Collateral Damage: The Map Bomb

I’d known these students a few weeks. Which is to say, I didn’t know them at all. They were just warming up.

 
Recently, something happened involving a map of Africa in a global literature course I teach at a rural land grant college in Washington state: A burglary, of sorts. Stolen identity. Standing at the classroom computer, I pulled up a multi-colored map after typing “political map of Africa” into Google. I should have known better than to snag an image from the digital ocean. In small print, before projecting it on a big screen behind me, the map looked like one I’ve often used to show students how Africa appears to the world like shattered stained glass, jagged and straight lines pointing everywhere. Thirty percent of the world’s political borders crisscross Africa alone in a vast network of separation Africans had no part in drawing. But when I transferred the image to the screen, glancing at my notes, I heard a student chorus of “Oh no!” and “What?” I turned to the enlarged map to see the page had been hacked. Someone substituted English obscenities for the names of countries, including the N-word for Niger, the former French colony where I was a Peace Corps volunteer 37 years ago. Frantically, I deleted the image, stammering an apology. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how that happened.”

We’d been making our way to the map via, Allah is Not Obliged, a novel by the late Ahmadou Kourouma of Cote d’Ivoire. The remarkable narrator is Birahima, recovering child soldier with little formal education who decides to write what he saw in the civil wars of Liberia and Sierra Leone. He tells the story in rough French, with a bit of Dioula and Arabic.

“I’m disrespectful,” Birahima warns us. “I’m rude as a goat’s beard and I swear like a bastard.” In class I planned to expand the notion of “disrespect” with discussion around a current map of Africa to show the context of Birahima’s world in the bleeding wounds of colonial rule. Today’s map is, after all, living evidence of colonial abuse—right there in 117 lines that separate Africa’s 54 countries. French lines. British lines. Belgian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian lines…

My plan crashed. What I felt—anger over the map incident and worries about the aftershocks—shook me over weeks.  

Twenty-four students, all arched eyebrows, and frowns. Four identified as not white: two Asian students, one indigenous person from Mexico, and one African American. That’s the demographic at a university surrounded by wheat fields near the foothills of the northern Rockies, and which—speaking of borders, colonialism, things stolen—sits on the homelands of the Nimiipuu and Palus peoples whose reservations in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon are within a two-hour drive. I was the apprentice to a crime, the fool who ushered the map into the room. Bullshit! rang in my head in the voice of Kourouma’s boy soldier, Birahima, confessed murderer with no time for lies or euphemism. With a fresh map, taken from the relative safety of Google Maps, I tried to move on, using the incident as an example of colonial intent—“to degrade, dishonor, undermine, and weaken cultures it attacks for profit.”

The students said nothing. I’d been disgraced. Justice, perhaps, for a 61-year-old professor of Scotch, English, Irish, French heritage. I know little of my genealogy, but if we play the odds across history, it’s certain I’m related to people who’d been active somewhere in the thousand years of Europe’s colonial program: Explorer, administrator, missionary, soldier, settler, landowner, slave holder, slave trader, politician, clerk. Peace Corps volunteer?

I struggled to draw students back, thinking of the anger that burns through Allah is Not Obliged. Worrying about the anger that burned in them. I imagined Birahima taunting from the back of class. Get on with it! Since I read the novel years ago on a magazine assignment in Mali, one line especially comes back: “Being a child soldier is for kids who’ve got fuck all on earth or in Allah’s heaven.”

Birahima spares no one his contempt, not even Allah.

Thirty percent of the world’s political borders crisscross Africa alone in a vast network of separation Africans had no part in drawing.

My spring 2023 global literature readings focused on immigrants and refugees. We read poets like Gloria Anzaldua and Jenny Xie among novelists, historians, and journalists. By the time we arrived at Allah is Not Obliged, we’d read Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway about migrants from Mexico dying in the Arizona desert; Dinaw Mengestu’s novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears about an Ethiopian refugee in America; and The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson’s history of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South.

