The orphan0% in

Birahima

The Malinké home

The orphan

Birahima grows up in a Malinké village in the north until his mother dies, and he sets off with the con-man grigriman Yacouba to find his aunt across the border in Liberia. Kourouma establishes the boy's brash, profane narrating voice at once, a ten-year-old armed with four dictionaries and no illusions, about to walk straight into hell.

The opening chapters

inspired byBirahima's home in the Malinké country of northern Côte d'Ivoire, from which he sets out, is drawn from that real region; sited there at the edge of the setting.

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The crossing25% in

Yacouba

The border into war

The crossing

Crossing into Liberia, Birahima and Yacouba enter a country dissolved into warring factions, roadblocks and child armies, where a grigriman's charms and a boy's Kalashnikov are the only currencies. Kourouma turns the border into a threshold between an ordinary poverty and pure anarchy, the moment the child steps into the machinery of war.

The journey chapters

inferredThe crossing from Côte d'Ivoire into war-torn Liberia is drawn from the real frontier of the 1990s conflict; sited on the border within the setting.

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The child soldier50% in

The warlord

The warlord camps

The child soldier

Handed a gun and drugs, Birahima becomes a child soldier, shuttled between the rival warlords whose factions carve up Liberia, and he reels off the names of the friends killed around him like a grim roll-call. Kourouma exposes the whole obscene economy of the child-soldier war, the boys made killers, the warlords grown rich, all of it reported in Birahima's chillingly casual voice.

The Liberia chapters

explicitBirahima is made a child soldier in the warlord camps of the Liberian civil war, drawn from the real factions and their armies of boys; sited in the Liberian interior.

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The RUF75% in

Birahima

The Sierra Leone diamonds

The RUF

The war carries Birahima on into Sierra Leone, into the diamond fields the factions fight over and the villages where the rebels hack off hands. Kourouma binds the child soldiers, the blood diamonds and the mutilations into one system, the mineral wealth that pays for the guns and buys the boys who fire them.

The Sierra Leone chapters

explicitThe war spills into Sierra Leone, where the RUF's diamond fields and its signature amputations appear; sited in the diamond country of the real conflict.

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The reckoning100% in

The aunt

The endless war

The reckoning

Across the tangled fronts Birahima keeps searching for his aunt, finding her only to lose her again to the war's endless churn, and resolves at last simply to tell his story. Kourouma ends not with resolution but with the boy's decision to bear witness, his blasphemous refrain, that Allah is not obliged to be fair to the things of this world, standing as the book's bleak, unanswerable verdict.

The closing chapters

inferredBirahima's long search for his aunt across the shifting fronts of the two wars is drawn from the real, chaotic geography of the West African conflicts; sited across the setting.

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