Allah is Not Obliged Ahmadou Kourouma Heinemann, 168pp, £14.99 ISBN 0434009571
"Ten, maybe 12" years old and orphaned, Birahama leaves the "crooked republic" of Guinea to live with his aunt in Liberia. Caught up in the Liberian civil war, he soon becomes a child soldier, drifting between opposed tribal factions by a mixture of chance and the prospect of a better life: the same rice with sauce that persuades him to leave his family for Liberia entices him to switch allegiance from the NPFL to Ulimo.
Birahama gives a human face to the war through his funeral orations for fellow child soldiers and frank explanations of the actions of warlords such as Charles Taylor. "It was self-evident: someone with no arms couldn't vote," he comments on Sierra Leonean rebel Foday Sankoh's use of methodical amputations to prevent democratic elections. Sorcery and religion are dealt with in an equally louche manner - "seeing as God says thou shalt not kill too much, or at least thou shalt kill less, we stopped killing".
Melding fiction and fact with the humility of childhood, Ahmadou Kourouma deftly exposes the desperate nature of the civil wars - and the relentless poverty - that have ravaged Africa, and brings the grandeur of gestures such as the G8 pledges into uncomfortably sharp relief.
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