Ahmadou Kourouma, highly respected award winning Ivorian author, has created with “Allah is Not Obliged” a vivacious, often hilarious, but also disturbing and thought provoking novel. Published in 2000 in its original French, it was likely the first of fictionalized or factual accounts capturing the life of child soldiers in modern-day Africa. Written in the voice of a boy with less than three years of schooling, and with limited French, the author uses his protagonist to convey much more than the intimate reflections of one of the “small soldiers” and what the youth describes as his “miserable existence”.