Slave, Hero, Victim: The Child Soldier Narrative in Context
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Transcript of Slave, Hero, Victim: The Child Soldier Narrative in Context
Slave, Hero, Victim: The Child Soldier Narrative in Context
by
Kaelyn Elizabeth Alexandria Kaoma
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English University of Toronto
© Copyright by Kaelyn Kaoma 2017
ii
Slave, Hero, Victim: The Child Soldier Narrative in Context
Kaelyn Kaoma
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
University of Toronto
2017
Abstract
This dissertation interrogates the newly prominent figure of the child soldier in African
literature. I examine a number of recent texts narrating the child soldier experience, both
memoir (Ishmael Beah, Emmanuel Jal, China Keitetsi, Senait Mehari, Grace Akallo,
Tchicaya Missamou, Niromi de Soyza) and fiction (Uzodinma Iweala, Ahmadou
Kourouma, Emmanuel Dongala, Chris Abani). The anthropologist David Rosen argues
that the contemporary Western humanitarian narrative often makes an automatic
assumption of innocence based on age that is not necessarily applicable in non-Western
cultures. The danger of imposing such Western frameworks on non-Western cultures is
that it risks engaging in the same colonial tropes of paternalism towards the native
“child” that were used to maintain dominance over colonized populations. Yet the hunger
for narratives that portray the child soldier as an innocent victim who eventually is
rescued and rehabilitated, as well as the fact that child soldier narratives are almost
purely an African genre (even though there are substantial numbers of child soldiers in
Asia, South America and the Middle East) suggests the kind of Orientalism that Edward
Said warned us against: a desire to see Africa specifically as a place of violence and lost
innocence that can be redeemed through Western intervention.
iii
This study takes a comparative approach, contextualizing the current literary
trope of depicting the child soldier as lost innocent by comparing these contemporary
narratives to a range of other texts. Chapter One examines the striking parallels between
child soldier narratives and antebellum American slave narratives. Chapter Two
juxtaposes child soldier narratives to the very different portrayal of South African youth
involved in the militarized anti-apartheid movement. Chapter Three compares child
soldier narratives to three texts narrating the experiences of young adult soldiers in the
Zimbabwean war of liberation. Chapter Four questions why the child soldier is almost
invariably imagined as African, while analyzing the one real exception to this rule,
Niromi de Soyza's Tamil Tigress. Ultimately, through its examination of literary
representations, my dissertation exposes the category of (African) child soldiers as highly
problematic, allowing us to reconsider implicit myths of childhood and human rights.
iv
Acknowledgments
This research was financially supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, the Department of English, the School of Graduate Studies and New
College. I am also grateful to the University of the Witswatersrand, the University of
Cape Town, and the University of Zambia for hosting me as a visiting scholar. Thank
you as well to the helpful staff at the UNISA Library in Pretoria and the National
Archives of Zambia.
I feel truly fortunate to have the committee that I had for my thesis. Neil ten Kortenaar
was, without a doubt, the best supervisor I could have ever hoped for. His advice and
suggestions shaped this project in so many crucial ways, and I was constantly amazed by
his ability to respond with extensive, detailed commentary within days of me sending
him a draft. Uzo Esonwanne's careful reading and thoughtful feedback made my work so
much stronger. Alexie Tcheuyap's insights and faith in this project have also been
invaluable. Many thanks to my external examiner, Eleni Coundouriotis, for her incisive,
comprehensive, and generous feedback on my manuscript. I would also like to thank my
examining committee, Ato Quayson and Cannon Schmitt, for their engagement with my
work and thought-provoking questions during my defense. Thank you as well to Helene
Strauss, who planted the seeds for this project back in my MA by assigning Ishmael
Beah and David Rosen in her class on "Intra-African Mobilities." I also owe a debt of
gratitude to Marguerite Perry, Tanuja Persaud, Sangeeta Panjwani, and the other
administrative staff in the Department of English for guiding me through this process.
v
I am deeply thankful for my friends and colleagues here at the University of Toronto,
including Chima Osakwe, Matt Schneider, Melissa Auclair, and many more. I doubt I
would have ever finished this dissertation without the support (and peer pressure!) of my
writing group, whose rotating cast included Elisa Tersigni, Nathan Murray, and
numerous others. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Jay Rajiva, Joanne Leow, and Esther de
Bruijn for all the advice and inspiration. And of course, I can't forget to acknowledge my
"work wife" Irene Mangoutas and my dear former office-mate Katie Mullins for their
company during all those long days working in JHB 722.
I also want to thank my extended family, both here in North America and Zambia,
especially my parents, Don and Betsy Morrison, for their support and encouragement in
everything that I do, and their keen interest in this project in particular. Thank you to my
husband, Lazarus Kaoma, for his patience and his pride in my accomplishments. Finally,
thanks to my son Levi, for being a welcome distraction from my work over the past few
years.
vi
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One: The Narrativization of the African Child Soldier Experience:
Theorizing a Genre .................................................................................................................. 15
Chapter Two: Innocent Victims or “Young Lions”: The Differing Representations of
the Child Soldier Figure .......................................................................................................... 67
Chapter Three: "We had no choice:" Decision-Making in Adult & Child Soldier
Narratives .............................................................................................................................. 117
Chapter Four: Child Soldier Narratives: An African Genre? .................................................... 155
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 206
Works Consulted ........................................................................................................................ 215
1
Introduction
When we hear the term "child soldier," what do we picture? Most likely, the image that
comes to mind is something close to the iconic image on the front cover of former Sierra
Leonean child soldier Ishmael Beah's bestselling memoir, A Long Way Gone: a black
African boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, wearing shorts and battered flip-flops rather than
fatigues, burdened by the weapon he carries, which is almost as tall as he is, looking
downcast -- a lost innocent, his childhood stolen, forced to fight against his will by
depraved adults. 1
Indeed, this is the figure that Beah ultimately represents, although it is
the process of rehabilitation in a UNICEF camp that teaches him how he has been
brainwashed and exploited. It is also the figure that appears in the numerous novels and
memoirs detailing the experiences of child soldiers that have appeared in print since the
turn of the century. However, how does the young Zimbabwean freedom fighter, the
teenaged South African anti-apartheid activist, or the adolescent Sri Lankan girl who
joins the Tamil Tigers fit into this picture?
This project investigates a burgeoning new genre of African literature: the child
soldier narrative. I examine a number of recent texts, both memoir (Beah's A Long Way
Gone, Emmanuel Jal's War Child, China Keitetsi's Child Soldier, etc.) and fiction
(Uzodinma Iweala's Beast of No Nation, Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah is not obliged, Ken
Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy, etc.), published by writers from a wide range of countries,
including Sierra Leone (Beah), Sudan (Jal), and Uganda (Keitetsi). Of course, child
1 This cover image comes from a picture taken by photojournalist Michael Kamber in June 2003. The
original caption, as given on Kamber's personal website, reads "A child soldier in Ganta, a town on the
Liberia-Guinea border. The town was shelled so heavily that not a single building was left standing."
2
soldiers themselves are not a new phenomenon, despite increasing attention paid to them
in recent years. Scholars like to point to the 1212 Children’s Crusade or bugle boys in the
American Civil War as examples of young people involved in warfare throughout
history. What is new is the current boom in child soldier narratives. With the exception
of Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1985), all of the texts I will be examining were published
within the last fifteen years. This veritable explosion of texts narrating the child soldier
experience signals a new literary (sub)genre that demands exploration, as it raises
questions about this particular political moment. The title of my dissertation signals my
comparative approach, contextualizing the current literary trope of depicting the child
soldier as lost innocent by comparing these contemporary narratives to a range of other
texts, including nineteenth-century American slave narratives and novels narrating the
experiences of South African youth involved in the militarized anti-apartheid movement.
The anthropologist David Rosen argues that the contemporary Western
humanitarian narrative often makes an automatic assumption of innocence based on age
that is not necessarily applicable in non-Western cultures. While it is certainly not my
intention to argue in favour of children fighting in wars, some of the ideologies used by
humanitarian organizations in their mission to eradicate the use of child soldiers (which
are then echoed in child soldier narratives) raise troubling questions about paternalism
and agency (or the lack thereof) that need to be critically examined. Moreover, while
earlier texts such as Kourouma's Allah is not obliged and Emmanuel Dongala's Johnny
Mad Dog (originally published in French in 2000 and 2002, respectively) present less
sympathetic portrayals of the child soldier, the most recent texts speak to a very
particular conceptualization of the child soldier that is arguably rooted in Western
3
notions of childhood innocence. The hunger for narratives that portray the child soldier
as an innocent victim who eventually is rescued and rehabilitated, as well as the fact that
child soldier narratives are almost purely an African genre (even though there are
substantial numbers of child soldiers in Asia, South America and the Middle East)
suggests something like the practice of Orientalism that Edward Said warned us about: a
desire to see Africa as a place of violence and lost innocence that can be redeemed
through Western intervention. Indeed, child soldier narratives are strongly oriented
towards the global North: they are published in the West, primarily marketed to and
consumed by a Western audience, and subsequently tend to reflect certain ideas about
Africa and Africans common in the West. My project is to look at some of the tensions
between the generic pressure to shape the narratives in a way that conforms with largely
Western expectations and moments of resistance within the texts themselves.
The definition of “child soldier” is surprisingly contentious. Rosen says the
combination of “child” and “soldier” seems semantically incommensurable, even an
oxymoron, being “an unnatural conflation of two contradictory and incompatible terms”
(Armies 3). According to Michael Wessells, the term “offends most people’s sensibilities
and challenges cherished assumptions about children” (1), namely that they are
immature, innocent, and need to be protected. By contrast, Wessells continues, “the term
soldier may evoke images of uniformed people, mostly men, who use guns, answer to a
particular commander, and travel with well-organized fighting units” (5-6, emphasis
mine). The idea of a child filling this role seems “paradoxical” and “unsettling”
(Honwana, Child 3). Moreover, as Wessells himself points out, this image of the soldier,
with its emphasis on uniform and arms, does not even necessarily apply to the various
4
ways children participate in warfare. P.W. Singer says, “A ‘child soldier’ is generally
defined (under both international law and common practice) as any person under
eighteen years of age who is engaged in deadly combat or combat support as part of an
armed force or group” (7). The Cape Town Principles, “an agreement adopted by
participants attending a symposium organised by UNICEF in Cape Town in April 1997”
(Twum-Danso 13), expand Singer’s definition to a certain extent, stating that a child
soldier is:
any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular
armed force in any capacity, including but not limited to cooks, porters,
messengers, and those accompanying such groups, other than purely as family
members. Girls recruited for sexual purposes and forced marriage are included in
this definition. It does not, therefore, only refer to a child who is carrying or has
carried arms. (Cape Town Principles)
By this definition then, Heart of Fire memoirist Senait Mehari, who never actually fired
a gun and has had her status as a child soldier questioned, would still be considered a
child soldier because she accompanied the Eritrean Liberation Front. However, Wessells
provocatively poses the question of whether or not stone-throwing Palestinian youth or
even teenage gang members could be considered child soldiers under such broad
definitions (6). He thinks the definition “should focus on mistreatments of children
stemming from association with armed forces in the context of political violence” (6).
However, his choice of the word “mistreatment” risks denying agency to the child soldier
to a certain extent. Is the condition of the child soldier considered mistreatment in itself
5
because it is not congruent with a certain conception of childhood as a time of peace and
play? Is it still considered mistreatment if the child him- or herself does not view it as
such? Would a young person who "willingly"2 joins an armed group and finds meaning
in participation still be considered a child soldier under such a definition?
Defining the “child soldier” also raises the question of who exactly is considered
a child. In their definitions of “child soldier,” the United Nations and most other
humanitarian groups make age the defining characteristic of childhood. For most of
these groups, that age is eighteen years. Singer claims, “Around the world, eighteen years
has become the generally accepted transition point to adulthood” (7). He points out that
most UN member states withhold the right to vote until citizens attain that age, and
criminal penalties are often less severe for those under this threshold. This is known as
the “straight 18” position when adopted by groups opposing the use of child soldiers.
As Rosen points out, “for the rest of the world, however, it is by no means clear that that
all persons under age eighteen are or even should be deemed children” (Armies 3).
Wessells calls attention to the fact that in many non-Western societies, including those in
sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly in rural areas, “a person is regarded as an adult once
he or she has completed the culturally scripted initiation ceremony or rite of passage into
manhood or womanhood,” which he notes typically take place around the age of fourteen
(5).3 By insisting that any person under eighteen is a child, humanitarian organizations
are universalizing a notion of childhood that is actually specific to a particular culture
2 I deliberately place this word in scare quotes, and will discuss its implications further in chapter 2.
3However, this still leaves open the possibility that uninitiated or prepubescent soldiers are still scandalous
in African contexts.
6
and not necessarily applicable elsewhere. Of course, all laws must necessarily
universalize, but the fact remains that a specifically Western concept of childhood is
being held up as the model for all cultures. Moreover, such notions of childhood are also
rooted in class. Alcinda Honwana notes that “Unlike middle-class children whose parents
and families are in a position to support them until they are able to sustain themselves (in
many cases well over the age of eighteen), many children around the world assume work
and social responsibilities at an early age” (Child 41). In fact, as Wessells points out, “In
times of war, many cultures regard fighting as an appropriate form of work, an extension
of the labor adults provide for their families” (7). A child soldier in some contexts may
be seen as a young adult contributing to his or her household.
Rosen notes that throughout history, warfare has always drawn in “the young and
the strong” (Armies 4). Moreover, he points out that “in preindustrial societies there is no
single, fixed chronological age at which young people enter into the actions, dramas, and
rituals of war” (4). He points to various examples of non-Western societies who recruit
warriors under the age of 18, including the Maasai, the Samburu, and the Dahomey
Amazons, who recruited girls between the ages of 9 and 15 (4). Singer uses similar
anthropological examples to argue the reverse. He points out that the Zulu did not
traditionally draft soldiers into military regiments until they were aged 18-20, and that
only married men were conscripted in the Kano region in West Africa, though he does
not specify at what age marriage typically took place (9). While Singer admits,
“Obviously, childhood is not a fixed state, simply bounded by eighteen years as its upper
limit,” he insists that “every culture withholds powers and responsibilities from
youngsters and places them under the care and control of guardians” (7). However, as
7
we have seen, who exactly is considered a “youngster” varies from culture to culture, and
the age at which one is deemed an adult can be substantially younger than the eighteen
insisted on by the Western humanitarian narrative. Although this argument may seem
counterintuitive, arguing against child labour laws, the danger of imposing a culturally-
specific (i.e. the modern UN-centric, human-rights-defined international legal culture)
framework on cultures where it may be alien is that it risks engaging in the same colonial
tropes of paternalism towards the native “child” that were used to maintain dominance
over colonized populations. It also demonizes the adult Africans who are presumed to be
exploiting and brainwashing these children. In terms of purely practical implications, it
risks excluding older children and teenagers from the rehabilitation offered to child
soldiers; when age defines one’s proximity to innocence, we find ourselves
“hierarchiz[ing] vulnerability” (Härting 72). In terms of literature, it may lead to
particular biases and (conscious or unconscious) pressures to shape stories or read them
in a certain way.4
Not only are notions of childhood culturally relative, but the very idea of
childhood as a separate state of human development is a fairly new one. Both Honwana
and Rosen point to the work of the influential French art historian Phillippe Ariès in
making this point. In his seminal book, Centuries of Childhood, Ariès posited that “there
was no place for childhood in the medieval world” (33), pointing out that medieval artists
portrayed children exactly the same as adults, except on a smaller scale. But during the
4 Despite these concerns, I will follow David Rosen’s example and continue to use the term “child
soldier” as it is defined by the Cape Town Principles, not because I agree that the Straight 18 position
“fairly represents who is a child” but to “highlight the difficulties of adopting this perspective” (Armies 3).
8
Renaissance in Europe, “the germ of a set of new ideas about childhood developed. At its
heart are the belief in the innocence of childhood, the practice of segregating children
from adults, and the isolation and prolongation of childhood as a special protected state”
(Rosen, Armies 7). Viviana Zelizer is also cited by numerous critics for her argument that
the “conception of the child as an economically valuable asset, a laborer, in the 1850s
gives way by the 1930s to a situation where even working-class American families
considered the child 'economically useless' but 'emotionally priceless'” (Bhabha 1527). It
is these beliefs in the essential innocence of children and their right to be protected from
all kinds of labour that shape the drive by many humanitarian organizations to eradicate
the use of child soldiers. However, this conception of childhood is not universal and
timeless, as sometimes is assumed; it is located in a particular time and place.
That this notion of childhood is a fairly recent historical invention can also be
seen in the fact that children in the Western world have until quite recently been active
participants in warfare. Honwana points out that the term infantry, referring to the
military unit comprised of foot soldiers, derives from the Latin infant, which of course
means "child," because originally it was young boys apprenticed to knights who followed
their masters into battle (Child 26). She says that Napoleon and Nelson both recruited
teen and pre-teen boys that would be considered child soldiers under the Cape Town
Principles (27). Rosen draws attention to the great number of underage boys who fought
in the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars, noting that “Applying modern
humanitarian terminology, the war to end slavery was in large part fought by child
soldiers in numbers even greater than those found in contemporary wars” (Armies 5). .