I wondered how students would react to Kourouma’s novel, published in France in 2000. They read it in English. I hoped the honesty of the prose would help them access a story of distant wars that killed 300,000 people and drove millions from their homes before ending in 2003, the year Kourouma died. Desperation defines the writing as if Birahima, barely a teenager, is awakening from a hashish stupor to confront the horror he’s witnessed and the crimes he’s committed with his “kalash” rifle. He needs the world to know. Birahima speaks with aggressive use of the N—word, descriptions of rape, casual killings, women cradling dead infants. He describes how at age ten he left his Muslim village in Cote d’Ivoire to join an aunt in Liberia, where he was kidnapped and indoctrinated with beatings and hashish to remake him as a soldier for “corrupt fucked up banana republics.” He watches another child soldier, a girl named Fati, gun down refugee toddlers, a brother and sister. “On account of she was totally fucked up on hash.”

I hear bitter satire in those words, lighting up the absurdity of the violence in Liberia and Sierra Leone, conflicts over mineral deposits and farmland. The list of warlords is long, but Birahima saves his anger for a few. Like Charles Taylor, arms trader and genocidal killer who masqueraded as Liberia’s president until an international arrest warrant caught up with him; his rival, Prince Johnson, who publicly executed a deposed Liberian president; and Foday Sankoh, Taylor’s proxy in Sierra Leone whose forces chopped off the hands of resistant villagers, a practice the French and Belgians perfected first. All used child soldiers. In class we discussed child soldiers in history, from the crusades to the American Civil War, to Hitler’s recruitment of children during World War II, and the civil wars of Central and South America. The French and British recruited teenagers for their colonial armies.

One day, on a whim, I asked my students if Birahima’s life compared to anything they knew. The question was unfair. I was trying to incite dialogue.

“It’s not the same,” a student from Seattle said, “but around my neighborhood there are gangs. We hear gunshots.” A few more cited violence in their communities, urban and rural. Another said, “Our government separates children from their families at the Mexico border. Some die.” I’d known these students a few weeks. Which is to say, I didn’t know them at all. They were just warming up.

“We had weekly active shooter drills in my high school,” a student said, blank-faced, as if unsure of her point or resentful she had to make it at all. I glanced at the “Run Hide Fight” active shooter instructions framed on the wall beside the classroom door, and realized I’d never read them. Another student said, “What about Parkland? That’s our reality.” The reality of the 2018 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida involving a 17-year-old with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. Fourteen students and three staff died. According to The Washington Post, there have been 386 elementary and secondary school shootings since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, exposing 365,000 students to such violence. There were 46 school shootings in 2022 alone.

I did not grow up with that kind of carnage in school, or anticipation of it. I did grow up with the violence of nightly television reports from Vietnam, fearing I and my three older brothers would end up there, guns in hand. My brothers were of draft age. “Some children,” the New York Times war correspondent Gloria Emerson wrote of my generation after the war, “want to forget how frightened they were that the war would snatch them up.” I remember my relief when the war ended in 1975. I was 15. By luck, my brothers never went. We don’t speak of it.

I showed clips from the Netflix movie, Beasts of No Nation, based on the novel by Nigerian American writer Uzodinima Iwealaone. Kourouma’s and Iwealaone’s works contrast sharply with another book from Africa, The Dark Child, Camara Laye’s 1954 memoir of growing up in a village in French Guinea where traditional values defied colonial rule. Laye wrote in French under the title l’Enfant Noire. My students read an excerpt, with this quote: “The rights of others were highly respected. If intelligence seemed slower it was because reflection preceded speech and because speech itself was a most serious matter.”

Birahima has no patience for such sentiment: “I don’t give two fucks about village customs anymore, ‘cos I’ve been in Liberia and killed lots of guys with an AK-47.” Like Laye, Kourouma wrote in French. He wrote to expose what happened to the colonies France left behind, marred by lines that bore no relation to geographic, social, political, and economic realities. Colonial borders fractured traditional culture, dismembering the life that Laye’s memoir celebrated. Birahima picks up the thread decades later, telling his story like acid in the face or a boy with a gun. “Don’t go thinking that I’m some cute kid,” he says, “cos’ I’m not. I’m cursed…. The gnamas [spirits] of the innocent people I killed are stalking me, so my whole life and everything around me is fucked.”

