Of barren lands and broken promises: Writing social change in Kourouma’s Suns of Independence and Allah Is Not Obliged

This article examines the political and aesthetic strategies of resistance in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Suns of Independence (1981) and Allah Is Not Obliged (2006), exploring the dual dynamics of mourning and mobilization as resistance strategies in their postcolonial narratives. In Suns of Independence, physical infertility becomes a symbolic indictment of nationalist disillusionment and sociopolitical stagnation, while in Allah Is Not Obliged, the figure of the child soldier dramatizes the collapse of moral order in war-torn postcolonial African societies. Thus, this article argues that Kourouma employs these metaphors as intentional strategies of resistance and ethical engagement, positing that the entwinement of personal trauma with the broader narrative of national deterioration enables Kourouma to transform individual suffering into allegories of systemic failure. The article centres Kourouma’s works as an exemplification of literature’s epistemic power as a mode of knowledge production that simultaneously diagnoses postcolonial disorder and gestures towards the possibility of ethical renewal.