First, let me tell you this. I don’t know much about Allah. Not properly. Not the way other people speak of him. If you are waiting to read a long story about Allah, you better forget it. It is true. I swear it. I don’t know many things now, and I remember much about nothing. No, nothing. You heard me! You can never truly tell now, can you? If truth is something men wear like a fixed portrait smile—coming in different flavours, and yet all with the same vile taste behind. If things are really what people say they are, or if people themselves are who they show you to be. So, I’ll tell you again. This is not a story about Allah. Neither is it about the shape of my father’s nose. Nor the smell of rain and the zinc roof crawling on your skin, or the face of that boy who died beside me with a mouth brimming with a century of unanswered questions.
I’ll tell you another thing. This isn’t a story about that country of mine. Just a tiny part, maybe. You know? The part about those lean faces, and the long nights, and cracked lips like dried earth. Those sorts of things. The kind they show you on the T.V. Those are the sort of things that wring life out of you, like clothes in the sun. The kind that burns the life of kids before they learn to suckle. It is not as if these memories evaporate from the heads of men. It is just sometimes, a man must decide what he must remember and what he must forget. Just like that. And there’s nothing anyone can do to change that.
I’ll tell you something more. This life is war. Here is another thing that was war. That place I called home. In that land, flowers writhe before any life can enter their veins. You know that kind of thing? When the sun smothers lungs, fries insects before they learn to fly. Those are the sort of things that haunt your dreams.
Maybe, things were always like that. Maybe, nobody sees these things until they happen. Like peace is a kind of a betrothed wife no man thinks he’ll lose until she wakes up one day and says, ‘I’ve had enough!’
That is how it had all begun. Like a bad marriage. A few arguments here and there. Like a dream, one in which you piss on the tyres of that neighbour you don’t like. It is always like that, isn’t it? One man’s trouble, another man’s pleasure. That’s how it had begun— two trifling men with towering ambitions and entitlements vaster than the Fouta Djallon. Then, suddenly, everything changed. No more shouts of kids chasing each other on the streets or strolling to school with sagging uniforms, sticks of Chupa Chups in one hand, and shimmering dreams in their eyes. Only two things exist on that land now: bullets pouring from the sky, blotting out the sun, and blood rising like a tide behind them.
And if you think that was the worst of it, you don’t know war yet.
There were worse things; elections, promises, petty politics, more blood. And things like those disasters with fat pots they called soldiers. You hear that? I’m talking about the sort of things that make a man wake up one morning and start questioning his life.
Maybe, in the end, this story is about Allah. Because only He understands the things men go through. Wallahi! The ruins, the rains, the roasting, the elections— all of it!
If you think about it, everything else about this world is a madness. Like all the other mad places you can think of. Maybe, I should have known. But no one talks about the kind of stuff people endure in those pits of madness. Not in Bujumbura. Not in Bamako. Not in Goma. Not even in Cairo. Not in my village. It is like an ancient secret. Sacred. Untouched. Not to be shared. Not even whispered.
I will tell you one more thing. Nothing matters anymore. Not a man’s life. Not a child’s dream.
Not even hunger itself. Only money. Money. Now, that is another thing.
The other day at the market in Agadez, a merchant sold a 592 CFA francs salt for 4,500. He just kept staring at me like the good market I was.
“I want to buy salt. Salt. Salt. Not kidney,” I said to him.
“Yes. Salt. Salt. 4,500,” he grinned.
“Why? Does it heal the sick?”
“No. No. No healing. Just food. Food. Put inside”, he said, stirring the air like how one stirs the pot. “No healing. Healing? Go hospital,” his fingers pointed across the street.
I paid for that salt. I tell you; I did. You’d only judge me if you did not know how much that salt meant to me. What a little salt in a pot of porridge would mean to me after everything I had seen.
He watched me pocket the bag. “Where you heading?” he asked. I didn’t answer right away.
There was a tin on the shelf behind him, blue and gold, with the face of a red bus on it. One of those tins that once held biscuits for rich men, now gathering dust beside expired stockfish. The words: Made in England.
England.
The name sat on my tongue like a lie I wanted to believe.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe England.”
He cocked his head. “England? You want go England by desert?”