Kourouma was never a child soldier, but he wrote from experience. He grew up in French Cote d’Ivoire near French Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), French Sudan (now Mali), French Guinea, and free Liberia. He attended colonial schools and served in the French army in Indochina as the Vietnamese rebelled against France. He studied mathematics in Paris before returning home in 1960 when, after 80 years of French rule, the colonies hardened into nation states. What he saw of border politics and ethnic rivalries disturbed him enough to devote his writing to the subject. His fourth and final novel, Allah is Not Obliged, denounces the borders and the warlords who act like colonial masters. The warlords, as Birahima put it, “divided up all the land, all the money, all the people… the whole world lets them.”

This is how colonial stories leach through history, rearranging landscapes, languages, and cultures to replace them with assumptions, lies, and greed.

An American writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, minted the word “warlord,” an example of colonial history’s weird, murderous narrative with its own vocabulary and cartographic mutations. In his 1856 travelog, English Traits, Emerson studies Britain with a wary gaze: “The spawning force of the race has sufficed to the colonization of great parts of the world,” he wrote. “Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics, and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord; the law-lord to the merchant and the mill-owner.” There’s the example as well of the border between French Niger and British Nigeria, settled in a trade for fishing rights off Newfoundland. Or the European fantasy that a mineral-rich high alpine mountain range, the Mountains of Kong, extended east-west across Africa beneath the Sahara. There is no Mountains of Kong. But for 300 years Europeans insisted the mountains onto maps until the 1880s after French explorers disproved their existence. This is how colonial stories leach through history, rearranging landscapes, languages, and cultures to replace them with assumptions, lies, and greed.

In the case of the map in my classroom, I wanted to know who would do such a thing, like mutilating a library book or painting a swastika on someone’s home. I found no trace of the offending map on the internet. A computer science major in class offered to help but found nothing. “Forget it,” she said. “These people cover their tracks.”

There are people to blame. They met at the Reichstag in 1884, the infamous Berlin Conference on Africa. More like a reunion of crime bosses. From November to January, representatives of 14 European countries, and the United States, gathered around a great wood table in the music room of the Reich Chancellery at Wilhelmstrasse, home to the chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck. On a wall hung a map of Africa on a canvas 16 feet high and nearly as wide, poorly detailed with rivers and mountains and a lot of white space. Artists’ renditions of the occasion show a room full of bearded white men in long coats and cravats. Snow blew the first week as if to shield the men from the heat of Africa. The air inside must have smelled of woodsmoke from fireplaces warming the room with its towering French windows and vaulted ceilings. Over the months delegates branded one area Belgian Congo, a land space larger than Europe itself. Then, French West Africa, British East Africa, and so on, slicing up administrative regions with tighter lines, more specific labels for individual colonies: Kenya, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, Sudan…. None of the men in that room, or the leaders who appointed them, ever set foot on the continent. No Africans were invited. A cartoon of the time shows Bismarck—who settled for smaller pieces of East and West Africa—wielding a knife over a giant cheese labeled “Afrique,” Iron Cross dangling from his neck.

A giant cheese. Or is it cake? In any case, something to be eaten.

By 1904, France governed more than three million square miles of West and North Africa in two administrative zones known on colonial maps as l’Afrique l’Occidentale Francaise (AOF in French documents) and L’Afrique Francaise du Nord (AFN). An area 15 times its size. They named colonies separately. What is now Mali, for example, they called French Sudan, or Soudan Francais. The word “sudan” comes from the Arabic, bilād al-sūdān, meaning “land of the blacks,” the term 12th-century Arab mapmakers gave to territory south of the Sahara as Islam was expanding into north Africa and Arab traders and missionaries began crossing the great desert. Upon independence, French Sudan’s new leaders reclaimed the name “Mali,” which means “land of the King” in Malinké and is the name for the 13th-century Malinké Empire that united a dozen kingdoms and many more languages to endure 500 years. On the other side of the continent, in East Africa, the name “Sudan” persists with the country of Sudan, a former British colony now split into two nation states north and south.

