Waiting For The Wild Beasts To Vote

A magical, blackly funny tapestry of a book, which, through the rise and fall of its central character - the dictator of a small imaginary former French African colony - tells the story of modern Africa.

This is a tour de force - original, irreverent, brutal, funny, poetic - in which history and myth are brilliantly evoked

A brilliant, often hilarious, political satire

A thoroughgoing indictment of the African way of leadership

Witty and wholly authentic chronicle of black African atrocity... Spellbinding

One of the most powerful, funniest and richest novels written in French this decade

Ahmadou Kourouma's remarkable novel is narrated by Bingo, a West African sora - storyteller and king's fool. Over the course of five nights he tells the life story of Koyaga, President and Dictator of the Gulf Coast. Orphaned at the age of seven, Koyaga grows up to be a terrible hunter; he fights mythical beasts, and is a shape-shifter, capable of changing himself into beasts and birds. He fights in the French colonial armies, in Vietnam and Algeria, but on his return he mounts a coup and becomes ruler and dictator of the Gulf Coast. For thirty years he runs a corrupt but 'clean' state, surviving repeated assassination attempts and gaining support and investment from abroad. But when the 'First World' decides it no longer want to support dictatorships and call for democracy, he needs another ruse to maintain himself in power... 
 
Part magic, part history, part savage satire, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is nothing less than a history of post-colonial Africa itself.

Ahmadou Kourouma

it is a powerful, shocking and deeply moving novel, an African Lord of the Flies...Through Kourouma's skilful telling, the characters live on the page

Allah is Not Obliged... deftly captures the mixture of horror, fascination and detachment with which a child views the world of grown-up folly

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

A compelling account of how closely linked innocence and brutality can be

'The full, final and completely complete title of my bullshit story is: 
Allah is not obliged to be fair about all things he does here on earth' 
 
Birahima's story is one of horror and laughter. After his mother's death he travels to Liberia to find his aunt but on the way gets caught up in rebel fighting and ends up with a Kalashnikov in his hands. He tells of the chaotic and terrible adventures that follow in his career as a small soldier with heartbreaking bravado and wisdom.

Ahmadou Kourouma

Praise for Allah Is Not Obliged

A work of luminous humanity

it is a powerful, shocking and deeply moving novel, an African Lord of the Flies...Through Kourouma's skilful telling, the characters live on the page

An exceptional storyteller

A work of luminous humanity

it is a powerful, shocking and deeply moving novel, an African Lord of the Flies...Through Kourouma's skilful telling, the characters live on the page

An exceptional storyteller

A work of luminous humanity

it is a powerful, shocking and deeply moving novel, an African Lord of the Flies...Through Kourouma's skilful telling, the characters live on the page

An exceptional storyteller

Books by Ahmadou Kourouma

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