I didn’t explain. How could I? That the word just slipped out. That, maybe I had heard it the day before, shouted by some boy chasing a smuggler’s truck. Or maybe I saw it in the newspaper used to wrap my bread. It didn’t matter.
I left him, smiling. Not the kind you do out of excitement, but of the relief of being left off a hook. A hook of uncertainties, and of things you ache to put behind.
Made up or not, England was all I had. At the moment.
I walked with that salt like it was a passport. Not caring about that merchant’s stare of judgement. I never think anyone would understand. Tell me. How would anyone understand that it wasn’t about England or any other place. That, it was not a matter of where I was going, but what I was running from. That even though I didn’t know where I was going, I knew what I was leaving behind.
How would he understand if I told him. About my mother with lungs full of dust. About my brothers who vanished under militia boots and gunpowder. And friends whose laughs I used to chase until one morning, the neighbours swept their blood into the gutter like rainwater. That I left them all. Not because I stopped loving them. But because love was useless where I came from. Like flowers growing on concrete.
Some nights, I still dream of their faces, blurred, waterlogged, mouths moving but no sound coming. Sometimes, I wake up with the taste of ashes on my tongue and wonder if I ever really left.
You think people leave for the better. No. They leave to survive what’s behind them.
To outpace the rot. To bury the stink of yesterday with the sweat of tomorrow.
They say don’t look back. But sometimes the past follows. Quiet. Barefoot. Hungry.
And so, I kept walking.
With the name “England” in my mouth like a borrowed word. And my memories
packed like contraband stitched under my veins.
I’ll tell you one more thing that haunts me like a bad dream. That night when those soldiers came in.
They came, as always. Not with warnings. But with fire in their eyes.
I was halfway through boiling water when the first shot cracked the sky like thunder made of metal.
Then came the scream. Then another. Then silence so loud it gnawed at the walls.
My mother didn’t run. She didn’t flinch. She sat there on the mat, legs folded, head wrapped in the same cloth she wore to my brother’s funeral.
“Get the money,” she said, her voice steady. “And the salt.”
Yes. The salt again.
Outside, the sky turned orange. Bullets like cursed prayers zipped past the window. The neighbour’s door burst open. Then someone’s child. Then someone’s body. “I’m not leaving you,” I told her. I meant it.
She spat blood into her hand and wiped it on her dress like it was nothing. Her breath rattled, soft like paper tearing.
“There’s no time for foolishness,” she said. “You’re only fourteen. Running is not shame. It’s breath. You hear me? You run because you want to live. Because the dead do not argue.”
Her fingers clutched my wrist. I saw the bullet hole then. Just below her ribs. Blooming slow. Like a flower, nobody asked for.
“I saw you in a dream,” she whispered. “Wearing a coat. Snow in your hair. You were laughing. That laugh you do when you lie.”
I held her. She was shivering now.
“I’ll carry you. Let’s go.”
“No,” she said, and it came like stone. “You carry memory. That’s enough. I’ll stay. Someone must stay and remember us.”
When she closed her eyes, she smiled. “Don’t bury me. Let the war take me. It already has.”
She died before the fire reached the room. Before the roof cracked and the night bled. I ran.
Not because I was brave. Not because I had a plan. I ran because my mother told me to. And I have never stopped running since.
When I close my eyes, I still see her, sitting on the low stool, grinding salt against stone.
Her fingers were white from it. That was her trade. Her life.
Salt.
The kind you pack into jars with old newspaper lids. The kind that clings to skin, to sweat, to the corners of your mouth after grief.
She sold it in small cones wrapped in brown paper. “Salt makes the poor man’s stew taste like hope,” she used to say.
We had no land. No cows. No inheritance. Just salt. And her stubbornness. And the way she smiled even when the world was falling apart as if teeth could hold the walls up. You hear that?
She hoped.
The last night, she pressed that bundle into my palm.
“May your life be sweet, wherever you find yourself, son,” she said. “May you find
happiness in whatever land my God may take you.”
I thought it was money. It was salt.
“Carry this,” she said. Her voice was ragged, low like it didn’t want to disturb the quietness that arrived after the madness. “This is all I have. But it will mean something one day.”
I didn’t understand.
She was bleeding through the cloth tied around her stomach, red spreading like ink. The soldiers had moved through the street like a flood of knives. My friend Musa was already gone, dragged out into the yard like a goat at Eid. Shot in the back. No name. No goodbye.
