Irony and tragedy are among those notions whose primary interest lies in the fact that they have been taken up by different disciplines. They have generated a number of writings from different approaches, philosophical, psychoanalytical, sociological and literary, based on different assumptions and a priori. We will address these questions in the context of French-language literature from sub-Saharan Africa with a work that, in our opinion, gives a privileged position to these two modalities, "Allah n'est pas obligé" by Ahmadou Kourouma.