Literary places in Liberia and Sierra Leone

Allah Is Not Obliged

Ahmadou Kourouma

Birahima, a foul-mouthed ten-year-old orphan from the Malinké country of northern Côte d'Ivoire, sets out to find his aunt and is swept into the 1990s civil wars of Liberia and Sierra Leone, becoming a child soldier passed from warlord to warlord. Kourouma maps a real and terrible West Africa: the boy's home in the north, the border crossing into war, the warlord camps of Liberia, and the diamond fields of Sierra Leone, all narrated in a child's blunt, dictionary-quoting voice.

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