“You want me to live with only salt?”
“You’re not carrying salt. You’re carrying me.” “Go.”
So, I ran. With that sachet of salt and the smell of smoke in my clothes. I never buried her. Couldn’t. Didn’t.
But I carry her still.
Everywhere.
You hear that? Everywhere.
***
Getting on that truck was like arriving in Heaven. No. Not the sort of Heaven people talk about. I am talking about the kind where one nurses the hope of eating every day. The kind where one could walk without looking over his shoulders. Where a three-square meal was not the result of several days of licking dry lips and long hours of sleeping under trees.
“The sweet smell of your new home embraces you already. Smell it now, it welcomes you like a hero. Wallahi! From now on, poverty will see you and pass by. Insha’Allah!” The warm air from Uncle Tobi’s tobacco-filled breath. Uncle Tobi. That was what everyone called him. Took me and some boys a day’s walk from my village, and promised us Heaven. Free Heaven, you hear.
His voice caressed the inside of my right shoulder. Then, I couldn’t care less. It did not matter to me, as long as I could start a new life. It did not even matter to me that I had left my home country. Nothing did anymore. Not even when one sat on a truck that felt like he had travelled half of his life to get here.
Now, I cannot believe I fell for that kind of crap. Uncle Tobi’s Heaven had turned out to be Agadez. And a few coin exchanged for our wretched lives.
Even after all these years in Agadez, a new and better life never awaited anyone. That sort of thing is not magic. Like this whole talk of the certain land that flows with milk and honey. A certain land of abundance. The Heaven. I swear it. I could not just wait to get there. I could feel it already, in my veins. With every breath. I swear it. I could feel it, in my bones. In the long smiles of the children dancing on the streets. I could swear on my life my soul was already there, waiting for my body to join. But first, Agadez. Then, Tripoli. Even though Agadez looked just like my village, everything was fine by me. So long as it would take me
there. Even though Agadez was not going to give me that, it was going to take me there. I did not know which country that would be. That land that flowed with milk and honey. That and that would make my life taste like salt.
But I guess people would never understand how for some, the dawn of each morning is another day of war. How would they understand? When the closest to war they’ve probably seen is a series on Netflix or a bulletin of lean faces of children on the TV?
How would they understand that each day here means that you hide like a goat in a pen for fear of being caught? That I was not promised three years here. Of serving to pay off your debts. Just, a week or two. I tell you this; I know people who have spent more. Like four. Five. Girls who had to open their legs so that their mouths could stay open. That sort of thing. All for this land that flows with milk and honey. This place is where Agadez will take you. How would they understand that over here, one truck ride cost a life’s savings?
That a bag of salt costs a kidney.
They wouldn’t. Would they?
***
This morning, when my truck finally arrived, I said goodbye to Agadez. Three years here of saving money for that trip. Waiting.
You hear that? Three years.
Three years since I start running. Three years of sand in my mouth, and still of raining bullets where I call home.
The clouds cough above us, throaty, and swollen with dust. They roll like they’ve seen too much and want no part of what’s coming. Then nothing. Just sand. An ocean of sand. Like we’ve slipped into the belly of time and time has forsaken us.
Then the bones begin.
First, I think they are bones of animals. Then the bodies come.
Bones and bodies like broken promises. White. Curved. Stiff. Some still wear shoes. Some wear nothing. Clothes lie around them, tattered like flags. Red. Blue. Green. Colours don’t matter here. Even death sees no colour. It takes what it wants. Children. Mothers. Men with dreams. All the same.
Our legs hang like slaughtered goats, tight, cramping, numb. Crammed like meat on a skewer. Knees in ribs. Elbows in mouths. We are not in a truck. We’re in a coffin on wheels. Thirty of us packed where five should sit. Every bump, cracking something open inside.
Beside me, a woman holds a small boy. No more than four. He has that open-mouth sleep, the kind that makes you look twice to see if he’s breathing. She hasn’t eaten in days. Her face is ash and bone. Her head bobs with the rhythm of the road, like a broken pendulum. Still, she holds him. Still, she hums. Hope, maybe.
By the second day, she is quiet. By the third, she is something else. Her breath grows shallow. Her hands loosen. Her body leans too far. She falls. Just like that. Like someone pulls a string and she collapses into the sand.