Moreover, these boys were valorized for their contributions in hagiographic accounts that
9
saw them as heroes and martyrs, not victims (Armies 6). He gives Gavroche in Les
Misérables and Johnny Tremain in the novel of that same name as specific literary
examples (“Literature” 116). Singer responds that young fighters were the exception, not
the rule: “these boys fulfilled minor or ancillary support roles and were not considered
true combatants. They neither dealt out death nor were considered legitimate targets”
(11). He also attempts to debunk the myth of the Children’s Crusade, noting that the boys
who participated were unarmed and seeking “to take back the Holy Land by the sheer
power of their faith” (12). However, the Cape Town Principles explicitly state that a
child soldier does not need to carry arms to be defined as such. This definition also
covers the “support roles” that Singer seems to think disqualifies pages and drummer
boys from the ranks of child soldierdom. By the logic of the same Western humanitarian
principles Singer subscribes to, these boys would still be considered child soldiers.
We can see how these debates about child soldiers play out in literature by tracing
the trajectory of the child soldier narrative's development. Although Saro-Wiwa’s
Sozaboy (1985), set during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70, is often seen as at least an
important precursor to the contemporary child soldier narrative (Coundouriotis 195,
Sanders 221), the genre began in earnest in the first years of the new millennium with the
two bleak French-language novels, Allah n’est pas obligé (2000) by Ahmadou
Kourouma and Johnny Chien Méchant (2002) by Emmanuel Dongala. Kourouma’s
novel follows Birahima, a foul-mouthed street kid-turned- “small-soldier,” from Guinea
to Liberia to Sierra Leone, while Dongala’s novel contrasts the story of the titular Johnny
Mad Dog, a brutal sixteen-year-old rebel in the Congo, with that of the saintly Laokolé,
also sixteen, who is just trying to escape the violence. Both of these novels paint a more
10
complicated image of the child soldier than simply innocent victim. These novels were
followed by the European release of two memoirs of former girl soldiers, China
Keitetsi’s Child Soldier (2002) and Senait Mehari’s Heart of Fire (2004), the latter
originally published in German. Keitetsi was eight years old when she ran away from her
dysfunctional family and joined Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army in
Uganda, where she spent years before escaping as an adult to South Africa, then
Denmark. Mehari’s father left her at the age of six in the custody of the Eritrean
Liberation Front during their war of independence with Ethiopia, but eventually brought
her to Germany where she embarked on a musical career. The year 2005 saw the
publication of Beasts of No Nation, Nigerian-American writer Uzodinma Iweala’s novel
set in an unnamed West African country and partially inspired by a meeting with Child
Soldier author Keitetsi (Iweala, "Writing" 10). His young protagonist Agu comes under
the influence of the sadistic, yet charismatic Commandant after soldiers attack his
village. Iweala’s novel is also the most obviously influenced by Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy in
terms of its language. Two years later, Ishmael Beah’s best-selling memoir of his time as
a child soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone, was published. 2007 was a
blockbuster year for child soldier narratives, as two other narratives were published that
year: Girl Soldier, Grace Akallo’s account of her kidnapping by the Lord’s Resistance
Army in Uganda, and Song for Night, Chris Abani’s novella about the voiceless young
mine defuser My Luck. Former Sudanese child soldier-turned-hip-hop-artist Emmanuel
Jal’s memoir War Child (2009) came on the heels of Beah’s success, followed by
Tchicaya Missamou’s In the Shadow of Freedom (2010), which traces his trajectory from
a gun-toting adolescent in the Congo to marine in the U.S.A.
11
This thesis examines the above texts over the course of four chapters. Chapter
One, "The Narrativization of the African Child Soldier Experience: Theorizing a Genre,"
attempts to define the child soldier narrative and considers whether it qualifies as a
standalone (sub)genre. I examine its various antecedents, including Latin American
testimonio, "misery lit" and most importantly, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave
narratives. There are striking parallels between child soldier narratives and slave
narratives in terms of their human rights agenda, their activist-authors, the role of the
white editor/collaborator/ghostwriter, and the controversies surrounding their
authenticity. In this chapter, I compare child soldier memoirs to the four slave narratives
deemed "classic" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: those of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs,
Mary Prince, and Olaudah Equiano. I also question the tendency of some critics to read
child soldier narratives as modern-day slave narratives, raising important questions about
choice and agency.
Chapter Two, "Innocent Victims or “Young Lions”: The Differing
Representations of the Child Soldier Figure," interrogates the representation of innocence
in these child soldier narratives. Literary representations of child soldiers often infantilize
these adolescent fighters and portray them as innocent victims who bear no responsibility
for their actions by virtue of their young age. I juxtapose child soldier narratives to the
very different portrayal of South African youth who participated in the often violent anti-
apartheid struggle, as represented in a quartet of novels responding to the 1976
"children's revolution" that started in Soweto. Very young students were involved in the
Soweto uprising, as well as other militarized protests against the apartheid regime, yet
they are rarely considered “child soldiers” per se. Certainly the term is never used in any
12
of the four “Soweto novels” that responded to and were published in the aftermath of this
uprising: Amandla by Miriam Tlali (1980), A Ride on the Whirlwind (1981) by Sipho
Sepamla, To Every Birth Its Blood (1981) by Mongane Serote, and The Children of
Soweto (1982) by Mbulelo Vizikungo Mzamane. The youth who joined Umkhonto we
Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress, or organized their own
groups in the townships with weapons supplied by MK, would seem to fit the UNICEF
definition of child soldiers. Yet, in South African literary representations, these young
people are rarely depicted as exploited innocents in need of Western protection; rather,
they are portrayed as heroic “young lions” (as they were dubbed by Nelson Mandela). I
argue that such a representation demonstrates that there are ways to recognize the youth
of child soldiers without infantilizing them or denying their agency.
Chapter Three, "'We had no choice:' Decision-Making in Adult & Child Soldier
Narratives," compares child soldier narratives to three texts narrating the experiences of
young adult soldiers in the Zimbabwean war of liberation: Charles Samupindi's Pawns
(1992), Alexander Kanengoni's Echoing Silences (1997) and Dan Wylie's memoir Dead
Leaves (2002). The Zimbabwean narratives share striking similarities with child soldier
narratives, yet the Zimbabwean/Rhodesian soldiers are much more likely to be presented
as taking responsibility for their actions, particularly the decision to join the struggle in
the first place. Even though the age difference between the child and nominally adult
soldiers is often insignificant, the generic pressures of the child soldier narrative (a
largely Western form with its representation of child soldiers based in a certain Western
conception of childhood) demand that the child soldier be represented as a victim who is
13
not really responsible for his actions, including the choices he may seem to make of his
own free will.
Chapter Four, "Child Soldier Narratives: An African Genre?" continues this
investigation into the trope of the child soldier as lost innocent, which I contend derives
from a readership located mostly in the West and invested in certain stereotypes of
Africa. Of course, this is not unique to child soldier narratives: it could equally be argued
that African literature as a whole is overly beholden to the West, given that so much of it
is published in non-indigenous languages, by Western publishing houses who may try to
shape texts to their own preconceptions of "Africa" and "Africans", and largely only read
in the West for various reasons that include economics, literacy, and lack of a reading
culture. Yet, the child soldier narrative seems distinctively positioned in its utter
invisibility in African contexts and its direct address of Western readers. At the same
time that child soldier narratives are a Western genre (at least in terms of readership), I
argue that they are simultaneously an African genre, in terms of what stories are being
told. Niromi de Soyza's Tamil Tigress (2011) is the one real exception to the rule of child
soldier narratives as African, being a memoir of the author's experience fighting in the
Sri Lankan Civil War as a young girl that, crucially, is actually marketed as a child
soldier narrative. However, the many ways in which this memoir differs from other child
soldier narratives suggests that it is an outlier and does not really fit into the genre, which
remains almost exclusively African.
By examining the child soldier narrative in context, and questioning who qualifies
as a child soldier, and why, I am suggesting a literary genealogy for the (sub)genre that
14
has not previously been explored in any detail. I look at the various ways the child
soldier figure has been interpreted in memoir and fiction: as an unnatural monster, as a
hero and a martyr, and most prominently, as an innocent victim and even a slave.
Ultimately, through its examination of literary representations both fictional and
autobiographical, my dissertation exposes the category of (African) child soldier as
highly problematic, allowing us to reconsider implicit myths of childhood and human
rights.
15
Chapter 1 The Narrativization of the African Child Soldier Experience:
Theorizing a Genre
In Ahmadou Kourouma's novel Allah is not obliged, boy soldier-narrator Birahima
claims "Child-soldiers are the most famous celebrities of the late twentieth century" (83).
Indeed, the enduring fascination with the child soldier figure well into the twenty-first
century has fed a growing number of memoirs and "memoir-style novels" (Moynagh,
"Human Rights" 40) on the topic, to the point where critics have treated the child soldier
narrative as its own subgenre.
In order to understand child soldier narratives, we might look to already-
established genres for antecedents: parallels can be seen with war memoirs, human rights
narratives, so-called "misery lit" and perhaps most clearly with slave narratives. I am not
the first to point out a relationship between child soldier narratives and slave narratives.
Mark Sanders names the Anglo-American slave narrative as one of the major precursors
of the child soldier narrative (207). Scholars such as Laura T. Murphy and Sadie Skinner
treat child soldier narratives as slave narratives. Child soldier memoirs especially bear a
strong resemblance to both nineteenth-century and modern slave narratives -- although a
number of child soldier novels approximate the memoir style in that they are first-person
accounts of the (fictional) child soldier experience -- and as such, will be my focus in
this chapter.
With the prevalence of the child soldier figure in the media today, it may be
helpful at this point to define what exactly is meant by "child soldier narratives."
Personal narratives of former child soldiers regularly appear in newspaper and magazine
16
articles, psychological and anthropological studies, activist or humanitarian pamphlets,
TV shows and films, even rap songs. However, my interest is primarily in long-form
literary (rather than journalistic) child soldier narratives: full-length published novels or
memoirs incorporating the child soldier experience as central to the narrative, usually
(but not exclusively) written in the first person. Let us understand child soldier
narratives as deliberate literary works primarily about the (fictional or non-fictional)
experiences of child soldiers. Child soldier narratives thus differ from oral testimony or
the transcription of an account that a (real) child soldier gives of their experiences to a
researcher, journalist or activist. The difference may seem unclear at times, particularly
in the case of the memoirs, which often involve a co-writer or other collaborator. John
Beverley provides a helpful distinction when he explains the difference between the
popular Latin American genre testimonio and recorded participant narrative/oral history:
in oral history, the intention of the recorder is central and the text is "data," whereas in
testimonio, the intentionality of the narrator (and his or her urgent need to communicate)
prevails (32). Testimony from child soldiers in non-fiction books or reports by
humanitarian groups is used as data to bolster the credited author or organization’s claim
or intention (usually a call to end the use of child soldiers). While the authors of
autobiographical child soldier narratives may share similar motives of ending the military
use of children and they often cite a desire to raise awareness so that no other child
suffers what they did, the intentionality belongs to the former child soldier, whose name
is placed on the front of the book as author. He or she thus makes a claim for
autobiography as a literary form, though whether a ghostwritten or otherwise
17
collaborative memoir really adheres to the terms of Phillippe Lejeune’s
"autobiographical pact" is something I will discuss in more detail later.
To consider the narrativization of the child soldier experience then is to meditate
on the shaping of the account in a specific way, to meet certain conventions. Of course, it
is not only written literary narratives that are shaped. Oral testimony is also manipulated,
with certain details exaggerated or omitted to appeal to one’s audience or interlocutor.
Anthropologist Alcinda Honwana makes the slightly cynical field observation that
"populations affected by war are likely to enhance their victim status in the presence of
NGOs" and that children especially "believe they must present themselves as helpless
and dependent in order to be seen as deserving of assistance" (Child Soldiers 15). A
similar type of trickster strategy may be seen in child soldier memoirs and fiction as
writers try to sell books and appeal to their almost exclusively Western audience.
Maureen Moynagh notes, "by the time that former child soldiers are in a position to
narrate their stories to a writer or editor, they are undoubtedly practiced at producing
many of the narrative elements that Western aid workers and journalists have come to
expect" ("Human Rights" 46). She quotes a passage from What is the What, the so-called
"autobiography" of Sudanese Lost Boy Valentino Achak Deng to support her point.
Deng (or his collaborator, Dave Eggers) writes "the tales of the Lost Boys have become
remarkably similar over the years . . . sponsors and newspaper reporters and the like
expect the stories to have certain elements, and the Lost Boys have been consistent in
their willingness to oblige" (Eggers 21). Thus, the narrativization of the child soldier
experience is the process by which the accounts or narratives of child soldiers are shaped
18
to meet the generic expectations (which themselves are heavily influenced by the desires
of their mainly Western readership) of the child soldier narrative.
At this point, it is worth examining the types of texts that have been classified as
child soldier narratives, and those that have been ruled out. There is remarkably little
consistency. Two South Africa-based scholars, Stephen Gray and J.A. Kearney, have
published surveys of the literature, although neither actually uses the term "child soldier
narrative" (Gray speaks of "child soldiers in African writing" while Kearney writes about
"the representation of child soldiers in contemporary African fiction"). While neither of
these scholars is explicitly trying to define a genre, their attempts to demarcate the terms
and limits of their respective studies are useful for just that purpose. In his article in
English Academy Review, Gray disqualifies texts such as K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen
Cents, Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, Mende Nazar’s Slave, and Dave Eggers’
What is the What, arguing that while they represent war-affected children, none of the
characters is actually a soldier.5 Kearney excludes What is the What for similar reasons.
He also dismisses Angelina Sithebe’s Holy Hill because there are only eight paragraphs
about the protagonist’s experiences as a child soldier and Burma Boy because of its
historical setting during World War II. Yet he counts Half of a Yellow Sun among these
narratives, although Adichie’s novel also has a historical setting, taking place only
5 Gray also discounts Bernard Ashley's Little Soldier, which Irina Kyulanova extensively compares to A
Long Way Gone, on the grounds that the former child soldier Kaninda from the fictional African country of
Lasai is only one (albeit major) character in a novel about youth gangs in London. Moreover, Little Soldier
is often classified as children's literature (Kyulanova 44, Rosen & Rosen 309). There are numerous
interesting examples of fictional child soldier narratives aimed at young audiences, such as Chanda’s Wars
by Allan Stratton, Age 14 by Geert Spillebeen, and Bamboo People by Mitali Perkins, but they are beyond
the purview of this dissertation.
19
twenty-two years after Burma Boy, and the child soldier High Tech is only a minor
character, introduced and summarily dispatched within thirteen pages. Gray includes
Burma Boy in his survey, concluding his article with a discussion of Bandele’s novel as a
"subtle riposte" ("Rites" 13) to all the child soldier narratives that went before.
Gray does, however, exclude Sozaboy (which Kearney does not even mention),
on the basis that its titular character Mene is nineteen years old at the time of recruitment
and an "eager volunteer" (5). However, the latter description is misleading, given that
Mene waffles back and forth about joining the army, torn between a desire to wear a
uniform and impress his girlfriend Agnes, and nightmares about being shot at. Moreover,
this is hardly a reason to disqualify somebody from being a child soldier. Not all child
soldiers in reality or literature are abducted or otherwise forcibly recruited. The issue of
choice and volunteerism is one I will discuss further in chapter 3. Furthermore, how Gray
arrives at his calculation of Mene’s precise age is unclear. Eleni Coundouriotis notes that
"the text offers contradictory information about his age" ("Child Soldier" 199). Patrick
Corcoran comes to the conclusion that, while naive and uneducated, Mene is not literally
a "soldier boy" based on the fact that he has hair on his chest and is old enough to get
married, but this disregards the fact that many people around the world marry at an age
when they still would be considered children in the global North. While Mene would not
be considered a child by his own community if he was old enough to marry, that does not
necessarily mean he is over the age of eighteen that delineates adulthood for many
Western groups working with child soldiers.
20
Given that Mene is described as a "small picken" (Saro-Wiwa 26) at the time of
Hitler and Sozaboy is generally understood to be set during the Biafran war of 1967-70, it
would seem that he must be over twenty years of age. Therefore, it is true he would not
be considered a child soldier under the Cape Town Principles. Gray also brings up an
earlier book that is not commonly counted among child soldier narratives: Charles
Samupindi’s Pawns (1992), about an 18-year-old named Daniel who is recruited into the
independence struggle in Zimbabwe. I will be discussing Samupindi's novel in a
subsequent chapter that compares the representation of young adult soldier (i.e. over the
age of 18) narratives to child soldier narratives. There is only a one-year age difference
between Daniel and Mene (based on Gray’s own calculations), and regardless, neither
would be considered child soldiers under UNICEF standards. Gray’s reasons for
excluding Sozaboy from the canon of child soldier narratives thus fall flat. At the very
least, Sozaboy should be considered an important "precursor" (Coundouriotis, "Child
Soldier" 195) to the contemporary child soldier narrative
Another text not mentioned by Kearney or Gray is Delia Jarrett-Macauley's 2005
novel Moses, Citizen and Me. Its protagonist-narrator is Julia, who returns to Sierra
Leone from London after many years' absence to confront her young cousin Citizen, who
murdered his own grandmother as a child soldier. Scholars Alison Mackey, David
Mastey and David Rosen all include this text in their discussions of child soldier
narratives. I exclude it because it is not a first-person account, nor is the child soldier the
main protagonist. Gray and Kearney also fail to take into account Girl Soldier (2007) by
Grace Akallo and Faith J.H. McDonnell, which is considered by Mastey, Maureen
Moynagh and myself to be a child soldier narrative. It differs from the other child soldier
21
memoirs in terms of its structure, the expanded role of its co-writer (which I will discuss
in more detail later in chapter 1), and its overt evangelism, but it is still a first-person
account of a child soldier (as defined by UN standards) which is marketed as such, with
the aforesaid child soldier's name on the cover as author. One text that no other scholars,
to my knowledge, include in their discussions of child soldier narratives is In the Shadow
of Freedom (2010) by Tchicaya Missamou with Travis Sentell. This memoir traces
Missamou's journey from his childhood in the Republic of Congo to joining the U.S.