Between them, France and Britain took 95 percent of Africa. Years after the Berlin Conference, Lord Salisbury, British prime minister, let slip the truth: “We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers were.” A startling conceit that makes me wonder what vulgarities delegates to the conference uttered over drinks, when the veil of the colonial mission to civilize fell away.

The words, the gross name-calling, slipped out on a map in my classroom. My students remained guarded about Kourouma’s novel. “The story is relentless,” a student said. “How could anyone survive this, mentally, I mean?”

Birahima speaks without fear: “A country is a fucked-up mess when you get warlords dividing it up between them.”

History supports him. I showed the class a film, African Apocalypse, Femi Nylander’s and Rob Lemkin’s 2021 documentary of the French Central African Mission, which crossed Mali and Niger in 1899, razing villages and killing tens of thousands who offered neither provocation nor resistance. Nylander, who is British-Nigerian, guides us along the expedition’s path, now Niger’s main national highway. He does it in merciless detail, citing handwritten colonial reports and interviews with villagers who live with the mission’s legacy of mass hangings, shootings, stuffing bodies down wells.

I showed the film because I wanted students to see proof of colonial crimes. But after the first half-hour the students seemed bored, no more moved than they were by the map mishap.

They weren’t bored by Kourouma’s novel.

Anyway, there I was—professor of the map—teaching a novel about children at war. Birahima hides nothing. Nor does he blame others. “The child soldiers, the small soldiers, don’t get paid…. They massacre the people and keep everything worth keeping.” He builds context. Like the story of the Liberian boy who fled an attack on his village and returned to find his family massacred. “You’re really young, just a little kid… what do you do? You become a child soldier… so you can have lots to eat and cut some throats yourself. That’s your only option.” This is life in a place where, as Birahima tells us, “Warlords are doing everything they can to get their hands on more stuff… small warlords were doing their best to be big warlords.”

My students read briefly from Hannah Arendt, a writer and refugee from Nazi Germany who wrote, Eichmann in Jerusalem, about the trial in Israel of Adolph Eichmann, architect of the deathcamp system. Arendt, who spent a few days in Gestapo custody for her work on anti-Semitism, concluded that Eichmann, the bureaucrat, was able to do his monstrous job because he distanced himself from the consequences. “Evil,” she wrote, “comes from a failure to think.”

Can we excuse child soldiers, abused by adults, for not thinking? The thoughts of Birahima, who is about 12 at the end of his soldier days, catch up to him. That’s where the novel begins: “The full, final, and completely complete title of my bullshit story is: Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth…. I better start explaining.”

Class was divided. “He’s old enough to know,” a student said. A handful agreed. Others responded differently: “Children are easily manipulated,” and, “He’s not in charge of his life.”

One morning, meeting with a student about a paper, I asked how the map hacking was settling in his mind with discussion of Kourouma’s novel. “That map thing, it happens,” he said. “We’ve seen worse.” He described a racist Zoom bombing in a high school class during the pandemic. “But the novel,” he added, “yeah, it’s raw. It’s like he took a chain saw to language.”

“The story is relentless,” a student said. “How could anyone survive this, mentally, I mean?”

Kourouma, one critic writes, was among the first African writers to attack France’s most powerful weapon, its language, or what Kourouma called “proper French.” The novel reminded me of a student in the village in Niger where I taught high school English in the 1980s. At the time Niger was in a drought that killed hundreds of thousands across the Sahel. There was this 14-year-old boy in class, terribly thin, hair discolored dull orange by malnutrition. He held me in contempt for my English conversation and verb tense exercises. He’d rise from his chair and interrupt in English and French. “Good morning, Sir. Je m’en fou! I do not care!” Once he shouted in Hausa, “Yi magana da Hausa. Yarenmu ne!” which means, “Speak Hausa. It’s our language!” I was learning Hausa and stuttered, “Ina jin Hausa kadan,” meaning, “I speak [literally hear] Hausa a little.” Students laughed. I’d been stripped of my cover. One day in class Hamza collapsed in a malaria seizure. He died at the village medical dispensary. He’s followed me ever since, like one of Birahima’s vengeful gnamas, a spirit who questions every moment of my seven years in Africa.

