Allah is Not Obliged Read Free Page B

and maman stopped bleeding. She was saved. My grandfather and my grandmother were happy and so was everyone from the village of Togobala and they wanted to give the sorceress a reward and pay her lots of money; but Moussokoroni refused. She refused to take their reward.
    Moussokoroni did not want money or cattle or cola nutsor millet or palm wine or clothes or cowries (a cowrie is a type of shell that originally comes from the Indian ocean which plays an important role in traditional life, mostly as a kind of money). Moussokoroni thought maman was beautiful, so beautiful that she wanted my mother to be her son’s wife.
    Her son was a hunter, a kaffir, a shaman, a pagan animist. A pious Muslim girl who reads the Qur’an like my mother is not allowed to marry a kaffir. The whole village refused.
    My mother married my father on account of how he was her cousin and the son of the village imam. So Moussokoroni, who was a shaman, and her son, who was also a shaman, got really, really angry. They cast spells on my mother’s right leg, an evil spell called a
koroté
(a venom that acts on the victim from a distance, according to the
Glossary
) and a really powerful
djibo
(which is an evil curse).
    After maman was married and was in her confinement on account of being pregnant, a black dot, a tiny black dot, appeared on her right leg. Maman was in pain from the small black spot so they lanced it, they made a small cut to lance the spot and put medicine on the cut. But the cut didn’t heal—it started to gobble up maman’s foot, to gobble up her leg.
    Straight away, my father and my grandmother went to see Balla, they consulted grigrimen and marabouts and shamans and everyone said that maman didn’t get better because of the
koroté
, the evil spell that Moussokoroni and her son had cast. They went to the village where Moussokoroni and her son lived but it was too late.
    Moussokoroni was already dead, good and dead from oldage and good and buried too. Her son, the hunter, was an evil man; he refused to listen, refused to understand, refused to confess. He was completely evil, a genuine kaffir, an enemy of Allah.
    Maman gave birth to my big sister. By the time my sister was walking and talking and going to school the abscess was still eating away at maman’s leg, so she was taken to the district hospital. This was long before independence. At the hospital, there was a white doctor—a
toubab
—with three stripes on his shoulder, a black doctor with no stripes, a male nurse who was a major, a midwife and a bunch of other black people wearing white coats. All the black people in white coats were civil servants who were paid by the colonial government. Back then, if you wanted a civil servant to treat you properly, you had to bring them a chicken. That’s the custom in Africa. Maman gave chickens to five different civil servants and they all treated maman properly and took good care of her, but even with all the bandages and the permanganate, her ulcer still didn’t get better, it just kept bleeding and rotting. The
toubab
doctor said they were going to have to amputate maman’s leg, cut it off at the knee and throw the rotten bit out for the dogs at the rubbish tip. But luckily one of maman’s chickens had gone to the nurse who was also a major and he came in the middle of the night to warn her.
    The nurse said that what maman was suffering from was not a
toubab
disease, it was a Black Nigger African Native disease. A disease that the medicine and the science of the white man could not cure. ‘Only the grigris of an African healer can heal your wound. If the captain operates on yourleg, you will die, absolutely die, you will die like a dog,’ said the nurse who was also a major. The nurse was a Muslim and could not tell a lie.
    Grandfather hired a donkey driver. In the middle of the night, by moonlight, the donkey driver and Balla the healer went to the hospital and kidnapped maman like a pair of bandits. Before dawn, they