Marines and fighting in Iraq. As a young teenager, he carries a gun for protection and is
briefly recruited to man checkpoints during the 1993 civil war. As such, he is treated as a
child soldier in paratextual materials and reviews. The text is an interesting anomaly as
Missamou does not renounce war due to his childhood experiences, but instead chooses
to pursue a military career, although he has since gone back to school and started his own
business. Lucien Badjoko’s 2005 French-language memoir of his experiences as a child
soldier in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the 1990s, J’étais enfant soldat, has
also escaped much critical attention in the Anglophone world, as it has not yet been
translated. As such, it is beyond the scope of this particular project.
An important question to consider at this point is whether child soldier narratives
actually constitute a new literary genre. Tzvetan Todorov finds it helpful to think of
genres as "classes of texts that have been historically perceived as such" (198). Arguably,
child soldier narratives are beginning to be historically perceived as an independent class;
the term is popping up repeatedly in recent articles (Coundouriotis, Moynagh, Harlow,
Sanders, etc.) and dissertations (Mackey, Mastey). Stephen Gray calls these narratives a
"new sub-literature" ("Rites" 4). Although Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson do not
22
include child soldier narratives as one of their listed "Sixty Genres of Life Narrative" in
the second edition of Reading Autobiography (2010), they do refer to attempts by
scholars in Africa to link "testimonial stories of war and enslavement, such as child
soldier narratives, to larger struggles for national liberation" (224). They also refer to
"the memoir of a child soldier in Africa" (285) as an example of the "war memoir" and
the "trauma narrative," and cite Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone as an act of
witnessing.
Interestingly, Smith and Watson restrict their comments on child soldier
narratives to the life writing of African child soldiers. Certainly, child soldier narratives
as they currently exist are almost purely an African genre. One might even be able to go
as far as to say the genre should just be called African child soldier narratives (as Smith
and Watson seem to suggest), because so few are non-African. Niromi de Soyza’s 2011
memoir Tamil Tigress: My Story as a Child Soldier in Sri Lanka’s Bloody Civil War is a
rare example of a non-African child soldier narrative that is now widely available. David
Mastey points out that "similar stories written by authors from, or which take place in,
other regions of the world, such as p Cakti’s ‘autofictional’ story Gorilla (2008) or
Patricia McCormick’s novel Never Fall Down (2012), have not been successful" ("Child
Soldier Stories" 149). Despite the widespread use of child soldiers in Asia, South
America and the Middle East, the child soldier narrative as we know it is largely an
African genre; that is to say, written by or about African child soldiers, rather than
published or read in Africa. I will discuss this in more detail in chapter 4.
23
Todorov claims that a new genre is always the transformation of an earlier one
(197); child soldier narratives thus can be seen as an iteration of another, more
established genre. Alastair Fowler lists the various types of transformations genres can
undergo; his category of "topical invention," where new topics are added to the existing
repertoire, or topics that were already there are further developed (233), seems the most
relevant to child soldier narratives. Departing from the more general war memoir or
novel that may have mentioned child soldiers briefly, or not made much of their youth,
such characters are increasingly becoming the narrators, their stories sustaining the entire
work, their status as children emphasized. Certainly, child soldier narratives are part of
the contemporary tradition where war is depicted as hell. However, Samuel Hynes argues
that the war memoir treats the soldier's experience in war as entirely separate from his
"real life" (8); this is certainly not the case for the autobiographical child soldier
narratives, which typically devote relatively little time to their experiences while enlisted.
Smith and Watson also express doubt about the usefulness of lumping child soldier
narratives under war memoir, "given the different terms of the memoir of a child soldier
in Africa and that of a participant in an organized national army" (285). Moreover, child
soldier narratives include fiction as well.
Child soldier narratives could also be seen as a sub-genre of the human rights
narrative. Obviously, many human rights organizations have taken up the cause of child
soldiers, seeing their very existence as a violation of the human rights to education and
freedom from slavery or other cruel, degrading treatment. The Convention on the Rights
of the Child explicitly forbids the use of children as soldiers on the basis of human rights.
Schaffer and Smith argue that life narratives are "one of the most potent vehicles for
24
advancing human rights claims" (1), in part because of their ability to individualize
collective suffering and goad readers to action. This is something we certainly see with
child soldier memoirs. However, child soldier narratives fit rather uneasily into the
framework of human rights narratives in other ways. The human rights narrative is
invested in portrayal of blameless victim-survivors: "storytellers in the context of rights
campaigns are expected to take up the subject position of ‘innocent’ victims; they are
expected to be able to occupy that position unambiguously" (Schaffer and Smith 161).
While most child soldier narrators make valiant attempts to represent themselves as
innocent children not responsible for their deeds, as I will argue in greater detail in
chapter 2, this is perhaps not the best way of understanding these narratives. Critics such
as Coundouriotis and Moynagh argue that child soldier narratives actually resist the
conventions of the human rights narrative. Moynagh claims that "the memoirs
especially" ("Human Rights" 54) contest human rights discourse in their portrayal of the
child soldier's agency. These challenges to the very basis of the human rights narrative
seem to go beyond "topical invention."
Mastey argues that child soldier narratives are an "outgrowth" of what is known
as the "misery memoir" or "misery literature" ("Child Soldier Stories" 149), given the
latter's success. Misery literature is a form of mostly autobiographical writing that
graphically depicts the suffering of the narrator/protagonist, most often beginning in
childhood, and their eventual overcoming of this trauma. The genre is often traced to
Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It (1995), which described the dehumanizing abuse he
suffered at the hands of his alcoholic mother. The parallels with child soldier narratives
are clear: the extreme violence, drug use, sometimes rape, and the typical ending
25
(always, in the case of the memoirs) in rehabilitation and recovery6. Gray also
characterizes child soldier narratives -- specifically, China Keitetsi's Child Soldier -- as
misery memoirs or survival stories, which he parenthetically defines as " lots of helpless,
pitiless suffering, with at last an unexpected, feel-good redemption" ("Rites" 7). Mastey
points out that the astonishing success of the "misery memoir" has paved the way for
child soldier narratives in a market that typically does not see African literature as
profitable. However, he also notes significant differences between the two (sub)-genres.
Most misery literature features Western settings, whereas, as previously mentioned, child
soldier narratives are almost invariably African. Mastey also argues that child soldiers
are represented as victims and perpetrators rather than simply victim-survivors as in
domestic misery literature, which he calls "one of the most distinguishing features of the
genre" (150). However, I would argue (and will do at greater length in chapter 2) that
even when child soldier memoirists confess to committing horrific acts of violence, they
ultimately come to understand themselves purely as innocent victims by virtue of their
tender age. Moreover, misery memoirists are not always purely victims: Stuart Howarth,
author of Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed, served time in jail for killing his abusive
father.
Closely related to "misery literature" is the form of the "recovery narrative" or
more, specifically, the addiction-recovery narrative. Smith and Watson define the
addiction narrative as "A kind of conversion narrative in which the reformed subject
6 That the memoirs should end in rehabilitation and redemption is perhaps not surprising, given that the
fortitude to produce a narrative of one's experience assumes that a certain level of recovery has taken place.
Obviously, fictional child soldier narratives are not necessarily beholden to this redemptive narrative arc.
26
narrates his or her degeneration through addiction to something -- alcohol, drugs, sex,
food, the Internet" (254). Many child soldier narratives depict the protagonists being
given drugs by their commanders so that they can fight without fear or fatigue. Sanders
suggests that A Long Way Gone actually "owes its commercial success in the United
States to its conforming to the addiction-recovery narrative" (207). Smith and Watson
note that such narratives have become "commodified" and "are circulated broadly to
readers eager for tales of abasement and recovery" (148). Like misery memoirs,
addiction narratives portray intense suffering, and eventual redemption and tend to be
best-sellers. Because of their popularity and profitability, they are eagerly sought out by
publishers, who may not do due diligence in fact-checking stories that sometimes prove
to be exaggerated or even wholly fabricated. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces is only
the most high-profile example of an addiction-recovery narrative eventually exposed as a
hoax; in this case, Frey's editor was instrumental in the decision to market the text as a
memoir rather than fiction (Smith & Watson 101). Smith and Watson also note that
writing a narrative is often part of the recovery process advocated in self-help groups
such as Alcoholics Anonymous. However, the danger is that "the use of diary or journal
writing as part of addiction therapy can also enforce a Foucauldian self-surveillance that
conforms the writing subject to prescriptive norm" (147).
Moreover, there are certain Eurocentric assumptions inherent when the recovery
narrative is used as a therapeutic method. It is often taken for granted that talking or
writing through one's trauma is a healthy way of dealing with it. For instance, Suzette
Henke proposes the notion of "scriptotherapy" in which "autobiographical writing
functions as a mode of self-healing" (Smith and Watson 279). Leigh Gilmore notes the
27
paradox that trauma is often conceived as being unrepresentable and beyond language,
but "at the same time language about trauma is theorized as an impossibility, language is
pressed forward as that which can heal the survivor of a trauma" (6). Ultimately,
however, she seems to believe in "the therapeutic balm of words" (7) and the "power of
narrative to heal" (7, ftn 13). However, as Smith and Watson point out, "Some theorists .
. . dispute that writing is always a form of healing from abuse or loss" (Smith & Watson
279). This is particularly true in non-Western contexts, where "the critique of a
psychoanalytically based talk therapy model of witnessing to trauma is especially
pertinent" (Smith & Watson 284). Coundouriotis notes that "What we see in child soldier
narratives where the act of narration is part of the therapy does not correspond to the
experience of the vast majority of child soldiers. In real life, instead of storytelling, we
find an insistence on rituals of purification" ("Child Soldier" 193). For instance, Alcinda
Honwana illustrates a preference for "symbolic procedures" (Child Soldiers 121), such as
a ritual bath or the burning of clothes, among former child soldiers in Mozambique as
opposed to methods encouraged in Western psychotherapy, including verbalizing their
experiences to a therapist or in the process of writing, which can be retraumatizing and
directly in opposition to local practices that encourage them to move beyond the past.
The idea that the very existence of child soldier narratives is predicated on a Western
conceptualization of trauma and healing is something I will discuss further in a
subsequent chapter.
This reliance of child soldier narratives on the recovery narrative model is often
seen as problematic in other ways. Coundouriotis notes that the addiction narrative model
tends to focus on the individual while ignoring the social and historic context of the wars
28
the child soldiers are fighting in ("Child Soldier" 192). She also points out, somewhat
contrary to Mastey's argument, that the recovery narrative allows the victim identity to
supplant the perpetrator identity, and for atrocities committed to be justified as the result
of drug addiction or abuse, thereby allowing "the problem of responsibility in the war to
be shifted onto the task of recovery itself" (192). This is a problem I will discuss in
further detail in chapter 2. Coundouriotis argues that texts like Johnny Mad Dog and
Allah is not obliged that do not follow the typical recovery model are more "successful"
(203) examples of child soldier narratives.
Mark Sanders, who attributed the success of A Long Way Gone to its similarity to
the recovery narrative, also links child soldier narratives to slave narratives, seeing both
as forms of recovery narrative. He speculates, "Perhaps drug addiction is the new house
of bondage. In any case, whether the protagonist is plantation slave or slave to drugs,
what the reader wants is a story of recovery" (207). Indeed, to my mind, the genre of the
slave narrative provides the strongest parallel to the child soldier narrative, despite the
centuries that divide them. Aside from the redemptive endings and frequent controversies
over their veracity that both genres share with the recovery narrative, both slave
narratives and child soldier narratives are authored by writer-activists, often with the
assistance of a (white) ghostwriter or editor. Both propagate a particular political/human
rights agenda: to end slavery or the use of child soldiers. As I previously argued, child
soldier narratives are strongly associated with African children and African wars, similar
to the way that antebellum slave narratives are associated with African or African-
American slaves. Of course, there are exceptions. Just as non-African child soldier
narratives such as Tamil Tigress do exist, there is also a sub-genre of slave narratives
29
about white Europeans and Americans enslaved in North Africa; however, arguably both
genres are less well-known than the classic African-American (or Afro-Caribbean) slave
narrative and the African child soldier narrative.7
In making this comparison, I am focusing on the four slave narratives that Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. defines as "classic" (xii): those of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs,
Mary Prince, and Olaudah Equiano. The earliest of these narratives, The Interesting
Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) traces
Equiano’s life from being kidnapped and sold into slavery as a child in Africa,
throughout his many voyages as a slave and later a freedman, a brief period as a slave-
owner himself, and his eventual permanent settlement in England and involvement in the
abolitionist movement. The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831) is a
dictated narrative which recounts Mary’s life as a slave on various Caribbean islands
before her owners took her to England and she exercised her right to freedom under
English law. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845),
"the most important slave narrative" (Starling 249), begins with Douglass’s birth in
Maryland to a slave woman, the son of an unidentified white man, and ends shortly after
his escape to the Northern free states. Until Jean Fagan Yellin discovered correspondence
in the 1980s that allowed for a positive identification of "Linda Brent," purported author
7 Contemporary slave narratives are a slightly different case. Laura Murphy notes that, contrary to slavery
in the past, "Most people today, however, are not enslaved by dint of their race or skin colour but because
of their vulnerability in the labour market. There is no consistent physical marker of that vulnerability or its
exploitation" ("New" 391). However, she also points out that even in the modern era, "Africans account for
nearly one in every seven of the estimated 35.8 million enslaved laborers in the world" ("Blackface" 97).
Well-known modern slave narratives such as Mende Nazer's Slave and Francis Bok's Escape from Slavery
(both accounts of enslavement in Sudan) are examples of that reality.
30
of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), with Harriet Jacobs, a former slave from
North Carolina, the narrative was dismissed as fiction, probably written by its ostensible
editor, Lydia Marie Childs. Indeed, Jacobs’s tale of relentless sexual harassment by her
master, the two children she had by a white man, and especially the seven years she spent
hiding in her grandmother’s attic before finally managing to escape to the North seemed
too incredible to be true at the time. These four narratives, which Gates says in his
acknowledgements that he selected with the help of noted slave narratives scholars
including Yellin, William Andrews and James Olney, offer intriguing parallels with
many child soldier narratives, particularly the memoirs.
Like many slave narrators, who established themselves on the abolitionist lecture
circuit before committing their stories to paper, many former child soldiers begin as
activists and speakers before becoming memoirists. Even Beah, who seems to be the only
"real" writer among these child soldiers (given that he wrote the book himself, studied
creative writing at university, and recently published a novel) began his career as a
spokesperson (Beah 169) and activist for child soldiers (199). Gates writes that "The
slaves’ writings were often direct extensions of their speeches, and many ex-slave
narrators confessed that their printed texts were formal revisions of their spoken words
organized and promoted by anti-slavery organizations" (xi). Indeed, Jal recounted the
same story from his memoir, about being tempted to eat his dead friend, at two separate
events: the launch of Romeo Dallaire’s Zero Force initiative (Dec. 9, 2010) and an event
promoting his "We Want Peace" campaign at York University (Feb, 17, 2011). Neither
of these events were a reading – in fact, his book never even made an appearance, except
as for sale after the performance. John Sekora makes the similar point that for many slave
31
narrators speaking publicly about their experiences in slavery was their primary duty,
while "writing was secondary, valuable insofar as it reached areas that lecturers could not
cross and brought in funds otherwise untapped" ("Species" 109). Indeed, with the
exception of Beah, the production of a book is a one-off for the former child soldier,
meant to further their activism or promote their other activities. Certainly, writing (or
collaborating on) a memoir was secondary to the musical careers of Emmanuel Jal and
Senait Mehari. Jal’s memoir was even sold as part of a "combo-pack" (Moynagh,
"Consuming") that included his album and a documentary about him of the same name.
Most of the slave narrators are very clear about their anti-slavery agenda. Equiano
writes in his prefatory letter "I now offer this edition of my Narrative to the candid
reader, and to the friends of humanity, hoping it may still be the means, in its measure, of
showing the enormous cruelties practiced on my sable brethren, and strengthening the
generous emulation now prevailing in this country, to put a speedy end to a traffic both
cruel and unjust" (5). Harriet Jacobs also clearly states her purpose for writing:
I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself . . . But I
do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the
condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what
I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of
abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. (1-2)
Child soldier narratives are perhaps closest to Douglass’s Narrative, which makes fewer
overt pleas to end slavery and presents more scenes of brutality. However, child soldiers
mostly let their stories speak for themselves, seeing little need to explicitly point out that
32
child soldiers are a bad thing and people should get involved in the movement to stop
their use. Their opposition to the use of child soldiers is mostly gleaned through the
horrific nature of their stories and their activism, detailed in their afterword or the author
description.