I told the class about Hamza. That was the boy’s name, Hamza Ibrahim.

“You saw him die?” a student asked.

I explained Hamza entered a coma at the dispensary. I spent the evening by his cot, hoping he would wake. He was breathing when I went home. When I returned in the morning, the nurses had buried him outside the village. Islam requires burial without delay. Hamza’s family never showed. I learned they’d gone to Cote d’Ivoire to find work and left their youngest, Hamza, in school.

I was reading Kourouma’s novel in French when I flew into to Timbuktu, the ancient center of trade and Muslim study in northern Mali that became a French outpost in the 19th century. Little remains of the colonial presence except for a military cemetery with graves dating to the 1860s. Mali and the UN put millions of dollars into preserving Timbuktu as a World Heritage Site—with its 13th-century mosques, mausoleums of Sufi Muslim saints, and centuries-old camel market. The cemetery marks the fact that the French established the northern base of their West African empire in Timbuktu to control trade over the Sahara. A year before my visit, Malian soldiers, backed by French paratroopers, liberated Timbuktu from jihadists who had held the city for a year in their war to establish a caliphate in the West African Sahel.

I showed students photographs I made of Timbuktu. I wanted them to feel how a novel can thread itself into your life like a new friend who makes you nervous. But you hang out anyway. I was reading Allah Is Not Obliged as I traveled Mali, learning about Islamist preachers who wandered the countryside recruiting children for a war rooted in a strict reading of the Quran that justifies violent jihad. The word “jihad” means “struggle” in Arabic and its history is peaceful or violent, depending on one’s interpretation of the Quran. I visited villages empty of children who’d followed these preachers into violence. I spoke with imams—the prayer leaders in the mosques—who feared a dark faction within Islam. “The Quran does not authorize violence,” one imam told me. “Jihad is a personal struggle to know God.” He was shot to death few weeks later.

What I’m trying to say is that what happened with the map in my classroom is an old story. One country overpowers and attempts to degrade another, rename it, erase it. That’s how colonialism works until someone raises a challenge, like Hamza. I see him and Birahima dancing with joyous profanity on French graves at the military cemetery in Timbuktu. The jihadists smashed those graves. They looted the office, burned its archives. Caretakers had repaired most of the site when I got there, which seemed odd. Graves of colonials are perhaps unworthy of respect. Theirs is a long story of crime without punishment, but as one caretaker, a retired Malian army sergeant in his 70s, told me: “They are part of Timbuktu’s history.”

Jihadists also destroyed hundreds of tombs of Sufi Muslim saints. Sufists believe poetry, music, and dance bring them closer to God. Islamist purists argue such practice distracts the faithful, which justifies their efforts to destroy Sufism. This is the sort of thing Birahima despises: the warlord “who wreaks havoc all over” while the all-knowing deity watches. I feel Birahima’s irreverence for things sacred, like the French language. Birahima refers to himself with the N-word, showing how French belittles even after the colony is gone: “My name is Birahima and I’m a little [N-word]. Not cause I’m black and I’m a kid… because I can’t talk French for shit. That’s how things are. You might be grown up, or old. You might be Arab, or Chinese or white, or Russian, or even American, if you talk bad French, it’s called parlet petit negre… so that makes you a little [N-word] too. That’s the rules of French for you.”

I love French, the way its liquid, emotional voice flirts between gendered nouns and pronouns (like its Latin cousins Spanish and Italian) and its mischievous conjuring of untranslatable images about ordinary things like the heat of the day. I discovered this as a student in France when trying to get my head around the expression, Il fait vachement chaud, meaning, “it’s really hot” or, literally, “it’s hot like a cow.” It confused me until I thought about how a cow looks on a hot day, calm, as if nothing can be done. The root of the adverb vachement is vache, the word for cow. It took me longer to understand the adverb expresses extremity or severity, like the declaration C’est vachement difficile—Difficult like a cow. Really? When I asked French friends to explain what cows have to do with it, they laughed. “Qui sais?”