No sound. No shout. Just dust where she once sat. The boy blinks. Once. Twice. Then he jumps.
He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t beg. He just follows.
The truck does not stop. No one looks. No one says a word. The driver doesn’t blink.
The wind carries their story backward, into nothing. Gone.
And we keep moving. Because this road does not wait. This road eats the slow.
I press my back into the boy beside me and whisper a prayer I don’t believe. A silent prayer to Allah. Not for me. For them. For the boy who chose love.
Later that night, when the truck coughs to a stop and we lie on the sand like discarded things, I close my eyes, but sleep doesn’t come.
Silence hums in my ears. Thick, heavy, like the breath of something watching. Around me, people shift, murmur, cough in their sleep. One man prays. A girl retches into the sand. Someone snores like they’re trying to forget they’re still alive.
And then I hear him.
The old man, just behind me. His was voice low. A whisper carried not to us, but to someone he believes is listening.
He prays in a tongue older than the road, folding words between his teeth like secrets. His back is straight. His fingers dance slowly across worn beads, pausing sometimes as if unsure whether to beg or to thank.
When he finishes, he doesn’t lie down. He stays sitting. Watching the stars like they might blink first.
“Boy,” he says after a while, his voice was dry but not unkind. “Why are you awake?” I don’t answer. Not at first.
He doesn’t press. Just let the silence stretch until I have no choice but to fill it.
“Why are you going?” He says again. “To forget,” I say. “To run.”
He chuckles, soft and bitter. “We all run. Some of us are in sandals. Some in prayer.”
He scratches his beard and looks out toward the dunes. “But we shouldn’t have to. Not if our homes weren’t sick. Not if men didn’t eat each other with teeth sharper than lions.”
“Why do you go, then?” I ask.
He shrugs. “To see if the world can be kind elsewhere. To live one more day without
watching something I love burn.”
His eyes don’t meet mine when he says it. That’s how I know he’s telling the truth.
We sit in quiet again. The wind whistles like a ghost between our limbs. A fire flickered in the background. Small, nervous, like it too was afraid of tomorrow.
Then he speaks, quieter now.
“You know, Allah… Allah must have a stomach deep as the ocean. Big enough to hold all the bad things men do. Still, He looks at us with love. With mercy.”
I shake my head. “How? After everything?”
He turns then. His face was lit faintly by the dying fire. “Because Allah is like a Black boy.”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
He leans closer, his smile faint. “Only Black boys I’ve known can carry this much pain and still offer bread to strangers. Still laugh with cracked lips. Still kneel beside their mothers’ graves and whisper, ‘It’s okay.’ Even when it’s not.”
I say nothing. But the words stay with me. Allah is like a Black boy.
Later, when sleep finally comes to me, I dream of a boy with salt in his palm and a desert in his eyes. He walks ahead of us, barefoot, singing to the sand.
Even when I wake, all I see is the boy from the truck. The fire’s gone now. Just glowing teeth in the ash, and faces that barely exist unless someone shifts close enough to steal breath. The dark sits over us like a thick blanket, smothering even the idea of morning.
In the dark, I see his small hand slipping after his mother as if it belonged nowhere else. That moment before he jumped, when he could have stayed. Could have lived. But chose not to.
I wonder if she felt him beside her before the sand took her body. I wonder if he reached her in time if they died together, or if he died reaching.
I press my fingers into the pocket of my shirt. The salt is still there, wrapped in cloth.
Mama’s salt is still intact. You hear that. Mama’s salt is still intact.
Maybe it’s the only thing that connects me to what came before. To her. To our cracked earth, and the smell of her hands after frying beans. Maybe it’s the only thing that says I come from somewhere. That I was once loved.
I swallow the lump in my throat. Not because I want to be strong. But because crying here dries you up faster than the sun.
I turn on my side, and the sand welcomes me like it always does. Grain by grain. No questions. No comfort. Just presence.
Tomorrow, we ride again.
And the desert keeps its silence.