Ishmael Beah never overtly makes a plea to end the use of child soldiers, though
he reproduces a speech he gave at the UN where he talks more generally about his "hope
that the war would end – it was the only way that adults would stop recruiting children"
(199). However, his author biography notes his involvement with Human Rights Watch
(Children’s Rights Division), his role with UNICEF as its first Advocate for Children
Affected by War, the namesake foundation he founded, "which is dedicated to helping
former child soldiers reintegrate into society and improve their lives" (231), and the
speeches he has given before the United Nations and various NGOs about war-affected
children. Implicit in this impressive resume is an appeal to join him in helping other child
soldiers, perhaps by supporting one of the organizations he has helpfully named.
Emmanuel Jal (whose author bio also lists his affiliation with various humanitarian
organizations and charities) goes one step further by providing at the back of his book an
ad and the website URL for his personal charity, Gua Africa, which "help[s] former
Sudanese child soldiers." Readers are thus guided to a specific, author-approved outlet
for the charitable feelings that may have been aroused by Jal’s story. Although he does
not explicitly position it as such, Jal clearly sees his memoir as a manifesto, saying "I’m
still a soldier, fighting with my pen and paper, for peace till the day I cease" (254).
Interestingly, he still uses martial imagery to express his agenda in publishing his story:
not specifically to end the use of child soldiers like him, but more generally, to promote
33
peace in Sudan and throughout the world. Similarly, Romeo Dallaire, a retired
Lieutenant-General in the Canadian Armed Forces, created the Zero Force campaign to
raise a battalion of young activists to fight against the use of child soldiers -- a campaign
that Jal helped promote. As a Globe & Mail article on Zero Force noted, "martial
language and metaphors abound on the campaign's website. You don't join Zero Force,
you enlist. You don't spread awareness, you recruit. And you don't volunteer, you serve.
Instead of buttons or stickers, those who've donated to Zero Force get to hang dog tags
around their necks" (Alstedter A22).
It is somewhat ironic that in order to eradicate the use of child soldiers, Dallaire is
attempting to create his own army of them. He is explicit in this goal, speaking about the
need to raise a force of young activists ten times the number of child soldiers currently
active, because "How you win the war is by annihilating the enemy, by eradicating the
enemy; and that is with overwhelming force" (Alstedter A22). However, the real target of
Dallaire's campaign is unclear, his language suggesting his army of activists are meant to
fight against the child soldiers themselves, who are ostensibly the victims. Moreover, this
type of language exists rather uneasily in tension with the anti-war sentiment expressed
in many of the child soldier narratives and Jal's own We Want Peace campaign8.
Tchicaya Missamou is another former child soldier who is rather ambivalent
about the anti-war message; after all, he enlisted in the U.S. Marines after his experiences
as a child soldier. He recalls as a little boy in Congo meeting a Marine and wanting to be
8 Although Jal does continue to use this type of military language on the website for the We Want Peace
campaign, selling buttons bearing the rather oxymoronic slogan "I'm a Peace Soldier" and encouraging
people to sign up to be official "commandos" rather than members of the movement.
34
like him, one of "the saviors of the world" (19). He describes some of the horrific things
he saw during his brief stint as a child soldier, his desire to quit, but also how he enjoyed
the power and wanted to fit in (84-86). When the war ended, he says, "we were happy to
abandon our checkpoints and prepare ourselves for an equally difficult battle -- high
school" (88). Like Jal, he continues to rely on military metaphors to describe his life as a
former child soldier, continuing, "I had a new enemy to conquer, one whose weapons
were powder and lipstick and perfume" (88). Despite his rather disturbing
characterization of teenage girls as the enemy, he settles into post-war life with little
difficulty, studying marketing at university with the intent of becoming a businessman
and making plans to marry his girlfriend Marielle. When his father requests he join the
gendarmerie, Tchicaya agrees reluctantly. He says, "I didn't know how to tell my father
that I was done with fighting. I didn't know how to tell him that I had already seen a
lifetime of violence" (101). Despite his ambivalence about soldiering, once he is in the
United States, he jumps at the chance to fulfill his "childhood dream" (299) and become
a Marine. Not even the hell of boot camp or the reality of his experiences in Iraq can
dampen his enthusiasm, and at the end of his deployment, he still proclaims his belief
that "War was never good. It was never simple. But it was necessary" (365).
Senait Mehari probably comes closest to the sentiments expressed by Jacobs and
Equiano when she says in her epilogue, "My mission has always been, and still is, to
draw attention to and thereby alleviate the suffering of children and young people who
are forced to become soldiers in armed conflicts" (255). Her memoir also includes an
informational section entitled "Child Soldiers" which gives statistics on child soldiers
and compares them unfavourably to slaves, saying, "Slaves may have had trading value
35
for their masters in days of old, but child soldiers today are dispensable wares" (257). In
her foreword, China Keitetsi writes, "I’m sure my dreams will never be free before the
300,000 other child soldiers are free" (xi). This is an implicit plea to the reader to do
whatever they can to end the nightmare both for Keitetsi and the staggering number of
children like her. Like Beah and Jal, Grace Akallo focuses on a pacifist message more
generally. She describes speaking at the Amnesty International annual meeting in New
York, appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show, and testifying at hearings before the U.S.
House of Representatives in order to "tell others about the need for peace" (Akallo 194)
and "put the children of northern Uganda on the map for millions of people" (192).
Although their appeals may not be as overt as those made by slave narrators, child
soldiers and their individual life stories are still "called upon to do specific political work
within human rights networks" (Mackey, "Apparitions" 190).
In his 1963 book Many Thousand Gone, Charles Nichols notes that at the height
of the slave narrative’s popularity, "almost any victim of slavery could get published"
(xiv). One might say the same for child soldier narratives, given the quality of narratives
that are published. China Keitetsi’s torturous prose, as well as Jal and Mehari’s use of
ghostwriters, suggests that publishers’ interest lay more in their stories than their literary
skill or other talents. Senait Mehari suggests as much when she complains about the
journalists who are more interested in her experiences as a child soldier than her music
career (235). Certainly, both slave narratives and child soldier narratives emphasize the
narrator/author’s status as victims and survivors. Every one of the child soldier memoirs
features some variation on the term on its cover, whether it is Keitetsi’s simple title Child
Soldier or the subtitle to A Long Way Gone, "Memoirs of a Boy Soldier." Similarly, with
36
the exception of "Gustavus Vassa, The African" and his "Interesting Narrative," all of the
slave narratives I discuss (and many of those I do not) draw attention to the narrator’s
(former) status as slave in their titles. Arguably, however, the impetus for this type of
marketing may come from the publisher rather than the author in the case of the child
soldier narratives. Despite her memoir’s somewhat misleading title, China Keitetsi only
devotes one section of her book to her experiences as a child soldier: the first 100-plus
pages describe her dysfunctional childhood. Ishmael Beah also devotes relatively little
space to his experiences as child soldier; he is not recruited until chapter 12. The
marketing of such texts detailing varied human experience as the stories of "child
soldiers" suggests that this one aspect of their lives is the main selling point.
Probably the biggest difference between slave narratives and child soldier
narratives is quantity. Henry Louis Gates Jr. estimates that there are over 100 book-
length slave narratives (ix). John Sekora adds that the Library of Congress heading "slave
narratives" would also include more than 400 brief slave narratives originally printed in
abolitionist periodicals, approximately 50 narratives compiled by the American
Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, 2194 interviews conducted with former slaves by the
Works Projects Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression, hundreds of letters,
and many novels ("Species" 101). In fact, Sekora says that "In the years from 1831 to the
Emancipation Proclamation, more slave narratives were printed in America than any
other literary form" ("Species" 106). In all, Marion Wilson Starling estimates that 6006
ex-slaves narrated their stories of captivity through interviews, essays and books (xviii).
By comparison, to date, there are approximately seven memoirs by child soldiers and
seven or eight novels that feature child soldiers prominently. There are also numerous
37
interviews with former child soldiers and brief narratives that appear in magazines or
humanitarian materials. It is beyond the scope of this project to catalogue all these texts;
however, it is doubtful that numbers comparable to slave narratives exist. Clearly, the
slave narrative is a much more substantial genre. However, child soldier narratives are
still growing and developing as a genre, having only been in existence for about ten to
twelve years. If we look at the first ten years of slave narratives, beginning in 1760 (with
"Adam Negro’s Tryall" of 1703 considered an outlier like Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy), then
there were only three slave narratives published in the first ten years of the genre: Briton
Hammon’s 14-pg tale, the criminal confession of "Arthur" published as a broadside, and
Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s narrative of his life. The next narrative doesn’t come until 1785,
with John Marrant’s Narrative. Even if we start with Equiano’s popular full-length 1789
Narrative, there are still only three more narratives published within the next ten years,
and then nothing till 1810. Generally, there are thought to be about 100 separately printed
slave narratives (Sekora "Envelope" 483, Gates "Introduction" ix) published between
1760 and 1863: a period of more than a hundred years. Perhaps in a hundred years we
will have a comparable number of child soldier narratives.
As a form, slave narratives are quite rigid and repetitive. James Olney outlines the
various conventions of the genre, including the slave’s portrait, the claim "Written by
Himself" or some variation on the title page, testimonials or prefaces written by white
abolitionists, an epigraph, and appendices which consisted of material such as bills of
sale, newspaper items, anti-slavery poems or sermons ("I Was Born"152-3). As for the
narrative itself, Olney claims it nearly always opens with the sentence "I was born" and
includes descriptions of whippings, slave auctions, the difficulty of attaining literacy, the
38
hypocrisy of so-called "Christian" slave-holders, the escape from slavery, and the taking
of a new name (152-3). There is a little more variation in child soldier narratives. While
all of the memoirs feature the former child soldier’s photo prominently, the design is not
as rigid as the portrait, and it varies with editions. However, all of the child soldier
narratives feature some kind of paratextual material, to use Genette's term, including
maps, chronologies of events, photos and advertisements of charities, which seem
comparable to the appendices in slave narratives. In terms of the narrative proper,
Sanders claims the child soldier memoir follows a "formulaic" trajectory: "Removed
from school and separated from family, the protagonist is recruited or pressed into an
army or militia, undergoes training, engages in killings and other atrocities, is eventually
demobilized and debriefed, after which efforts are made to resume schooling and to
reunite with family" (207). Mastey notes that the genre of child soldier narratives is
"defined by several conventions that most (if not all) of the works share, whether fiction
or non-fiction" ("Child Soldier Stories" 148). Among these conventions he lists the
representation of life before enlistment and after decommission, the portrayal of the
traumatic effects of child soldiering, and at the very least, some sort of gesture towards
the possibility of redemption. Other common tropes include abusive/dysfunctional
families, drug use, the relationship with their guns (taller than they are, too heavy,
substitutes for one’s wife or family) and the war games played by children versus
children’s real experiences in war.
Olney writes of slave narratives as a genre: "The theme is the reality of slavery
and the necessity of abolishing it; the content is a series of events and descriptions that
will make the reader see and feel the realities of slavery; and the form is a chronological,
39
episodic narrative beginning with an assertion of existence and surrounded by various
testimonial evidence for that assertion" ("I Was Born" 156). Child soldier narratives do
share the theme of child soldiers and the necessity of stopping their use, and the content,
which gives often-overlapping descriptions of the life of a child soldier, in order to make
the reader feel the realities of this life. The form is not quite so clear-cut. Certainly, there
is no uniform opening formula like the "I was born" that characterizes child soldier
memoirs. After a prologue set in the more recent past where his American classmates ask
him about his past, Beah’s book begins with rumours of war seeming unreal as he heads
to a dance competition in another town. Jal also has a prologue, which has him
performing on stage while remembering past violence; the memoir proper then opens in
medias res with Jal on a truck to southern Sudan with his family and some Arabs who
call them slaves. Mehari remembers being teased as a child and called "Suitcase Baby,"
then recounts the story of her birth and how her mother went to jail for leaving her in a
suitcase to die. Keitetsi starts with a few lines about her father’s birth and career, then
tells how he divorced her mother after her birth because she was not a boy. Despite this
key difference, autobiographical child soldier narratives continue in a "chronological,
episodic" manner of slave narratives. They are repetitive enough in theme, content and
form that, despite the very different countries that the child soldiers come from and the
very different conflicts they find themselves embroiled in, the narratives begin to blur
together.
Maureen Moynagh points out similarities between child soldier narratives and
slave narratives in terms of their production in the context of a human-rights movement,
usually with the assistance of a Euro-American co-author/editor ("Human Rights" 46).
40
Indeed, of the child soldier memoirs I am examining, only two (Beah and Keitetsi) do not
have co-writers to help them tell their stories. However, the co-writer in child soldier
narratives tends to be erased, whereas slave narratives draw upon the authority of their
white editors to authenticate their stories in prefatory letters. Although Lukas Lessing is
often described as the "co-writer" (Mackey, "Apparitions" 15; Göttsche 58, ftn 17) of
Senait Mehari’s memoir, Heart of Fire, he gets no official credit in the book, other than
thanks from Mehari in the Acknowledgements for having "helped me write my story
down after a series of long and intense conversations" (256). A document credited to
Mehari’s Spanish literary agent, Ute Körner, describes Heart of Fire as "Reported by
Lukas Lessing" and a description of "Senait: Her Story" and "Senait: Her Life" is
followed by a section on "The Writer”, which gives a brief biography and CV for
Lessing. Yet his professional webpage (www.lukaslessing.com) describes him as a
"ghost writer." In an email interview, Lessing described his writing process: "I made a lot
of interviews with her [Mehari] and many other people, then I wrote. She read, corrected,
I wrote again, she read again, corrected again, I wrote again...." (Lessing 2012). In the
same interview, Lessing also confirms that he wrote the unaccredited factual section,
"Child Soldiers," at the back of the book, which refers to Senait in the third person
(Lessing 2012).
Texts like Heart of Fire seem to challenge Lejeune's concept of an
autobiographical pact, which is predicated on a unity of identity between protagonist,
narrator and author, who is assumed to be that person whose name appears on the flyleaf.
As Lejeune says, "In printed texts, responsibility for all enunciation is assumed by a
person who is in the habit of placing his name on the cover of the book, and on the
41
flyleaf, above or below the title of the volume" (11). As such, seeing that only Mehari's
name appears on the front cover, Lessing seems to be breaking the pact, given that he is
the actual writer of the narrative. After all, "the autobiographical genre is a contractual
genre" (Lejeune 29), which explains why readers get upset when autobiographies are
discovered to be falsified in some way, because a contract has been violated. Foucault
also discusses the relationship between the proper name, the individual, and the author,
noting that if we discovered that Shakespeare had not actually written the sonnets
attributed to him, "that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in
which the author’s name functions" (122). However, in the case of child soldier
narratives like Heart of Fire when the child soldier who is the subject of the book,
ostensibly the storyteller/first-person narrator, and the one whose name appears on the
front cover, is revealed (only through research or reading the copyright page very
carefully) not to be the actual "author" of the text, having employed a ghostwriter, it does
not necessarily change the way his or her name functions to the same degree. After all
the source of their fame is their life story, not their literary genius. In the chapter entitled
"The Autobiography of Those Who Do Not Write," Lejeune addresses the problem of
ghostwritten narratives directly, noting that while the role of ghostwriter is sometimes
compared to that of translator, there is "just one difference, but an enormous one: in the
[ghost]writer’s case, the original text does not exist. The writer does not transmit the text
from one language to another, but draws the text from a ‘before-text’" (264, fn. 2).
Megan Lloyd Davies seems to have played a similar role as Lessing in the
production of Emmanuel Jal’s War Child. In an interview, Jal describes meeting with
Davies four times a week for four months, and talking while she wrote (Jal 2011). She
42
then took their conversation and worked them into a manuscript, which he then read and
provided feedback on (Davies 2012). However, unlike Lessing, who in true ghostwriter
mode is all but effaced from the book he largely produced, Davies shares copyright of
War Child with Jal, and on the title page (though not the front cover) author credit is
given to "Emmanuel Jal with Megan Lloyd Davies" (emphasis mine). On her website
(www.meganlloyddavies.com), Davies seems to verify the process Jal describes:
This book about Emmanuel's experiences as a child solder in Sudan was hard to
write. Not only was the subject matter deeply disturbing but Emmanuel had never
told his whole life story before. Over months of interviews, he slowly got to
know and trust me enough tell it. His life story may read like the stuff of movies
but it's real. His courage and tenacity enabled him not only to escape Sudan but
today work tirelessly to promote peace and the plight of child soldiers. A truly
inspirational man. ("War Child")
This quote is unattributed, but given the context (it is on her personal website, in the first
person, and all of the descriptions of books she has worked on include similar quotes), it
seems safe to assume it is Davies herself being quoted. It also echoes the process she
describes in an email interview. She is quite clear about the division of labour in the
production of this book. Jal "tell[s]"his life story, which Davies finds "hard to write”, but
she does it anyway, because that is her job: he is the storyteller, she is the writer.
Moreover, she evokes the white "references" who vouch for the authenticity of slave
narratives when she says, "His life story may read like the stuff of movies but it’s real”,
echoing Lydia Maria Child, who acts as a guarantor for Harriet Jacobs’ narrative in her
43
editor’s introduction, while admitting "some incidents in her story are more romantic
than fiction" (3). Interestingly, in his Acknowledgments, Jal is less than grateful to his
co-writer: "Megan Lloyd Davies – I don’t want to thank you because you were a pain in
the ass" (Jal 262). Moynagh has called this "an intriguing, if cryptic comment" ("Human
Rights" 56, ftn 9). Mastey has suggested that this "incongruous remark" registers Jal's
unease with the process of transforming his experience into a palatable form for
American readers ("Child Soldier Stories" 156). However, in an interview, Jal explains
that this characterization of Davies stemmed more from the traumatic experience of
narrating his experiences. He describes suffering bodily and mental symptoms, including
nosebleeds and nightmares, when he first began telling his story. He says "I didn’t want
to see Megan, but she actually helped me tell the story without pain" (Jal 2011).
