Abstract

This study examines the harrowing intersection of the cycle of cruelty and the large shadows of child soldiering in Ahmadou Kourouma's seminal work, Allah n'est pas obligé. Set against the backdrop of the brutal civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the chronicle follows Birahima, a child soldier who navigates a landscape defined by the total collapse of traditional moral and familial structures. The research explores how the protagonist and his peers transition from victims of war to perpetrators of extreme violence. It argues that this cruelty is not an inherent trait but a survival mechanism fueled by the indoctrination of warlords and the desensitization caused by constant exposure to atrocities. In the fictional universe of Kourouma, the figure of the child soldier functions not as an aberration of nature but as a symptomatic product of political and moral collapse. The apparent "cruelty" of the child is neither innate nor psychologically autonomous; rather, it is a refracted manifestation of a failed adult order structured by corruption, civil war, and postcolonial disillusionment. By dismantling the sentimental construction of childhood as an inviolable realm of innocence, Kourouma exposes what may be termed the ontological dispossession of an entire generation. In Allah n'est pas obligé, the child narrator's fragmented syntax, dark humor, and oscillation between naivety and brutality dramatize a subjectivity forged in violence. The narrative voice resists stable moral categorization, thereby destabilizing binary oppositions between victim and perpetrator. The child soldier emerges as a hybrid figure—at once minor and executioner—whose lethal agency coexists with profound vulnerability. This paradox compels the reader into an ethically uncomfortable terrain where responsibility is displaced upward, toward the political structures and adult actors who orchestrate the conditions of war. Kourouma's aesthetic strategy thus operates as an indictment: the tragedy resides less in corrupted childhood than in corrupted adulthood. In revealing how warfare annihilates not only lives but the very possibility of childhood itself, Kourouma reframes the child soldier as the living testimony of a society that has forfeited its moral legitimacy and, with it, its future.

UN SDGs

Peace and Justice Strong Institution

Quality Education