It reminds me of what my Mama used to say when I was just a boy. We would drink water for days until the stomach ached. That was when my father ran. Six boys, all crammed in that hanging shack. The food could not reach even the throat when Papa was around. Sometimes, my stomach groaned at night and I felt like strangling him while he slept. Now that he was gone, it was like hellfire burnt in our tummies. That day, I’d picked money from the market floor. A huge one, wrapped in black polythene. One that I felt could have bought us meat for months. My tongue did not even remember what it tasted like to eat meat. At night, Mama sat at the window, gazing through. Always sat there and sobbed the entire night since the coward ran. I never really cared at the time. The house was quiet; no snores at night, and we could do whatever we wanted. In a long time, we could walk around feeling like proper men.
When I handed that note to her, she glanced at me, her snail eyes returning to gazing through the window. That woman could take hunger. I tell you. She would not take it.
“I didn’t steal it, Mama. I found it.”
She shook her head, staring at me now like I was a TV. I swear it. I could hear her stomach rumble like a drum.
“You found it? So, we going to eat now, huh? Do you know what that means?”
My little mind kept scanning her face, wondering where it was all going. It was dark. Heavy dark. That kind of darkness that could hold you in its arms and cuddle you. But no one even cared about that much darkness in that village. We’d slept in it for that long, sometimes, coming out into the lights in the mornings felt like a betrayal. I tell you; we could thread a needle in that darkness. Tears welled down Mama’s eyes. I swear it. I could see it. Mama had that look in her eyes.
“I tell you what it means,” she dragged me to the window, pointing to the mango tree outside our house. “You know what happens when they cut that tree?
I shook my head.
“I tell you what that means. Charcoal. Firewood. More money for one family. But do you know what it means for another? She paused and gazed at me. She looked fierce; like she had bullets behind her eyes. “I tell you. No food for weeks. It’s a crazy world, a crazy world. In this world, one man’s misfortune is another man’s opportunity.”
The next morning, she sent me running, looking for the owner of that money. Even though I’d spent a note or two, she made sure I worked to replace it.
Crazy. It was all crazy. The jumping, and the falling, and dying on a no man’s land. But even there too, one man’s ill luck was another man’s feast. That woman’s water was gone even before her legs had touched the floor. I swear it. People would have devoured it if they had the chance. I will never forget that. That falling. The jumping. The rage for the water. The rage in those bullets, when they came for my brothers, right before my eyes. When it took them one after the other like pieces of meat.
I will scream it in my dreams every night.
Even when the others say we have arrived in England. I will still hear it in the songs of mothers for their children. Wake up to it every morning like the rising of the sun. I will remember it, every other day of my worthless life.
I will always remember that day when they say we have arrived. That look on the immigration offricer’s face when all I had to show was a sachet of salt and a pale picture of six boys with bony faces and long legs.
He looks confused, like a man who has never had to wrestle with death.
And then finally, when he regains himself, trying what looks like a smile, he shouts, pointing toward a fenced yard lined with white vans.
It doesn’t look like England.
It looks like away from home. Something whispers to me.
The wind here doesn’t carry the smell of salt like the sea back home, it carries silence. An indifferent kind. And occasional stares that hold the weight of a verdict, like the land itself, wondering how you slipped through the cracks of its design. Looks that scrape at your skin, not out of curiosity, but disbelief, as if you’re what happens when the world forgets to close a door.
I step off the White man’s van last. My legs forget how to move.
My tongue is still dust. But another home is better than no home at all.
I carry nothing but the shirt on my back and the little wrap of salt pressed deep into my pocket. I don’t know why I keep it anymore. Maybe because it’s all I have. Maybe because it reminds me I am not a ghost yet.
Inside the shelter, the walls are grey. The floors creak. Ten beds in a room meant for four. A boy coughs blood into his palm and wipes it on the mattress. A girl sleeps with her arm over her face like the world is too ugly to see.
I sit near the radiator. It doesn’t work. I press my forehead to the cold wall. This is England.
The made-up country.
The story we told to survive.
The thing we whispered in the dark to keep death from taking us too soon.
When someone asks my name. I don’t answer.
So, they call me the boy who doesn’t talk.
But later that night, I remember how I stepped outside, the sky looking just like the desert did. A black mouth swallowing stars. I open the wrap of salt. It’s clumped now, hardened from all the sweat and time. I pour a little into my palm.
“Mama, I found a new home,” I whisper.
Then I wait. Not for help.
Not for the thoughts of home. Not for Allah.
Just for the wind to answer. Or for nothing at all.