The relationship between former Ugandan child soldier Grace Akallo and her co-
writer, the American Christian activist Faith J.H. McDonnell, is a little different. Like
Megan Lloyd Davies, McDonnell’s name appears on the title page of the child soldier
narrative she helped produce – actually, McDonnell gets top billing, contrary to
alphabetical order, and on the front cover of the book no less. Moreover, Girl Soldier is
credited to "Faith J.H. McDonnell and Grace Akallo" (italics mine), rather than with, as
was the case with Jal and Davies, or Missamou and Sentell. Joya Uraizee notes that
McDonnell is sometimes even listed as the sole author of the book (64). The structure of
Girl Soldier is considerably different than any of the other child soldier memoirs:
chapters alternate between Grace’s first-person retelling of her experiences and historical
background and what are described on the back cover as "spiritual insights" provided by
McDonnell. Indeed, the evangelizing tone and message of Girl Soldier set it apart from
44
other child soldier narratives. Laura T. Murphy points to McDonnell as an example of
what she calls the "blackface abolitionist," the activist co-writers of modern slave
narratives who resemble both nineteenth-century abolitionists like William Lloyd
Garrison and blackface performers in the way they appropriate the experiences of
(largely black, African) slaves while engaging in stereotypes, eliding white responsibility
for black oppression, and giving the audience an opportunity to identify with the other.
Murphy argues that McDonnell's voice dominates the book, pointing out that "Akallo’s
narrative constitutes only 64 of the 225 pages of the book" ("Blackface" 103). As such,
Uraizee calculates McDonnell contributes 69 percent of the total pages in the book to
Akallo's 31 percent (64). Murphy also argues that McDonnell often distracts from or
even contradicts Akallo in her attempt to use Grace as a metonym for the persecution of
Christians in order to legitimize her own (not Grace's) Islamophobic agenda.
The acknowledgements to Girl Soldier point to some interesting details about the
conception and production of this narrative. Grace thanks McDonnell "for the idea of
writing this book and finding the publisher for it" (18). She also thanks her friend Henk
Rossouw, who "started the idea of writing a book with me, but we did not find a
publisher. When I told him I was writing a book with someone else, he encouraged me"
(19). In her narrative, she writes about meeting Rossouw, a South African journalist who
wrote a story about her that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education (190-191).
His article looks at Grace's story through a very different lens: her attempt to attain a
higher education after her captivity and escape. Mastey notes that it appears that
McDonnell and her publisher "deliberately sought out this kind of narrative rather than
45
being offered a manuscript as is typical in the industry" ("Child Soldier Stories" 149, ftn
4). This suggests that both had a heavy hand in shaping Akallo's story.
In contrast to Lessing and Davies, who are to varying degrees erased from the
narratives they worked on, Jacobs’ editor is at the front and centre of Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl. Hers is the only name that appears on the book’s original title page;
Harriet Jacobs’s name is nowhere, and even her pseudonym, "Linda Brent, "does not
surface until the end of the author’s preface. Of course, Child’s role is somewhat
different from that of Lessing or Davies. Whereas it seems as if Lessing and Davies were
the ones actually putting pen to paper for the narratives they helped create, Jacobs
presented a manuscript to Child. Although she had originally planned to dictate her
narrative, a discouraging rebuff from Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, convinced Jacobs to write her story herself (Yellin, "Written" 482-3). However,
she remained insecure and self-conscious of her skills as a writer throughout the process.
In a letter to her close friend, Amy Post, she writes, "I must write just what I have lived
and witnessed myself. Don't expect much of me, dear Amy. You shall have truth, but not
talent" (qtd. in Yellin "Written" 485). Her self-deprecation seems overstated, especially
when we compare her narrative to, say, China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier. Perhaps this lack
of confidence led to an expanded role for Child, whom Jacobs initially approached at her
publisher’s behest to write an introduction to her narrative.
Still, Child’s editorial interventions were relatively minor, or so she claims. In her
introduction, she downplays her role, saying, "such changes as I have made have been
mainly for purposes of condensation and orderly arrangement" (3). She maintains this
46
stance in private correspondence, telling a friend, "I abridged, and struck out superfluous
words sometimes; but I don’t think I altered fifty words in the whole volume" (qtd. in
Yellin "Introduction" xxii). These claims are significant, because, until Jean Fagan Yellin
published her groundbreaking work based on this letter and others, it was commonly
thought that Incidents was fiction, probably written by ostensible editor Child. Yellin
claims that, despite her pseudonym, "Jacobs quickly became known among abolitionists
as the author of Incidents" ("Introduction xxv). However, over the years, the origins of
the narrative became confused: "Those historians of the slave narrative who did recall
Incidents associated it only vaguely, if at all, with Jacobs’s name. Some thought it a
narrative dictated by a fugitive slave, Jacobs, to Child; others thought it an antislavery
novel that Child had written in the form of a slave narrative" (Yellin, "Introduction”,
xxv). In his 1972 book The Slave Community, John Blassingame aligns Harriet Jacobs
with "Linda Brent" and allows that Jacobs was likely a real fugitive slave, but judges the
narrative of her life as "not credible" on the basis of it being "too orderly" and "too
melodramatic" (373). However, the letters that Yellin discovered confirm that not only is
Jacobs’s story true, but she wrote it herself, with the role Child played being much closer
to that of a traditional editor, or even a copy-editor.
Although Bruce Mills agrees that Yellin’s evidence conclusively proves that
Jacobs wrote her own narrative, he still thinks that Child’s "editorial guidance
nonetheless significantly affected the narrative's final shape" (256), pointing to changes
suggested by Child that put the emphasis on motherhood rather than contemporary
politics, presumably to make it more palatable to white readers skittish after John
Brown’s recent violent attempt to lead a slave revolt. Alice B. Deck agrees that Child’s
47
involvement went beyond the duties of a mere copywriter, pointing out that "Child’s
request [in one of her letters to Jacobs] . . . for more details of violence committed
against slaves shows that she wanted to add elements to bring Jacobs’ story in line with
the expected pattern" of slave narratives (39). While we have no correspondence to
indicate that editors or co-writers exercised any influence over child soldier narrators to
change their stories to fit audience expectations, the "formulaic trajectory" that Sanders
identifies, with its redemptive narrative arc, suggests that an "expected pattern" of child
soldier narratives does exist. As Moynagh contends, "While the former child soldiers
have their own reasons for telling their stories, it is fairly safe to assume that Euro-
American publishers and journalists pursue them "because they [conform] or [are]
conformable to cultural myths and literary traditions with an already established audience
appeal, as William Andrews has argued was the case for slave narratives" ("Human
Rights" 46).
Susanna Strickland's9 role in the production of The History of Mary Prince seems
closer to that of Lessing and Davies in their respective child soldier narratives. In his
preface, editor Thomas Pringle writes:
The narrative was taken down from Mary’s own lips by a lady who happened to
be at the time residing in my family as a visitor. It was written out fully, with all
the narrator’s repetitions and prolixities, and afterwards pruned into its present
shape; retaining, as far as was practicable, Mary’s exact expressions and peculiar
9 The maiden name of Susanna Moodie, of Roughing It In the Bush fame (Whitlock, "Silent Scribe" 249).
48
phraseology. No fact of importance has been omitted, and not a single
circumstance or sentiment has been added. It is essentially her own, without any
material alteration farther than was requisite to exclude redundancies and gross
grammatical errors, so as to render it clearly intelligible. (3)
The language here echoes Child’s claims that she merely "pruned excrescences" in
Jacobs’s narrative, but otherwise had "no reason for changing her lively and dramatic
way of telling her own story" ("Introduction" 3). However, as previously pointed out,
Jacobs was not merely "telling" her story; she had already written it. By contrast, the
illiterate Prince dictated her story, in a process much closer to the conversations that
produced the two child soldier narratives. Like Lessing and Davies, Strickland is also
largely absent from the text, reduced by Pringle in his introduction to an unnamed "lady"
(3). Her name is also redacted from the one other reference to her in the text, when near
the end of her narrative Prince herself refers to the history that "my good friend, Miss
S— , is now writing down for me" (38). In a personal letter, Strickland confirms, "Of
course my name does not appear" on the publication, as well as affirming that she is
"adhering to [Mary’s] own simple story without deviating to the paths of flourish and
romance" (qtd. Whitlock, "Silent Scribe" 249). Yet evidence suggests that Strickland
may have had more influence on the narrative than she or Pringle is willing to admit.
Prince’s former owner, John Wood, sued Pringle for libel based on his
representation in the narrative. At the trial, Prince testified that various details of her
sexual life which she narrated to Strickland were left out of the History, including the
particulars of her extramarital relationships with two men and a violent dispute with
49
another woman whom she found in her lover’s bed (Salih x). Presumably, the latter
incident is what Wood refers to in his refusal of pleas for Mary’s manumission,
describing her supposed "depravity" (qtd. in Pringle 44), and what Pringle omits when he
reprints Wood’s letter in his supplement, saying, "it is too indecent to appear in a
publication likely to be perused by females" (44). There is a notable lack of sexual
content in child soldier narratives as well. According to Mackey, "despite the statistics
about the sexual abuse of male and female child soldiers, personal experiences of it are
barely mentioned" ("Apparitions" 218). The female child soldiers are more like to allude
to their experiences of rape and sexual exploitation, but only in elliptical terms. Where
exactly this censorship stems from is debatable. I will discuss these circumlocutions
around sexual violence further in chapter 4.
There is a similar silence around the sexual experiences of the female slaves.
Mary Prince describes one of her masters as having "an ugly fashion of stripping himself
quite naked, and ordering me then to wash him in a tub of water," a fetish she describes
as "indecent" (24), echoing Pringle’s own language. There certainly seems to be a sexual
connotation to this task, though it is not made explicit. Salih notes that this aspect of
Prince’s experience is "diplomatically glossed over" in her narrative, because "Prince and
her allies were probably anxious to spare the prudish sensibilities of potential readers
who may have been too squeamish to face the truth about the sexual exploitation of black
women by their white masters" (ix). Interestingly, Salih here attributes agency to Prince
in consciously choosing to censor her narrative. Elsewhere, she sees a different power
dynamic: "It was important for the Anti-Slavery Society to present Prince as sexually
50
pure, or, at least, the object of her master’s lusts rather than the sexually active person
which, by her own account, she seems to have been" (x).
Like Prince, child soldiers have sometimes found themselves embroiled in
scandals and legal troubles because of their memoirs. A libel suit was brought against
Senait Mehari by a woman who is described in Heart of Fire as a military commander
although she claims she was just a 12-year-old student ("Publisher"). Mehari’s publisher
settled the suit and released a statement calling the discrepancy "a regrettable error"
("Publisher"). Mehari addresses the controversy in a 2007 epilogue to the paperback
edition of her memoir, saying, "Some members of the Eritrean community living in
Germany claimed that I had lied about my childhood: they said that the army camps I
described had actually been schools, and there had been no famine or drought in Eritrea,
nor were children used as soldiers" (254). However, she went on to say, "proof of their
claims could not be provided" and that UNICEF and various other aid organizations she
was involved with "swiftly backed me and proved my detractors wrong: child soldiers
had indeed been used in the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia" (254). Ishmael Beah
faced a similar controversy. He perhaps opened himself up to criticism when he made the
claim in A Long Way Gone that "To this day, I have an excellent photographic memory
that enables me to remember details of the day-to-day moments of my life, indelibly"
(51). The Australian newspaper subsequently broke the story that according to some
Sierra Leoneon sources, Beah’s village was destroyed in 1995, not 1993, and therefore,
he was fifteen, not thirteen when he became a child soldier, and only spent a few months
51
in the army, rather than the years that he claims (Gare & Wilson).10
Although Beah’s
publisher supported him, Emmanuel Jal was perhaps cognizant of this controversy when
he wrote in his preface to War Child, "I cannot be sure exactly how old I was nor for how
long I was in certain places or exactly when." Certainly, his memoir has not faced the
same kind of backlash as Beah or Mehari’s. Although China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier was
published before Beah’s memoir, she also provides a disclaimer, saying, "I might have
mixed the years, and the parents, in this first part, and for that I ask my readers to
understand, as I was very young then" (51). Her narrative also carries a Publisher’s Note
stating that the story is "told entirely in her own idiom" (vi).
Idiom or dialect becomes important for determining the authenticity of slave
narratives. Pro-slavery factions frequently tried to discredit the narratives, claiming that
no African-American could be so articulate. As Philip Gould points out, "the mainstream
English press often cast doubt on the plausibility of these and other narratives in terms
that were particularly condescending about the possibilities of black authorship" (22).
Frederick Douglass has been criticized by both his contemporaries and modern critics for
the elevated diction of his Narrative, which is thought not to reflect an "authentic" slave
voice. Lydia Maria Child anticipates this type of reaction when she writes in her
Introduction, "It will naturally excite surprise that a woman reared in Slavery should be
10 Another intertext for child soldier narratives could be I, Rigoberta Menchú, the testimonio of the
indigenous Guatemalan activist. Like Beah and Mehari, Menchú found herself embroiled in a very public
scandal about the veracity of her narrative after anthropologist David Stoll published his analysis Rigoberta
Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, which outlined a number of factual inaccuracies he
claimed to have found in her text. As well, as with many of the child soldier memoirs, Menchú's narrative
was produced in collaboration with an editor/amanuensis, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, although the latter's
very visible role is perhaps closer to that of the editors of slave narratives than the ghostwriters of child
soldier narratives.
52
able to write so well" (3). She goes on to account for Jacobs’s exceptionality by her
natural intelligence, the kind mistress who taught her to read and write, and (rather self-
congratulatory on Child’s part) the company she kept after moving North. Even one of
the recommendations that Equiano reprints suggests "it is not improbable that some
English writer has assisted him in the compilement, or, at least, the correction of his
book; for it is sufficiently well-written" (13).
Although the Australian investigation focuses on discrepancies in chronology,
there is one moment where Shelley Gare and Peter Wilson seem to be suggesting the
possibility that Beah got extensive help in the writing of his book as well. They refer to
an email exchange with Beah’s adoptive mother, Laura Simms, and one particular
message that stood out from the rest: "Although it was signed ``Laura'', it seemed to have
been written by someone-else. The syntax is jerky, awkward. Punctuation is missing.
Whereas the first email had clearly been written by someone who was a native English
speaker and educated, this now read as if prepared by someone whose native language
was not English" (Gare & Wilson). Although they do not speculate further, the
implication seems to be that Beah (who is not a native English speaker) wrote the email.
In an article questioning his credibility as an author, this veiled accusation can be
extrapolated to doubting Beah’s language skills and ability to write the book that bears
his name without substantial assistance: one more example of his alleged duplicity. Nega
Mezlekia faced similar insinuations in the wake of the controversy over his authorship of
his memoir, Notes from the Hyena’s Belly. Neil ten Kortenaar points out that
unsympathetic journalists "leave Mezlekia’s spelling mistakes uncorrected and signal
them with the word "sic" in parentheses" ("Nega Mezlekia" 43-44), seeming to challenge
53
Mezlekia’s ability as a writer. However, according to Beah’s agent, Ira Silverberg,
Beah’s editor Sarah Crichton played a similar role in the creation of his narrative as
Lydia Marie Childs did in Harriet Jacobs’s: "Asked if it were possible that someone had
either encouraged Beah to make his real-life story more dramatic or had edited the
manuscript in that way, Silverberg responded that that was an offensive suggestion.
‘(The story) didn't change. Sarah helped to refine it; the book was originally twice as
long. That's all’" (qtd. in Gare & Wilson).
Not only has the authorship of slave narratives been disputed, but, like child
soldier narratives, the facts they present have also been challenged. James Macqueen, an
anti-abolitionist, wrote a letter addressed to Earl Gray and published in Blackwood’s
Magazine, a portion of which is an attack on Mary Prince and her editor Thomas Pringle.
He reprints portions of her narrative and juxtaposes them with refutations from various
neighbours in Antigua, including Mary’s own husband. Where Mary writes that her
owners, the Woods, all but abandoned her when she was ill and that she would have died
if it were not for the care of a kind neighbour named Mrs. Green, Macqueen quotes a
letter from Mrs. Green’s daughter, Mrs. Brascomb, that denies this act of Good
Samaritanism, stating that, to her knowledge, her mother never aided any of Mrs.
Wood’s servants "as their appearance shewed they enjoyed every comfort" and she "ever
considered Mr and Mrs Woods as humane owners" (746). Where Mary writes about
being flogged by her master, Macqueen quotes several "respectable" (749) females who
deny she was mistreated. The Australian also quotes testimony from people who knew
Beah, such as his school principal and the chief of his village, to make its case.