I work in French, read it, use it in interviews and social settings. I speak it on Zoom with friends in Africa. But my French is poor. Full of errors, mispronunciations. My Midwest American twang doesn’t help. Once, while ordering in a Paris bakery, the woman behind the counter muttered the phrase petit negre in response to my accent. (Forgive this brief digression but it’s worth noting that France has a government agency, l’Academie Francaise, whose purpose since 1635 has been to protect the “purity” of the French language, which has lost to English its status as the international language of diplomacy. l’Academie was founded by Cardinal Richelieu, official of the Catholic Church who was also French prime minister, then known as “first minister.” Last year, for the umpteenth time, l’Academie sounded the alarm over the presence of English in French culture, calling the trend “a degradation” of French identity, and citing words like “weekend,” “cool,” and “job” that are common in French. Never mind that French and English have contributed to the disappearance of entire languages in Africa. They remain the languages of government and education in former colonies.) So, to get back to my story, it’s not surprising that when the baker realized I understood her insult, she finished me off: “Vous parlez francais comme les Africains,” she said, hands atop the glass case with its pile of fresh pain au chocolat. I took her declaration that I “speak French like Africans” as a complement.

I embrace Birahima’s disrespect of France for imposing its language on hundreds of millions of people who can never know French like the French. The boy writes:

To tell you the life story of my fucked-up life in proper French, I’ve got four different dictionaries so I don’t get confused with big words. First off I’ve got the Larousse and the Petit Robert, then, second off, I’ve got a copy of The Glossary of French Lexical particularities in Black Africa, and, third off, I’ve got the Harrup’s…. I need to explain stuff because I want all sorts of different people to read my bullshit.

Birahima stacks dictionaries like trophies, rejecting euphemism and polite language in mockery of colonial masters. French explorers and officials prepared reports in meticulous cursive learned in childhood, and again in training as civil servants and military officers, as if the language had to be glorified and celebrated in loving longhand. Cardinal Richelieu himself speaking through their fingertips.

In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron, on a visit to Algeria—scene of 132 years of French rule—admitted colonization was “a crime against humanity.” He said this in French, une crime contre l’humanité. Later, pressured by former French colonists in Algeria, he apologized—to the colonists, in French of course: Je suis desolé de vous avoir blessé. “I’m sorry for wounding you.” This raises a question. Would the atonement have been interpreted differently if Macron had said it in Arabic, Algeria’s national language? ‘ana asf lijurhik. And then flown south across the Sahara to Cote d’Ivoire, Ahmadou Kourouma’s homeland, to repeat it in Dioula, Baoulé, and Senufo? Then to Timbuktu in Mali to speak the words in Arabic, Fulani, Bambara, and Tamashek. East to Niger, to say it in Hausa, Fulani, and Djerma. On to Senegal and Mauritania to express it in Woluf and Hassaniya. Then to the remaining former African colonies, and on to Vietnam, Haiti, French Guyana, Martinique, and so on. Maybe, with the experience of atoning in so many languages, his words would grow more sincere and specific with every stop on this atonement tour of the colonial globe. France can afford it. The British, too, and the Belgians, the Americans. All of them. They can pay for it with their profits from African cotton, gold, rubber, uranium, salt, cattle, copper, diamonds, bauxite, cocoa, coffee, zinc, oil, grain, and the 12 million souls kidnapped into slavery. Maybe, under such weight, the former colonists in Algeria would have said nothing or, better yet, been ignored. Who knows? Atonement might produce other results.

Students were relieved the semester was over. One stuck around after class the last day to tell me she liked the novel. “You could teach a class around it.”

The novel tells it straight. Ahmadou Kourouma and his young muse will take blame and expose others. Birahima will break the hard news, apologizing for nothing. “The story of my cursed, fucked up life…. Sit down and listen. And write everything down. Allah is not obliged to be fair about everything he does.” Birahima held me to account when a classroom exercise backfired, leaving me panicky before my students, the novel in my hands as he stood on the periphery, “kalash” strapped to his back, gleefully shouting, Get on with it!