In the last several years there have been a number of books about the horrors of child soldiers and the horrors occurring in various parts of Africa, including the best seller A Long Way Gone by Ishamael Beah (Sierra Leone), Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins, and What Is the What by David Eggers.

    Now comes one from Emmanuel Jal, one of the Lost Boys of the Sudan. It is excellent and deserves a wide audience.

    Jal tells his story of his journey into hell, beginning approximately at age seven. It’s not clear to me how much of the book is his own writing and how much has been told to co-writer Megan Lloyd Davies. But that probably doesn’t matter as the authenticity of Jal’s journey is never in doubt

    Born in Sudan in a time of peace, Jal’s life quickly turns wretched as the civil war between northern and southern Sudan develops (largely over oil). Jal’s family moves further and further south to avoid the devastating effects of the war . Within a short period of time, he loses his father, who leaves to train with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), witnesses the rape of his aunt, and becomes permanently separated from his mother and siblings. He is then sent to Ethiopia, supposedly to go to school. There is no schooling, and a two year period of almost unimaginable struggling for survival begins for this now nine year old.

    Jal is filled with hatred, both by what he has been told by the adults in his world as well as what he has seen and experienced. Before long, he finds himself training to be a child soldier. He is not forced into the child soldier role but chooses it (to the degree a seven-nine year old has free will) as he wants revenge for what the northern Muslims have done to his family and his world.

    Jal wants to kill Muslims, but his first taste of war as a ‘soldier’ comes when the Ethiopians turn on the Sudanese orphans and rebels and begin to expel them. His life then gets worse, if that is possible, as the southern Sudanese rebels begin to fight amongst themselves as the Nuer and Dinka tribes turn against each other. Forced marches, food deprivations, betrayal by friends and witnessing man’s inhumanity barely describe what Jal experiences. He carries an AK47 which is bigger than he is. And when he finally does kill, it does not seem to quell his anger or hatred.

    At one point Jal almost turns to cannibalism simply to survive, but according to War Child, he has a vision of Jesus and chooses not to go down that road. Shortly thereafter, an English aid worker, Emma McCune (the same Emma from the book Emma), takes him into her home and seeks to rescue him from the life of a child soldier. And thus begins a long and rocky exit from his world of child soldiery, if not from the hate and emotional destruction he has experienced. When Emma is soon killed in an auto accident, Jal is without a sponsor. He is in and out of schools, lives on the streets in Kenya, meets other individuals who seek to and do help him. But it is not an easy journey from the hell he has lived.

     Jal begins to mix music with his attempts at schooling. He and several other lost boys form a singing group and a society to help others in similar condition. Eventually he makes his way first as a gospel singer and ultimately as a hip-hop artist. At first he is successful in Kenya and ultimately internationally. His music takes him around the world as he uses it both to sooth himself and as a way to bring attention to what is happening in Sudan.

    As unlikely an odyssey as this sounds, from the depths of depravity to the hopefulness of his recovery and achievements, War Child  amazes. That an individual can survive what Jal has experienced and go on to devote his life to peace, for me, puts him in a category that has very few equals.

    There are parts of the book that are beautifully written, if that word can be used for his graphic descriptions of the horrors of what Jal saw, experienced, and perpetrated.  Certainly War Child deserves to rise to the top of the list of books on child soldiers and on what is continuing to happen in Africa today. 

(A documentary by the same name, War Child, was released late last year and tells the same story as the one in his memoir. The film has won numerous awards, and Jal’s music recordings and albums, and now his book, have given him an international stage on which he is seeking to make the world aware of what has and continues to happen in Sudan).

  

Update: NYTimes today has a story of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the Congo that sadly indicates that the kidnapping of children and making them sex slaves and killing machines continues, and worse, all sides of the conflict there seem to be using children. It’s madness.

Further Update: See Bob Herbert’s column here about “The Invisible War.” He writes about the Congo and the ‘profound evils’ occurring there, primarily the war of rape and destruction of women and young girls that has gotten only minimal coverage. Madness. Madness.

Final Update - 2/23/09 - I went to see and hear Emmanuel Jal for myself this afternoon at Howard U where he was speaking and signing books. There were about 150 students there from Bell Multicultural High School in DC. Many of them had seen the War Child documentary, and they were clearly amazed at what Jal had to say.  The first question from the kids: “What was the hardest thing about being a child soldier?” Jal told them how he close he came to eating his close friend in order to save himself from starving,” something he goes into in detail in the memoir. 

After answering questions for about 45 minutes, mostly in a soft spoken, thoughtful way, Jal was asked to sing one of his rap songs. He had told the audience that he had turned to music as a way of trying to stay sane after he was taken to Kenya by an aid worker. His rap song was the ‘hit’ of the afternoon for the kids and was an emotional time for Jal as he ‘sang’ about his lost childhood.

My father is reading the memoir and has questioned how is it possible for Jal to have remembered such detail from those horrible times in the Sudan and Ethiopia.  I asked Jal that question afterwards, and he said that maybe good memories can leave you but the terrible ones don’t. Or at least haven’t left him.

Jal said he is still a soldier, although now one for peace.  He is speaking and singing around the world about what has gone on in his country,  and he is also raising money to build a school in Southern Sudan.  Check out his website here.