54
Whereas the accusations against Beah are strictly about facts, allegations are
made against Mary’s character in Macqueen’s article. Macqueen quotes testimony from
Martha Wilcox – who, incidentally, is described in Mary’s narrative as "a saucy woman"
who "was constantly making mischief" (Prince 26) for Mary and the other slaves –
casting aspersions on Mary’s chastity. Martha states that Mary used to sneak a Captain
William into her apartment so that he could spend the night. She also claims that the
story Mary tells in her narrative about a fight she had with another woman over a pig was
really over the woman’s husband, and that Mary made money "by allowing men to visit
her" (Macqueen 749). Macqueen quotes another "respectable female "in Mr. Wood’s
household, who says of Mary, "Her character was very bad. For one act, which is too
base to be here related, she was taken before a magistrate and excluded from the
Moravian Chapel" (749). This, of course, echoes Pringle’s own exclusion of Wood’s
accusation from his supplement. Perhaps most damningly, Macqueen quotes Mary’s own
husband, saying that "Mr. Wood never punished Mary to his knowledge "and that having
heard what was said in her narrative, "he thinks some stratagem or other must have
induced her, which she will ere long regret" (748).
Interestingly, Macqueen places the bulk of the blame for the lies on Pringle,
insisting that Mary is his "despicable tool" (744). He says of her treatment of the Woods
in her History, "That she was instigated to calumniate them by others, is unquestionable;
for when reproached by an Antigonian for her baseness and ingratitude in stating such
falsehoods as her narrative contained, she replied that she was not allowed to state any
thing else, and that those who questioned her desired her to state only that which was bad
concerning her master and mistress!" (748). This again raises interesting questions about
55
the degree to which Prince’s narrative was revised and shaped by her abolitionist editors
to fit a particular agenda. Similar questions might be raised about the child soldier
narratives. However, this is not to deny agency to the writers. As Moynagh writes,
"Whatever the mediating effect of the co-writers, we should not assume the former child
soldiers themselves lack the power to shape their narratives, at least to some extent, even
when they are written by someone else" ("Human Rights" 47). Rather than seeing child
soldier narrators/authors as the "tool" of their editors, publishers, or humanitarian
organizations, it may be more productive to view the relationship as a "division of
literary labour" (Moynagh, "Human Rights" 46; Andrews 33).
Another controversy involving a slave narrative that has even stronger parallels to
those involving child soldiers is the one around Olaudah Equiano, also known as
Gustavus Vassa. As in the case of Ishmael Beah, these questions about the veracity of his
account were originally raised in the news media. In 1792, as Equiano was revising the
fifth edition of his best-selling Interesting Narrative, attacks appeared in the Oracle and
Star newspapers. They accused Equiano of lying about his African birth, asserting he
was actually born in the West Indies, on the then-Danish island of Santa Cruz (now St.
Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands). While The Australian only implicitly refers to the
impact that these allegations have on the reception of Beah’s memoir and its agenda to
end child soldiery, the Oracle spells out the way in which Equiano’s (alleged) falsehood
harms the abolitionist cause: "What, we will ask any man of plain understanding, must
that cause be, which can lean for support on falsehoods as audaciously propagated as
they are easily detected?" (qtd. in Carretta, "Questioning" 237, ftn. 2). Both publications
suggest that by being dishonest, Equiano is hurting his credibility as a witness to the
56
brutality of the slave trade. Of course, the people who are upset by Beah’s (alleged)
misrepresentation do not use it as ammunition to deny the importance of ending the use
of child soldiers. Even The Australian is careful to stress that "the revelations do not
mean Beah's tale isn't truly terrible" (Gare & Wilson). Yet in an editorial on the subject
of the controversy, the paper states, "Whenever an author adjusts the truth, they sully the
cause or case they supposedly serve" ("Inconvenient"). It is worth noting that neither
Beah nor Equiano ever actually admitted to lying: Beah issued press releases denying the
charges and was supported by his publisher, while Equiano’s furious response to this
"invidious falsehood" (5) involved prefacing all subsequent editions of his narrative with
multiple letters vouching for his honesty and the authenticity of his story. However, in
his Introduction to Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Vincent Carretta says "[r]ecently
discovered evidence" (x) still points to discrepancies in Equiano’s narrative of his life, in
terms of both birthplace and birth date.
Interestingly, this evidence suggests that the Star and Oracle were correct in
essence, if not details: baptismal records give Equiano’s birthplace as Carolina, not Santa
Cruz, but definitely not Africa, as he claimed in his Narrative. In an essay on the
"Equiano question," Carretta allows that "Vassa himself, of course, may not have been
responsible for the information or misinformation regarding the place and date of his
birth recorded at his baptism" ("Questioning" 232) but he finds Carolina attributed as
Vassa’s birthplace on the muster book for his Arctic voyage as well. He points out that
"The recorder of the Racehorse muster was unlikely to have had access to or interest in
Vassa’s baptismal record. Since the personal data probably came from Vassa himself,
now a free man, we must ask why, if he had indeed been born Olaudah Equiano in
57
Africa, he chose to suppress these facts" ("Questioning" 232-3). He notes there were
other men on board who gave African birthplaces. Equiano would have had obvious
reasons for fabricating an African birth to give credibility to his narrative. As Carretta
notes, Equiano’s "authority to speak as a victim and eye-witness of slavery . . was
dependent on the African nativity he claimed" ("Questioning" 227). If he was born in
Carolina, he could not claim firsthand personal experience of the slave trade and the
Middle Passage. Indeed, the section of his book dealing with his life in Africa and his
journey on the slave ship is the most widely-read and reprinted. What is less clear is, if in
fact he was born in Africa, why he would say he was born in the United States.
Carretta also makes an interesting point about Equiano’s name. Equiano writes
that Olaudah was his birth name, which means fortunate or well-spoken in his native
language (41). When he was captured into slavery, he was initially renamed Michael,
then Jacob, before his first long-term master, Michael Henry Pascal, renamed him
Gustavus Vassa, after the sixteenth-century Swedish king and freedom fighter. While
Equiano initially resisted this name, he writes that it became the one "by which I have
been known ever since" (64). Indeed, Carretta points out that Equiano did not start using
his alleged birth name again, or referring to himself as "The African" until 1787, shortly
before publishing his Narrative. Even so, the name "Olaudah Equiano" only ever appears
in two other places other than the Narrative itself ("Questioning" 234). Equiano is not the
first slave to change his name. Harriet Jacobs assumed the pseudonym Linda Brent to
write her narrative, and Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington
Bailey, also going by the surnames Stanley and Johnson after his escape before a friend
renamed him Douglass after the "Lady of the Lake" (Douglass 96). However, Carretta
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suggests that Equiano only changed his name and (re)assumed an African identity after
he wrote his book, perhaps suggesting a disingenuous move to claim an African birth he
never really had in order to sell books. Many of the child soldiers also renounce their
birth names. For instance, Jal Jok is baptized multiple times in the Pinyudu refugee
camp, being called John and Michael before settling on Emmanuel Jal (Jal 86). Shena A.
Gacu is nicknamed China Keitetsi in the army because of her slanted eyes ("Shena").
However, unlike Equiano/Vassa, they do not have to reclaim their "African identities"
when writing their memoirs, although China uses her birth name for some of her charity
work, such as the Network of Young People Affected by War.
In addition to the evidence that Equiano was not born in Africa, Carretta writes
that "commercial and military records suggest that he may have been much younger
when he entered Pascal’s service than he claims in his Narrative" ("Introduction" x) – an
interesting reversal of the controversy around Ishmael Beah’s age. While Beah would
have had obvious reasons for adjusting his age – as The Australian points out, the two-
year difference has the effect of "turning the child soldier-recruit into a soldier who
would have been in his mid-teens" (Gare & Wilson) – Equiano’s reasons, assuming that
it was a deliberate choice, are not so clear. Exaggerating his age would seem to be at
odds with his project of painting the direst possible picture of the slave trade in hopes of
mobilizing people against it. One would think that an even younger child enslaved, like
the youngest of child soldiers, would make for a proportionally more heartbreaking
figure, thereby making Equiano’s case against slavery even stronger. Carretta suggests
that Equiano "may have exaggerated his own age because the younger he was when he
left Africa, the less credible his memory of his homeland would be" ("Questioning" 254,
59
ftn. 143). Carretta is certainly more sympathetic than The Australian was, defending
Equiano by saying that "deviations from the truth seem more likely to have been the
result of artistic premeditation than absentmindedness" (Introduction xi). Arguably, one
could make the same argument for Beah’s memoir, treating some of the discrepancies as
"artistic premeditation." After all, by making himself younger and serving longer, he
intensifies the plight of the child soldier, potentially drawing more attention to his cause:
a noble goal, some would say.
To be fair, the trauma of Beah’s childhood, not to mention the drugs he took
while he was a soldier, would make discrepancies in the chronology he provides
perfectly understandable. Beah’s adoptive mother, Laura Simms, defended him to The
Australian by rhetorically asking, "If you were a kid in a war, would you have a calendar
with you after you had lost everything and were running through the bush[?]" (Gare and
Wilson). Moreover, Beah would not be the first child soldier not to know his real age. In
his preface, Jal writes about not knowing his real birth date and taking January 1, 1980 as
his birthday like other Lost Boys. Senait Mehari says, "To this day, no one knows when I
was born. This is not unusual in Africa. Almost nobody knows their birth date, especially
if, like me, they were born to poor parents or in the countryside. There is no formal
documentation of births" (9). This is mirrored in fictional representations of child
soldiers, including Birahima in Allah is not obliged, who says "I’m maybe ten, maybe
twelve" (Kourouma 3). Similarly, Frederick Douglass says, "I have no accurate
knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the
larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the
wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not
60
remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday" (15). Perhaps the
explanation of the differing accounts given of Equiano’s age – and Beah’s – is that
simple.
Interestingly, we may even be able to consider Equiano a kind of proto-child
soldier himself. As a young boy, he accompanied his master, Michael Pascal, a naval
officer, to battle during the Seven Year’s War. Clearly, he saw action during this time,
given that he describes his "station" (Equiano 83) during the engagement between
Boscawen and Le Clue off Cape Lagos as dodging enemy fire to supply gun-powder to
one of the guns on the ship. Although Equiano is not in charge of firing the guns himself,
this activity still seems to qualify as combat support. He seems to undergo training,
saying "I had been learning many of the manoeuvres of the ship during our cruise, and I
was several times made to fire the guns" (70). He also repeatedly complains about not
seeing any engagements (battles), which is reminiscent of some of the child soldiers
agitating to see action at the front lines (e.g. Emmanuel Jal). His status on the boat is
"servant"– Carretta’s footnotes show that he was listed as such on various ships that he
sailed on. However, the Cape Town Principles classifies anyone under the age of 18 who
acts as a cook, porter, messenger, or other such role for an armed force as a child soldier.
Thus, it would seem that Equiano would fit this definition as an 11-year-old servant (or
possibly younger!) in the Navy.11
11 I am aware that I am applying the Cape Town Principles retrospectively to Equiano. I do so as a
rhetorical strategy, to draw attention to the way that the conception of the "child soldier" is a contemporary
invention.
61
Equiano is not the only example of the blurring between young slave and child
soldier. Many scholars of modern slavery seem to take for granted that child soldiers are
slaves. Sarah Maguire's essay on child soldiers is included in a volume entitled Child
Slaves in the Modern World with little reflection on the rationale for this editorial
decision. Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd's To Plead Our Own Cause, an anthology of
contemporary slave narratives, features the stories of child soldiers Aida, Dia and Manju
who are identified as such in the sub-title to the section in which they appear. Laura T.
Murphy's collection, Survivors of Slavery, includes the narrative of Anywar Ricky
Richard, whose "form of enslavement" is classified as "[c]onscripted child soldier" (212)
in Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army. Murphy defines slaves as "people who are
forced to work against their will, with no pay beyond subsistence, under threat of
violence, with little or no means of escape" (Survivors 2). Certainly, soldiering is a form
of work. Adults are employed by militaries to provide a service and receive a salary for
their efforts. As such, child soldiering can be considered a form of child labour, and
according to the International Labour Organization, one of the "worse forms" (Maguire
247-48, Singer 157). Whether this labour is always forced or not, however, is another
question. A number of the former child soldiers discussed here portray themselves in
their memoirs as having chosen to join these armed groups and thus, implicitly,
volunteered their labour. I will discuss this notion of choice and volunteerism in more
detail in chapter 3. However, few child soldiers seem to receive financial compensation
for the work they perform. Singer notes that "While adults usually desire to be paid for
their roles, even if they believe in the cause, children rarely are. One survey of child
soldiers in Burundi found that only 6 percent had ever received any sort of remuneration"
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(55). Indeed, only China Keitetsi mentions drawing a salary (202, 238) from her work as
a child soldier. However, child soldiers may be compensated for their services in other
ways. In charge of manning checkpoints as a 14-year-old, Tchicaya Missamou says that
the militiamen who supervise them provide them with "ammunition, weed, alcohol,
whatever we requested" (83). This goes beyond subsistence.
In lieu of pay, the threat of violence often keeps child soldiers in thrall to their
commanders. Senait Mehari describes being slapped (58) and beaten (82) as a member of
the ELF, but this type of violence is not exclusive to the military: she is also beaten by
her father. The threat of violence often prevents escape attempts. Mehari says, "We were
not allowed to leave the camp" (62), ostensibly because it is too dangerous, but the fates
of those who attempted to escape -- execution -- reveal the truth. One commander even
says, "'I'll kill anyone who tries to run away myself'" (97). Maguire notes "Even where
children 'voluntarily' join armed forces, they are rarely allowed to leave at will" (250).
But of course, adults cannot easily leave military service either -- to do so would be
desertion. Indeed, attempts to escape from the ELF are framed in such terms in Mehari's
text: "desertion was strictly forbidden" (85) and "Deserters were normally shot
immediately" (97). Moreover, some of the child soldiers seem less than keen to escape.
Jal actually runs away to another camp, hoping there will be more opportunities to fight
there. He says, "I wasn't running away from war. I was running toward it" (108). When
he meets Emma McCune and she promises to take him away from war, he has mixed
feelings. He asks himself, "how could I ever leave Sudan with this khawaja [white]
woman? Was this what God wanted for me?" (179). Part of the impetus for accepting her
offer is the rumour that he and the other child soldiers were going to sent back to the
63
Kakuma refugee camp. He says, "I knew there were schools there, but I didn't want to go
back to fighting over khawaja food and waiting. I'd rather go back to war" (178). Emma
has promised to send him to school in "the white people's land" and he thinks "Maybe if I
went there, I would finally learn the things I needed to take my revenge on the jallabas"
(179).
In her thesis on francophone African slave narratives, Sadie Skinner treats Lucien
Badjoko‘s, J’étais enfant soldat (2005) as a slave narrative, although she admits that in
his narrative, "the word slavery is never evoked, nor is any direct analogy drawn between
Badjoko‘s textual construction of his experiences as a child soldier and slavery" (13).
Given that Badjoko voluntarily joins a militia group in the Democratic Republic of
Congo as a child, the rationale for classifying him as a slave (and his narrative as a slave
narrative) is not immediately clear. However, Skinner clarifies that she is thinking of
slavery in terms of Orlando Patterson’s notion of "social death." Rather than putting the
emphasis on ownership or force in defining what makes a slave, Patterson argues that
slavery, which historically is the only other alternative to death for captives of war,
functions as a symbolic death that removes the slave from his social order: having "no
socially recognized existence outside of his master, "the slave becomes a "social
nonperson" (Patterson 5), separated from his family and on the fringes of society.
Skinner argues that, in a similar vein, child soldier Badjoko "completely sheds all traces
of his former existence and fully embraces his new life as an agent of violence" (82).
This pattern can be seen in many of the child soldier narratives, as the protagonists leave
their homes and families, and their identities become completely subsumed in that of the
64
armed group, which remains on the margins. In this aspect, the conflation of child soldier
narrative with slave narrative makes sense.
In her work on modern slave narratives, Murphy includes a number of texts
usually classified as child soldier narratives, including Beah's A Long Way Gone,
Keitetsi's Child Soldier, and Akallo and McDonnell's Girl Soldier ("Blackface" 95, ft.
10). Akallo's narrative seems to fit Murphy's own definition of slavery, given that Grace
is kidnapped, forced to carry gear for the LRA and "marry" a commander, barely given
even enough food to survive, and threatened with beatings and even shooting. Another
girl who tries to run away is caught and killed, her head "smashed" (106). The result for
Grace is that "The thought of escape left me immediately" (106). However, some of the
other child soldier narratives fit a little more uneasily into this category. China Keitetsi
actually "ask[s] to join" the NRA (114-115). As already noted, she receives a salary for
the work she performs (202, 238). She also manages to run away from the military
multiple times, but always returns. When she leaves Uganda, she is not actually escaping
the military, but a former friend whose money she has lost in a bad investment. As such,
Murphy's classification of Child Soldier as a modern slave narrative is somewhat
puzzling. However, Murphy is not defining a slave narrative simply as a narrative of a
slave. She says, "The slave narrative is a genre driven not solely by the fact that its
protagonist narrator is held captive and seeks freedom; it is equally defined by its
purpose, its desire to affect an audience" ("New" 386). Regardless of the choice the child
soldier protagonists seem to demonstrate in joining or remaining with their armed
groups, most (though not all) child soldier narrative have an activist, anti-war message. It
is in this sense that the connection to slave narratives becomes clearer.
65
Over the past decade, child soldier narratives have changed, with the later texts
portraying a less cynical view of child soldiers. The earlier texts portray the child soldier
as irredeemable, cold-blooded killers. Dongala’s eponymous Johnny Mad Dog
repeatedly kills and rapes with seemingly no remorse until he is killed himself by the
novel’s other protagonist, the angelic Laokolé, in a stark battle of good versus evil.
