War Child

"War Child by Emmanuel Jal, who’s mainly known as a Sudanese rapper. The story he tells in songs is that he was a child soldier, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, basically the children of South Sudanese who were killed, and their villages destroyed, in the 1990s by North Sudanese militias, the forerunners of the Janjaweed. The Lost Boys then had to trudge for months across Sudan to find safe haven in the refugee camps over the border in Ethiopia. Jal’s autobiography is extraordinarily well-told, and chilling. He gives mercilessly detailed accounts of brutal hand-to-hand fighting as the child soldiers of the South, the SPLA – the Southern guerrilla movement – went into combat against North Sudanese forces around Juba for example. And these were 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds doing the most horrendous things: decapitating bodies, stringing their enemies up. It’s an incredible document of just how nasty and savage this all was, and it was all going on just ten years ago. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It also gives us a very revealing account of how brutal the SPLA was. They were often lauded as a great liberation movement by many of their American backers, but they were pretty nasty, and the way they trained these child soldiers, the discipline they instilled in them, the harsh training methods, is all there in the book. It’s a gripping read: very memorable images of the fighting, and the sheer animal brutality meted out by both sides. Having read that, it’s almost a wonder they managed to make peace in 2005. Jal was lucky in that he was rescued from the SPLA by some western do-gooders in Nairobi, who recognised him as an unusually intelligent child and gave him an education. To a certain extent he’s been able to live a decent well-adjusted life since, but then he wrote this: about the nightmares he has, and how the experiences shaped him. It is to me the most visceral, well-communicated account of how awful that civil war was. Jal, I think, lives in London now; he was going to be a great star and signed lots of recording contracts, but I don’t think he’s really taken off. I suspect he’s too clever, but, rather than listen to his records, I can recommend his autobiography instead."