is also called
el-kabeir
.
    That’s why everyone in the village knows about Yacouba. Yacouba is from Togoballa but now he was a big somebody in Abidjan and did the big hajj there in his big starched
bubu
.
    One morning I woke up and everyone in the village was saying that Yacouba had come back during the night. But they all had to keep quiet and not say anything about Yacouba being back. They all knew that the man who had arrived back in the village was really called Yacouba, but now they had to forget the name Yacouba and call him Tiécoura instead. Every day, five times a day, they saw him going to the mosque but no one was allowed to tell anyone else that they had seen Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura with their own two eyes (when someone has one name but you’re supposed to call them by a different name it’s called ‘alias’). Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura had been in the village for two moons and nobody called him Yacouba any more and nobody even asked why a big somebody like him had come back to the village.
    Since they couldn’t find anyone in the village to take me to my aunt’s house in Liberia, one morning after prayer Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura, the big somebody hajji said he would take me to Liberia. He said he wanted to go with me because he was also a money multiplier. A money multiplier is a marabout that you give a little handful of money to one day and another day he gives you back a big fistful of CFA francs or even American dollars. Tiécoura was a money multiplier, but he was a marabout fortune-teller too and a marabout who made grigris.
    Tiécoura was in a hurry to get away because everybody said that, with all the tribal wars and everything in Liberia, marabout money multipliers and shamans and healers and grigri makers could make lots of money and even American dollars. They earned a lot of money in Liberia because therewas nobody left except the rebel warlords and people who were too scared to die. A warlord is a big-shot who’s killed lots of people and has his own country with villages full of people that he’s allowed to kill anytime he likes for no reason. With all the rebel warlords and all their people, Tiécoura knew he would be able to do business there with no trouble from the police like he got in Abidjan. He was always in trouble with the police for all the work and all the business he did in Abidjan, Yopougon, Port-Bouët and different villages in Côte d’Ivoire like Daloa, Bassam, Bouaké and even Boundiali in
Sénofou
country up in the north.
    Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura was a real big big-shot, a genuine hajji. When he was circumcised, he left the village to sell cola nuts all over the bushmen villages in the forests of Côte d’Ivoire like Agloville, Daloa, Gagnoa or Anyama. In Anyama he got rich by shipping lots and lots of baskets of cola nuts to Dakar by boat. By wetting beards (that means bribing people, also known as paying
baksheesh
), by wetting the beards of the customs officers, Yacouba’s cola nuts got on the boat in Abidjan and off the boat in Dakar without paying a penny in taxes or duties. If someone tries to export cola nuts and doesn’t bribe the customs officers in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, they have to pay lots of import taxes and duties like government levies and they don’t make a penny for themselves. Yacouba’s cola nuts—which he never paid a penny tax on—were sold off to the highest bidder in Senegal with loads of profits. With all the profits, Yacouba-alias-Tiécoura got rich.
    As soon as he was good and rich he took the plane andwent to Mecca so he could be a