Kourouma’s cocky, foul-mouthed anti-hero Birahima actually throws a tantrum, crying
and demanding to be allowed to become a child soldier. This type of portrayal seems to
subscribe to a view of child soldiers as a lost generation. In his book Children at War,
P.W. Singer has explicitly titled one subsection "The Lost Generation," where he quotes
a number of depressing statistics about the violence, poverty, and disease faced by
children and youth in Africa, which he sees as creating a disaffected generation who have
grown up with violence and know nothing else, and so are easily recruited into armed
conflict. Michael Wessells sums it up well: "Public media have often spoken uncritically
of a ‘lost generation,’ portraying entire generations of war-affected children as beyond
repair and unable to assume socially constructive roles" (28). However, in his book he
challenges this view of child soldiers as a "lost generation" or irretrievably "damaged
goods," arguing that children are surprisingly resilient.
We can see the movement from Singer to Wessells’ view reflected in literary
child soldier narratives, as we move from the deformed bildungsroman (Walsh 185) of
Allah is not obliged to the "recovery narrative" of A Long Way Gone, which emphasizes
Ishmael’s rehabilitation and rebirth as an activist speaking out against the use of child
soldiers. However, this new focus on the child soldier’s ability to overcome adversity and
reintegrate into society is not necessarily a good thing from a literary standpoint as it
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paradoxically victimizes them further. While earlier texts paint a grim picture of a "lost
generation," the recovery narrative panders to the (Western) audience’s expectations by
emphasizing the essential innocence of the child in a potentially paternalistic fashion that
does not recognize the child’s agency. Of course, there is a difference between the
agency of the writer (in the present) and that of the child soldier (in the past). The author
may invoke Western ideas for their own purposes as an agent, but paradoxically this may
be denying agency to their childhood self. The issue is complicated when a co-writer
becomes involved.
Similar issues of agency and collaboration can be seen in slave narratives. From
the human-rights agenda of the writer-activist to the controversies regarding authorship
and factual accuracy, the resemblances between the two forms of narratives are often
striking. Slave narratives were initially dismissed and denigrated for not being real
literature, but eventually became accepted as an established genre. Although child soldier
narratives are still growing and developing as a genre, perhaps one day they will earn a
similar place in the canon.
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Chapter 2 Innocent Victims or "Young Lions": The Differing
Representations of the Child Soldier Figure
In his bestselling memoir A Long Way Gone (2007), former Sierra Leonean child soldier
Ishmael Beah initially bristles at being repeatedly told by rehabilitation staff that “It’s not
your fault . . . You were just a little boy.” This concept of non-responsibility is clearly
connected with assumptions of childhood innocence in the minds of the staff, but Beah
and the other young soldiers resist such infantilizing platitudes, wanting to be recognized
as fully fledged soldiers with adult capabilities. Gradually, he comes to accept the idea
that nothing is his fault, internalizing the notions of childhood innocence promoted in the
rehabilitation camp. Interestingly, David Rosen ends his chapter on Sierra Leone in
Armies of the Young with a quote from a former child soldier, who echoes the exact
words that are the prevailing cry in A Long Way Gone: “God must forgive boys like us.
It was not our fault” (90). Rosen argues that the automatic assumption of innocence
based on age is the product of a contemporary Western humanitarian narrative and is not
necessarily applicable in the non-Western cultures where it is frequently imposed. Beah’s
memoir enacts this exact theory, clearly linking the idea of non-responsibility and
innocence to youth, even though these notions are not necessarily relevant to his specific
national or cultural context as a young Mende man from Sierra Leone. By contrast,
young anti-apartheid fighters, who could also be considered child soldiers, are most often
represented in South African literary production as active agents, rather than victims who
bear no responsibility for their often violent actions. The reasons for this disparity
deserve close scrutiny.
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As previously discussed, there are numerous problems with the emphasis on
chronological age as defining childhood, as well as the assumption that childhood is a
time of natural innocence. The tendency of humanitarian organizations to reduce young
soldiers to innocent victims on the basis of an arbitrary cut-off age of eighteen is
troubling in a post-colonial context because of a long history of Western colonizers
reducing “native” colonials to children both politically and conceptually. As Bill
Ashcroft puts it, “Colonial imperialism utilized the concept and implications of
childhood to confirm a binarism between colonizer and colonized; a relationship which
induced compliance to the cultural dominance of Europe” (52). Therefore, a relentless
insistence on viewing the teenaged soldier as a child risks evoking racist colonial notions
of development, paternalism, and the colonial subject as forever a child. It preserves the
dichotomy of the West as a mature and virtuous father figure, and the non-West as
passive victims, and ignores any agency that children may have. As Erica Burman has
argued in her article about images of suffering non-Western children in charity appeals,
“The model of the suffering, innocent child may sit easily with western assumptions of
passive populations in need of rescue, but this threatens to ignore and undermine the
positive role that political involvement may play in the lives of children coping with
conflict and trauma” (244). What is interesting about these child soldier narratives is that,
as shown in the example from Beah, the child soldier-protagonist often resists this
infantilization at first, before coming to accept it – more or less grudgingly. These
moments of tension within the texts suggest a potential discomfort with such an image of
childhood.
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Indeed, Ishmael12
initially resists the staff’s urging to forgo any responsibility
because of his age. He says, “This made us angry, because we wanted ‘the civilians,’ as
we referred to the staff members, to respect us as soldiers who were capable of severely
harming them” (140). Ishmael and the other soldiers do not want to be infantilized; they
wish to be recognized as fully-fledged soldiers with adult capabilities. They respond to
this perception of themselves as children with violence. After the riot at the first
rehabilitation centre, where Ishmael and the other boys from the army battle with former
child rebels, the boys are pleased by the fear they inspire in the city soldiers. Beah says,
“It seemed they had gotten the message that we were not children to play with” (137).
The boys think they have succeeded in proving their adulthood through violence, but the
fear experienced by the city soldiers is only temporary. The staff at Benin House persists
in viewing them as children who are not responsible for their actions, despite the
violence they continue to inflict. When Esther speaks to Ishmael “the way a mother
would talk to a stubborn child” (141), Ishmael responds by throwing the glass she handed
him against the wall and shattering broken glass everywhere, causing her to jump. As his
rehabilitation proceeds, Ishmael continues to react against the staff’s insistence on
treating him like a child, but judging by the gradual change in his response, he is
beginning to absorb their conceptualization of childhood innocence. In a later
confrontation with Esther, Ishmael says “I threw the Walkman at her and left, putting my
fingers in my ears so I couldn’t hear her say, ‘It is not your fault’” (160). The plugging of
his ears is the act of a petulant child rather than a soldier to be feared, with no broken
12 For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the protagonist of A Long Way Gone as Ishmael, and the author as
Beah.
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glass involved. Treating him as a child eventually makes him one. Ishmael comes to fully
accept the alluring concept that nothing is his fault. He says, “Even though I had heard
that phrase from every staff member – and frankly I had always hated it – I began that
day to believe it” (165). Given his initial resistance to being viewed as a child, this text,
written after his rehabilitation was completed, arguably demonstrates the success of his
interpellation by an ideal of childhood reflective of the contemporary humanitarian
narrative produced in the West. This is a necessary transition to make over the course of
the text, because of the generic demands of the child soldier narrative, which are
themselves heavily influenced by Western humanitarian ideals.
Rosen argues that the current Western humanitarian perspective that
conceptualizes childhood and innocence as synonymous is not necessarily applicable in
non-Western cultures, where childhood can be seen very differently. He notes that many
young people in other parts of the world take on adult rights and responsibilities at a far
younger age than they do in the West (Armies 62). In his chapter on Sierra Leone, Rosen
specifically discusses the historical practices of the Mende, one of the major ethnic
groups in Sierra Leone (63) and the one to which Beah belongs, in recruiting young boys
into their fighting forces. He draws on Kenneth Little's classic ethnographic text, The
Mende of Sierra Leone, to make his point about the initiation of pubescent boys into the
Poro, the men-only Mende secret society, and subsequent emergence as warriors. Rosen
says, “Although the Mende did not reckon age with precision, the youngest warriors
were in their early teenage years. The West today regards such young people as boys or
children, but the Mende saw them as young adults with the rights and duties of
adulthood” (64). This fact would seem to provide a historical precedent for how Ishmael
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would be viewed as a teenaged soldier in his particular national and ethnic context, in
opposition to the rehabilitation centre staff’s conceptualization of him as a child not
responsible for his actions. This is not to imply that culture in Africa is not subject to
historical change: ideas of childhood change through time as they have in the West,
which, as Phillippe Ariès argues, has seen a change from when children were considered
miniature adults to the new notion of childhood as a separate and protected stage of life.
However, Rosen's argument is that the way children are viewed in Sierra Leone has not
changed; that the emergence of child soldiers in the civil war was rooted in the country’s
history of violent exploitation of children in the slave trade, secret associations for boys
that promoted violence, and youth violence as a tool of pre-civil-war politics. This
rejection of notions of childhood innocence thus seems to be the product of a long
history.
The concept of the innocence of children as an imported notion in A Long Way
Gone can be seen in the reaction of the villagers to children and child soldiers. The
experience of the civil war causes them specifically to fear children and boys. Even boys
like Ishmael and his friends, who are initially simply running away from danger, are
assumed guilty until proven innocent. Ishmael says, “People were terrified of boys our
age. Some had heard rumors about young boys being forced by rebels to kill their
families and burn their villages. These children now patrolled in special units, killing and
maiming civilians. There were those who had been victims of these terrors and carried
fresh scars to show for it” (37). These young people have a reputation for brutality and
thus anyone in the same age group is to be feared. The lived experience of the war, in the
context of a long history of youth violence, creates a society where automatic
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assumptions of innocence for children are frequently rejected. Rosen writes about the
history of youth violence in Sierra Leone as leading to the child soldier crisis and shaping
notions of childhood innocence in the country. Beah’s chronology also makes reference
to student demonstrations (222) and the revolt of the slaves on the Amistad, which was
led by “a young Mende man” (220). This long history of violent child and youth action
arguably makes Sierra Leoneans less inclined to pardon child soldiers on the basis of
their age and presumed innocence, as violence perpetrated by children is not necessarily
seen as unusual. Conversely, the staff at the UNICEF rehabilitation camps maintain their
belief in children’s innocence, even after the riot in the first camp, where six boys are
killed by other children. Even after the boys stab the storage-man and beat him
unconscious, he returns “limping but with a smile on his face. ‘It is not your fault that
you did such a thing to me,’” he says (140). Both groups have seen the violence that
children are capable of inflicting, but only the rehabilitation staff cling to their belief that
children cannot be held responsible for their actions, which may actually impede the
children's recovery. Wessells notes that when children (or adults) view themselves as
victims, it is difficult for them to regain the sense of control that is crucial for
overcoming trauma (134).
On the surface, it would seem that some Sierra Leoneans share the view of the
contemporary humanitarian narrative produced in the West. The men who originally
remove Ishmael and his comrades from their army unit are described thus: “One of them
was a white man and another was also light-skinned, maybe Lebanese. The other two
were nationals, one with tribal marks on his cheeks, the other with marks on his hand”
(128). Despite the involvement of Sierra Leonean nationals in the disarmament and
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demobilization of child soldiers, the fact remains that the rehabilitation staff are
employed by UNICEF, a United Nations organization that engages in typical Western
humanitarian discourse. While discussing why they have been discharged from their unit
and taken to the rehabilitation centre, one boy tells Ishmael that “he thought the
foreigners gave our commanders money in exchange for us” (133). UNICEF and the staff
members who run the rehabilitation program are then clearly identified as foreign despite
the presence of Sierra Leoneans within the organization’s ranks. Arguably then, the
notion of childhood and innocence promoted in the camp seems to be a foreign import
rather than indigenous to Sierra Leonean society.
When the boys are captured by villagers who suspect them of being dangerous
rebels, the chief initially says, “You children have become little devils” (66). However,
he is distracted from his immediate anger by the rap cassettes that fall out of Ishmael’s
pockets. As soon as he sees that Ishmael is carrying tapes rather than weapons, the
second chief starts referring to him and his friends as “boys” instead of “devils.”
Additionally, while watching Ishmael dance to the music, the chief “gave a sigh that said
[Ishmael] was just a child” (67-8). The chief is eventually convinced of Ishmael’s
childish innocence, but the key difference is that he does not automatically assume that
children must be innocent by virtue of their age, as the rehabilitation staff seem to. The
type of music that convinces him to rethink his initial opinion is also significant in that it
suggests Western influence. The music is specifically an album by Naughty by Nature,
the American hip-hop group. While it is true that rap music in general is part of a global
countercultural movement and has been adopted by disenfranchised people of colour --
particularly young people -- in many different parts of the world, Ishmael’s introduction
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to the genre suggests otherwise: he first discovers rap music in “a quarter where the
foreigners who worked for the same American company as my father lived” (6). Already,
rap music is explicitly connected with foreigners and Americans. Ishmael then further
defamiliarizes this type of music by describing the first rap video he saw as “a bunch of
young black fellows talking really fast” (6). The village men specifically refer to the
tapes as “foreign cassettes” (66) and Ishmael has to explain to the chief “that it was
called rap music” (67), further suggesting that this type of music is a foreign concept in
the village. Given these descriptions, I would argue that in the context of this memoir,
rap music is symbolic of imported Western notions. The chief’s gradual acceptance that
the boys are harmless, which only comes after his initial fearful reaction, therefore
cannot be read as a native Sierra Leonean belief in the essential innocence of children.
The fact that their childishness seems to be confirmed by the possession of music that
shows their involvement with Western youth culture further aligns this belief in child-
like innocence with the global North.
The idea that innocence is a foreign notion is further supported by the reception
that child soldiers in Sierra Leone received after demobilizing. Many scholars note that
former child soldiers are often seen as polluted and rejected by their communities
because of the atrocities they committed, often against their own families (Rosen 89,
Honwana 105, Singer 74). This is illustrated in the experiences of Ishmael and his
friends. He tells the story of his friend Mambu “who went back to the front lines, because
his family refused to take him in” (180). Ishmael and his friend Mohamed are ostracized
by their schoolmates when they return to school in Freetown: “all the students sat apart
from us, as if Mohamed and I were going to snap any minute and kill someone.
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Somehow they had learned that we had been child soldiers” (202). Even Ishmael’s uncle
hides Ishmael’s past as a child soldier from the rest of the family, saying “‘I don’t think
they will understand now as my wife and I do’” (176). These experiences do not
corroborate the notion promoted by the rehabilitation centre, that by virtue of his age,
Ishmael is innocent and not responsible for his actions: Sierra Leoneans continue to shun
and fear former child soldiers. Because of their lived experience and Sierra Leone's
history, they are accustomed to youth violence; however, this does not mean they want to
subject themselves to it. Although Beah says that one of the consequences of the civil
war is that people in general were suspicious of each other and "every stranger became
an enemy" (37), child soldiers have a particularly fearsome reputation, as he has already
alluded to. This lack of faith in the rehabilitation process signals skepticism about the
possibility of restoring innocence to former child soldiers, perhaps even doubt that this
original innocence ever existed. This treatment that the former child soldiers receive
from their community effectively functions as a punishment, and therefore, a denial of
innocence by virtue of age. Both the UNICEF staff and the villagers have seen what
children are capable of, but only the Westerners are willing to forgive them and live with
them, because of their perhaps misguided belief in the essential innocence of children in
general. Yet the eventual success of Ishmael's rehabilitation, as portrayed in the memoir,
signals his investment in the genre's typical narrative arc, which demands redemption. I
will discuss these generic expectations in further detail in chapter 4.
Beah’s Sierra Leone is not the only place where childhood innocence seems to be
a foreign notion. Many of the child soldier narratives make it clear that the events they
relate take place in contexts where childhood ends much earlier than the Western
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humanitarian narrative would have it. In Johnny Mad Dog, Laokolé wakes her little
brother to help her, saying, “He was almost twelve now, no longer a small child, old
enough to help the family” (Dongala 4). Later on, reflecting on her duty to care for her
mother and young sibling despite her young age, she states, “At sixteen, a girl is already
a woman” (Dongala 47). According to Laokolé, young people who would be defined as
children under UNICEF parameters have certain adult responsibilities. Senait Mehari,
who was six or seven years old when she joined the Eritrean Liberation Front, makes
clear the role that cultural context plays in these differing perceptions of childhood and
adulthood:
Even by the standards of the time, I was too young to be a soldier. Both the ELF
and the ELPF started training children at eleven years of age but only sent
soldiers into action from the age of twelve or thirteen, when they were regarded
as young adults in African culture. By the age of fourteen they were on the front
line. (Mehari 63)
She makes the link between “African culture” and early (at least by Western standards)
onset adulthood. This is not to suggest, as T.W. Bennett does in his provocatively-titled
monograph, that child soldiers are potentially “a legitimate African tradition,” but that
the straight-18 position is not as universal as human-rights law often makes it appear to
be. Emmanuel Jal also comments on the different concepts of childhood in Africa and the
West (or more specifically, South Sudan and the United Kingdom) when describing the
British media interest in his past, as child soldiers were considered “unusual in a country
where children are children until eighteen, many years more than in my village at home”
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(Jal 244). He continues, “Childhood in Africa does not hold the same romance that it
does in Europe and America. But I would still like to see a world in which no child
experiences what I did” (Jal 256). This is an important distinction to make. Being critical
of the romanticization of childhood and the straight-18 position held by many
humanitarian organizations does not amount to supporting the use of child soldiers. Since
the publication of his memoir, Jal has broadened the scope of his activism with his “We
Want Peace” campaign, which agitates for a cessation of hostilities in South Sudan for all
people, regardless of age.
