OUTTARRA from FENGOLO

                                                 

He was short, skinny, with sunken cheeks typically those of a chain smoker. A scraggy beard just added to the nondescript personality. His attire was always the same, dark coloured pants and an even darker repulsive smelly shirt with plastic sandals. At first glance, though, there was something mesmerising about him, may be his eyes, which seemed rather sharp. They somehow did not gel with his overall persona. Or maybe the fact, that he was so coherent and articulate in his speech, which again was rather odd. In Africa, the norm was to talk incessantly, annoyingly repetitive and in a language which sounded like French but only occasionally. In fact one really had to exercise one’s restraint to the optimum limit from repeating verbatim what had been spoken a dozen times by more than a dozen people.

Outtarra is a common West African family name and the person bearing this name could be of any nationality in the sub Saharan West Africa ie Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire or may be even Guinea. It was more important for him to be identified as a ‘Malinke’, which incidentally is an ethnic group amongst the umpteen number of such groups in all these countries. Malinke are the dominant tribe in neighbouring Mali. The ethnicity here takes precedence over everything else including nationality. Getting back to Mr Outtarra, the man who has just been described above, was the chief spokesperson as he liked to describe himself, of all the foreigners in that village called Fengolo in Western Côte d'Ivoire. Yes he was a foreigner in his own land and so were all the villagers. The reason for their being treated as foreigners by the locals are strange but well to be honest, haven’t we heard of the “sons of the soil”, right here in India. 

Outtarra was my source, as the sleuths would like to call their informants, only difference being that he wasn’t being paid to do this. Generally intelligence operatives resort to various means to elicit information, the three Ws weaknesses ‘wine’, ‘women’ and ‘wealth’ money of course makes the mare go, wine being the other universal vice  and women even Rishi Vishwamitra could not control himself and fell for the charms of Menaka. History is replete with stories of Mataharis who have turned the tides of war many times. But Outtarra was keeping me posted with the happenings purely from a very selfish perspective and that was of self preservation. He and his ethnicity brethren knew they were being targetted by the “We” pronounced as “Vay” people.The We, sometimes called the Krahn or Guere, are an indigenous African people that inhabit areas in eastern Liberia and western Côte d'Ivoire. 

The fact that the two ethnicities had also embraced different religions, ‘We'  had adopted Christianity and ‘Malinkes' were essentially Moslem, may have played a part, but that was not the major issue. The core of the problem was post colonial arbitrary division of boundaries of nations. Asia and Africa have been at the receiving end at the hands of their respective colonial masters. Brothers turned into bitter rivals by this travesty of history. He had his own little business essentially dealing in Timber, the buyers were the Lebanese merchants who controlled this illegal trade in the war torn nation. Considering Ivorian standards he was well to do and was a natural leader of his community.

His information was always timely and gave us an edge over the militias, who were planning attacks on Fengolo itself.  Belligerents were located on either side of a Zone laid down by the UN. The village was located in the “Zone of Confidence”, a misnomer as that zone was everything but confident, the villagers in the Zone were lucrative targets for both sides. Fengolo lying to the Northern end of the Zone was targetted by the Govt backed militias. With his critical inputs we, the Casque Bleu (Blue Berets) managed to preempt the militias and prevented any major mishaps, so much so that the Force Commander Maj Gen Abdulaye Fall, a Senegalese national,  singled out the Duekouye Military Observers Team  and commended its sterling contribution to peacekeeping.

Actually it was Outtarra who deserved this commendation.