Allah is Not Obliged Read Free Page A

fate. Allah doesn’t have to accept sacrifices and neither do the spirits of the ancestors. Allah can do whatever he feels like; he doesn’t have to acquiesce to every prayer from every lowly human being (‘acquiesce’ means ‘agree to’). The spirits of the ancestors can do what they like; they don’t have to acquiesce to all our complicated prayers.
    Grandmother loved me. Me, Birahima. She treasured me. She loved me more than her all her other grandchildren. If anyone gave her a lump of sugar or a ripe mango or a papaya or some milk, she would save them for me and no one else. She wouldn’t eat a single bit. She’d hide whatever they gave her in a corner of the hut so she could give it to me when I got home sweating, tired, thirsty, starving like a real street urchin.
    When maman was young and a virgin and pretty as a jewel, she used to live in the mining camp where my grandfatherdid his gold business. The place was crawling with cut-throats and gold dealers going round raping uncircumcised girls and slitting their throats. That’s why maman didn’t stay there. At the very first harmattan (‘harmattan’ means ‘a season marked by hot dry easterly winds’, according to the
Glossary
), she was sent back to Togobala for the ceremony of excision, where girls are initiated every year when the north wind blows.
    No one in Togobala knows where in the savannah the excision will be performed until it happens. At cockcrow, the girls come out of their huts and in single file (‘single file’ means ‘one after the other in a line’), they walk in silence into the forest. They get to the place of excision just as the sun appears. You don’t have to have been to the place of excision to know they cut something out of the girls. They cut something out of my mother, but unfortunately maman’s blood didn’t stop, it kept gushing like a river swollen by a storm. All her friends had stopped bleeding. That meant that maman was the one who was to die at the place of excision. That’s the way of the world, the price that has to be paid. Every year at the ceremony of excision, the djinn of the forest takes one of the girls who has come to be initiated and kills her and keeps her for a sacrifice. The girl is buried there in the forest. The djinn never chooses an ugly girl, it always picks one of the most beautiful, one of the prettiest of the girls to be initiated. Maman was the prettiest girl of her age, that was why the djinn chose her to die in the forest.
    The sorceress who was the excisor was one of the Bambara (an ‘excisor’ is a woman who performs female circumcision).In our country, the Horodougou, there are two peoples, the Bambaras and the Malinkés. People from families like Kourouma, Cissoko, Diarra, Konaté are Malinkés, we’re Dioulas and Muslims. The Malinkés aren’t from here; they came from the valley of the Niger long, long ago. The Malinkés are good people who heed the word of Allah. They perform the five daily prayers, they don’t drink palm wine or eat pork or any game killed by kaffir
obayifos
like Balla (an
obayifo
is a shaman or a grigriman). All the other villages are Bambaras, pagans, kaffirs, unbelievers, animists, savages, shamans. Sometimes the Bambaras are called different things like Lobis or Sénoufos or Kabiès. Before people came to colonise them, they didn’t wear any clothes. They were called the naked peoples. Bambaras are true indigenes, the true ancient owners of the land. The woman who was performing the excision was a Bambara named Moussokoroni. When Moussokoroni saw my mother lying there bleeding and dying, she took pity on her because maman was still really beautiful back then. Lots of kaffirs who know nothing of Allah are completely evil, but some kaffirs are good. Moussokoroni had a good heart and worked her magic and she was able to rescue maman from the clutches of the murderous evil spirit of the forest. The spirit accepted Moussokoroni’s prayers and the sacrifices