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A Story of War, Trauma Recovery, and Friendship: At Night All Blood is Black
We embraced each other by our names —
Montaigne, “Of Friendship”
Alfa Ndiaye, a young Senegalese is plunged into a war as an African soldier fighting for the French Army against the Germans. This is not a war with any end in sight. It absorbs soldiers one after the next into its belly. It offers nothing but a monotonous routine of bullets flying overhead at day, some falling on soldiers, machete ripping bodies apart, and nights that give nothing more than home in damped trenches with bowls of soup, and moist regalia all through. There’s no escape from this battlefield, the only way out is death and if fortunate, pension, which is seldom achieved. The soldiers in this army are under coercion to fight and run in the arms of death at the sound of Captain Armand’s whistle. No one stays below the trenches when he blows, like rats scurrying from their holes they run out to meet machine guns and snipers waiting for them.
Ndiaye lost his best friend in the war, Mademba Diop, and it changed his life forever. Ndiaye described Diop as his ‘soul brother’, someone he fought back to back with in the war. It was Mademba with whom Alfa dreamt along even in the battle, fought arm to arm with in the hope of dying to the same bullet, or maybe surviving together for the same pension…