For many of these child soldiers, the rite of passage into adulthood takes place
significantly earlier than one’s eighteenth birthday. Before he can leave his village,
Kourouma’s Birahima has to undergo initiation. After he and the other boys are
circumcised and spend two months away from the village being educated in the secret
knowledge of manhood, Birahima says “we had been initiated so now we were men”
(Kouroma 30). His exact age at this time is unclear, but he is no older than ten or twelve
(3). Interestingly, this process takes place before he becomes a child soldier; technically,
he is already an adult by the time he joins. Tchicaya Missamou also undergoes initiation
at a young age and before he is recruited into the Lari militia. He gives a lengthy
description of travelling deep into the jungle as an eleven-year-old with his father, a
number of medicine men, and thirty other boys with their fathers, where they spend two
weeks practicing swimming, tracking animals, and learning ancestral songs before their
circumcision. As they return home, Tchicaya says, "Thirty boys went into the jungle, but
not a single one returned. In their place were warriors. Men" (63). Indeed, he uses the
terms "warrior" and "man" almost interchangeably in this section. By representing this
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initiation as men before the initiation as child soldiers, these texts complicate an
understanding of underage combatants as children and defy their own marketing, which
is something I will discuss further in chapter 4.
Other child soldiers miss out on their initiations entirely, which still take place
much earlier than age eighteen. Agu in Beasts of No Nation recalls the dances that used
to be done in his village, including the one the young boys do to become men, thinking
“if war is not coming, then I would be man by now” (Iweala 56). So Agu is a child
soldier by his own definition then, but not because of his age: under normal
circumstances, he would have been initiated and considered a full-fledged adult at this
point in his life. His age in the novel is never made clear, but Iweala has said in an
interview that he imagined Agu as somewhere between the ages of nine and twelve
(Sachs, TIME). Despite never having undergone the usual rite of passage, Agu seems to
make the transition to adulthood at some point during his time as a soldier: later on in the
text, he says “I am knowing I am no more child so if this war is ending I cannot be going
back to doing child thing” (Iweala 93). What has replaced the usual initiation ritual is
war, a substitution Agu makes clear when he says, “All we are knowing is that, before
the war we are children and now we are not” (Iweala 36).
Irina Kyulanova argues that that in Beah’s memoir specifically, war acts as a
reverse rite of passage that leaves child soldiers in limbo, not still children but not yet
adults either, and that the rehabilitation process functions as an attempted rite of passage
back into childhood. This argument can be extrapolated to many of the other child
soldier narratives. Emmanuel Jal envies the boys who have undergone gaar, “the
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ceremony in which strokes were cut into the skin of boys to make them men” (37-8). He
specifically states that, among other things, gaar meant “you were ready for war” (38).
The ceremony typically takes place at the age of fourteen (38); indeed, Emmanuel later
mentions that all the jesh a mer13
fighting at the front lines were “boys of about fourteen
upward” (Jal 142). Like Agu, Emmanuel himself becomes a child soldier before formally
becoming a man. However, just after telling Emmanuel that his gaar is still “many years
away,” his father says, “you are a big boy now. You must not complain or cry. You are
my soldier and must show your brothers and sisters what it is like to be a man” (Jal 39).
He is only about seven years old at this time, and has not officially crossed the threshold
into adulthood, but he is still being encouraged to think of himself as a man and a soldier.
The frequent conflation of “adult” with “man” in these narratives deserves comment. The
girl soldiers do not insist on their own personal adulthood in the same way, perhaps
because female soldiers, like child soldiers, are considered to be an oxymoron.
Like Beah, Emmanuel also resists attempts to infantilize him. His refrain in War
Child is some variation on “I was a soldier, not a child” (101). As a nine-year-old in his
first battle, he tells himself this repeatedly as self-motivation but his father has been
telling him the same since he was even younger. When seven-year-old Emmanuel cries
because his father, an SPLA commander, is returning to the front, he says Babba “saw
my tears and told me I was a man, a soldier, a warrior now” (Jal 22). Interestingly,
sometimes Emmanuel’s own commanders resist his self-conceptualization as a grown
man and full-fledged soldier. He agitates to be allowed to fight on the front lines, in the
13 Defined as “young people who are trained to fight in war” (Jal 64).
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face of officers who think he is “too little to fight” (143). He makes his case to his
commander John Kong, saying “‘I’ve heard the big soldiers talk. They are scared of
jenajesh because we shoot so quickly. We are young and light too – they can use us to
run across minefields and run at the front of battle’” (133). However, Kong tells him,
“You are still a small boy, you are a junior” and patronizingly calls him “little soldier,”
which fills Emmanuel with “rage” (132-3). However, Emmanuel is only twelve at this
time; as previously mentioned, most jenajesh are fourteen or older, the age at which they
would typically undergo initiation into manhood. Kong is not telling him that he has to
wait until he turns eighteen to join the soldiers on the front line, just that he is not ready
at this particular moment. Moreover, Emmanuel’s physical stature is also an issue. He
states he is “still so small” and that the jenajesh at the front are all bigger than him (142).
He says “This is why the officers wanted to keep me away from the front” (143): when
they say he is too little, they mean in terms of size, not age.
Like Beah, Emmanuel continues to see himself as a soldier even after he
demobilizes. After defecting to join Riek Machar, a rival SPLA commander, Emmanuel
meets Riek's second wife, British aid worker Emma McCune14
, who takes a shine to him
and smuggles him out of Sudan to live with her in Kenya. Used to a certain degree of
freedom in his previous life as a soldier, Emmanuel has some trouble adjusting to life as
14 As an idealistic expatriate turned "warlord's wife," McCune was a notorious figure, the subject of books
and documentaries including Victoria Stevenson's The Warlord's Wife, Emma's War by Deborah
Scroggins, and Till the Sun Grows Cold, an biography written by McCune's mother, Maggie McCune.
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Emma’s adopted child.15
He has a habit of sneaking out of bed after she has tucked him
at night. She tells him, “‘You’re a young boy . . . You must sleep and grow” (182).
Emmanuel says, “It made me angry when she said such things. I wasn’t a boy. I was a
soldier” (182). Although Emma does not explicitly absolve him of responsibility for his
actions on the basis of his youth, she does tell him, “You are too small to live in war, too
young to see the things you have” (179). She is disturbed by the war games he still likes
to play and the pictures he draws “of jeeps, tanks, and houses on fire instead of hippos,
birds, and crocodiles,” telling him, “‘You must draw beautiful things’” (183) i.e. things
that she considers more appropriate for a child. Yet, compared to other people, who
condemn him, saying “‘He was a child soldier, he’s crazy,’” Emma is “the one person
who did not judge” him (190). Despite her influence, Emmanuel never really lets go of
his identity as a soldier. After Emma dies, he spends several years roaming from place to
place, getting expelled from different schools for fighting. When he gets into an
argument with his headmaster, he thinks, “Who was this man to disrespect me? I was a
soldier. I was a man. I was nineteen years old now” (201). Although he is now of the age
that even Western humanitarian groups would accept him as a soldier, he is envisioning
shooting his headmaster – violence that would never be condoned off the battlefield.
Even at the end of the book, he still self-identifies as a soldier, albeit one that has traded
in his gun, saying “I’m still a soldier, fighting with my pen and paper, for peace till the
day I cease” (254).
15 Although Emma tells Emmanuel “‘You are my little brother now’” (181), she clearly is more of a
mother figure to him; when she dies, Emmanuel makes a clear parallel between her and his own dead
mother, saying “Mamma had been taken from me, and now Emma had too” (194).
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Agu’s transition to rehabilitation in Beasts of No Nation is much smoother than
Emmanuel’s. After deserting his unit, he makes his way to a rehabilitation camp by the
sea that he describes as “heaven” (Iweala 137), where he has his own room and new
clothes and plenty to eat. He also has daily sessions with Amy, “a white woman from
America who is coming here to be helping people like me” (140). He complains that she
seems to think he is a baby, when really “I am like old man and she is like small girl
because I am fighting in war and she is not even knowing what war is” (140). However,
he also tries to protect her to a certain extent, telling her, “I am not saying many thing
because I am knowing too many terrible thing to be saying to you . . . if I am saying these
thing, then it will be making me to sadding too much and you to sadding too much in this
life” (141). He is trying to spare her feelings as well as avoiding his own painful
memories. By contrast, Beah courts the fear and horror of his interlocutors. When Esther
asks him about his scars, he says, “I told her the whole story about how I got shot, not
because I really wanted to, but because I thought that if I told her some of the gruesome
truth of my war years she would be afraid of me and would cease asking questions”
(Beah 155). Unlike Agu, Ishmael and the other boys are not grateful to have been
“rescued,” at least not at first. At the rehabilitation centre, they are offered medical
treatment (which they refuse), schooling (where they fight instead of paying attention in
class, and sell their school supplies), and “one-on-one counseling sessions in the
psychosocial therapy centre that we hated” (139). The only thing they do as asked is eat
the regular meals that are provided to them. It is not until the staff discover Ishmael's
love of music, winning him over with the gift of a Walkman and a Run-DMC cassette,
that his rehabilitation really begins. This is the point when he starts to think of himself as
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a victim rather than as a soldier. Emmanuel’s rehabilitation is less formal, consisting of
the year he spends living with Emma in Kenya and going to school. He does not mention
receiving any psychological treatment, though he does say that he found writing songs
and performing calmed him and reduced his nightmares: “after getting to know England
and the USA, I have learned that this is called music therapy, but all I knew in Kenya is
that music made me happy in a way I hadn’t felt before” (215).
In some ways these narratives participate in what Laura Briggs calls the
“ideology of rescue by white people of non-white people” (181), or to paraphrase Spivak,
white [wo]men rescuing black children from black adults. Indeed, the saviour figure in
almost all of these narratives is a white woman. I have already discussed Emma
McCune’s adoption of Emmanuel Jal in some detail. Despite the difficulties he had
adjusting to life with her, Jal calls her his “guardian angel” and thanks her for “rescuing
me” in his Acknowledgements (261). He has written songs about her and named the
school he built in South Sudan the Emma Academy. After he has completed
rehabilitation, Ishmael Beah meets the American Laura Simms, a professional storyteller,
at a conference in New York. About a year later, conditions in Freetown have
deteriorated after a coup, and the uncle Beah has been living with dies. He manages to
phone Simms and ask if he can come stay with her in New York. Although the memoir
ends in the Sierra Leoneon embassy in Conakry, Guinea, before Beah actually makes it
to the United States, the book makes it clear that Simms keeps her promise and becomes
Beah’s “mother” (197, 227). Although it is arguably Esther, the black nurse, who first
manages to get through to Beah and launch the rehabilitation process, it is Simms whom
Beah thanks first in his Acknowledgements, “for her tireless work to bring me here, for
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her love and advice, for providing me a home when I had none, and for allowing me to
rest and enjoy the last moments of what was left of my childhood” (227). More generally
speaking, the narratives all function as an implicit appeal to the Western reader to
contribute to the cause and help “save” these innocent child soldiers.
This portrayal of child soldiers as innocent victims in need of saving seems
unique to these recent memoirs and novels. By comparison, the literary representation of
South African children and youth involved in the militarized anti-apartheid movement is
very different. Very young students were involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising16
and
other insurrections, yet they are rarely considered “child soldiers” per se. The youth who
joined Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress, or
organized their own groups in the townships with weapons supplied by MK, would seem
to fit the UNICEF definition of a child soldier as “any person under 18 years of age who
is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity”
(Cape Town Principles 1997). Yet, Michael Wessells (who has done field work in South
Africa) is one of the only scholars who groups South Africa among the nations who have
used child soldiers. As Rosen puts it, “Little attention was paid to the presence of child
soldiers in the era of national liberation movements, but it has become a significant issue
now that postcolonial states face their own insurgencies” (Rosen, Armies 157). Certainly,
16 A note about terminology: I deliberately refer to the events of June 1976 as the Soweto “uprising.”
However, they are often described as the Soweto “riots”; as Mzamane points out, “It was the official term
that was employed (by multitudes of ‘non-Whites’, too), just as the British news media uses the word
repeatedly to describe the uprisings in Brixton, Toxeth and elsewhere” (“Traditional Oral Forms” 159).
Mzamane, who titles one of the stories/sections in The Children of the Soweto “The Day of the Riots,” says
he does this “in an obviously ironic sense . . . The ‘rioters’ of my title are not the students, but the
marauding armies of police and soldiers” (“Traditional” 159).
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the role of young people in uprisings such as the one that started in Soweto in 1976
deserves to be reconsidered in light of new research on child soldiers. Interestingly, in
South African literary representations, these young people are depicted in a variety of
ways – as heroic “young lions” (as they were dubbed by Nelson Mandela), as menaces to
society, as “youth as apocalypse” (Seekings 2) – but virtually never, as exploited
innocents in need of Western protection. Nor are these young people infantilized in the
same way child soldiers often are. Usually, the child soldier sees him- or herself as an
adult, where as Western humanitarian groups (and Western readers) see them as children.
In the Soweto novels, young people seem to be seen as children and adults
simultaneously.
On the morning of June 16, 1976, thousands of black students in the township of
Soweto began marching from their schools to the nearby Orlando Stadium for a rally.
The immediate cause was to protest the imposition of Afrikaans as a language of
instruction in schools. Black students resented being forced to learn the language of the
oppressors, and the added hardship of having to write their exams in a language that was
foreign to most. It was the final straw after the introduction of Bantu Education in the
1950s, which in practice allotted black schools inferior resources and only trained black
students for unskilled manual labour, which was thought to be the only work appropriate
to their station in life. Of course, this was all in the larger context of the humiliations and
injustices that black Africans had to endure under the apartheid regime. The June 16th
rally was the culmination of months of protest against the Afrikaans Medium Decree,
including petitions, walkouts, and violence at various schools, including the stoning of a
police car and the stabbing of a teacher with a screwdriver (Kane-Berman 14; Mandela,
86
Long Walk 483). It was organized by the Action Committee of the South African
Students’ Movement (SASM), which later became the Soweto Students’ Representative
Committee (SRC or SSRC). Students carried no weapons, only placards bearing slogans
such as “To Hell with Afrikaans” and “It happened at Angola – why not here?” (Hopkins
& Grange 92, Karis and Gerhart 169). When confronted by police with tear gas, the
protestors responded by throwing stones (Karis and Gerhart 168). The police retaliated
by shooting into the crowd. One of the first children shot was twelve-year-old Hector
Pieterson. Sam Nzima’s photograph of eighteen-year-old Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying
Hector’s limp body while his sister runs alongside them screaming has become one of
the most iconic images of the uprising (Hopkins & Grange 96).17
Chaos erupted. More
people were killed and wounded; buses and buildings and other symbols of apartheid
were attacked and burned. The violence continued for several days, and spread to other
townships across the country. Mass detentions and bannings followed, as students
organized follow-up attacks and strikes. Although children have been involved in various
stages of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, I choose to focus on the 1976
Soweto uprising as a pivotal moment that really galvanized the youth of the country to
take the reins. The importance of this moment can be seen in the books it inspired.
The quartet of South African novels responding to the events of June 1976,
commonly referred to as the Soweto novels, consist of, in chronological order, Amandla
by Miriam Tlali (1980), A Ride on the Whirlwind (1981) by Sipho Sepamla, To Every
Birth Its Blood (1981) by Mongane Serote, and The Children of Soweto (1982) by
17 Part of its iconic status is obviously because it depicted children being shot.
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Mbulelo Vizikungo Mzamane. While Tlali’s book features various plot strands and
different characters discussing issues and events in Soweto in 1976-77, they are all
somehow connected to Pholoso, a high school student who becomes a leader in the
student uprising and eventually flees into exile. Sepamla’s novel is about the young
freedom fighter Mzi, who returns from training in Tanzania and joins forces with a group
of students involved in the uprising, led by Mandla. Mzamane’s novel, which is
sometimes treated as a trilogy or two short stories and a novella, has three sections. Book
One, “My Schooldays in Soweto,” is narrated by Sabelo, who details the early unrest in
the schools over the imposition of Afrikaans. Book Two, “The Day of the Riots,”
portrays a white salesman trapped in the Soweto home of a black co-worker on June 16,
1976, with the riots raging outside. The last and longest of the three books, “The
Children of Soweto,” portrays the immediate aftermath of the uprising: mass funerals,
strikes, arrests, the backlash of migrant workers, etc. Serote’s novel is somewhat
different from the other three, being set in the township of Alexandra rather than Soweto
and treating the events of June 1976 less directly, which is perhaps why it is the only one
of the four books that was not banned in apartheid-era South Africa (Sole 85). Part One
focuses on Tsi, a thirty-year-old former journalist who drinks too much and broods about
his experiences of police brutality. Tsi mostly disappears in Part Two, which takes place
after the uprising in Soweto had spread to other townships and features various other
characters: Tsi’s nineteen-year-old nephew Oupa who is involved in the resistance,
journalist Dikiledi, her father Michael (a former school principal sentenced to fifteen
years in jail because of his involvement in the Movement), and others.
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For the most part, the students in the Soweto novels are older than the child soldiers
in the more contemporary narratives I have been examining. Most are high school
students, though of course in this context that does not necessarily mean they are
teenagers. As Hopkins and Grange observe in their Author’s Note, “Reference to
children also represents a fundamental misconception about black education under
apartheid, where scholars in high school were often aged between 18 and 22 – hardly
children.” Mzamane’s narrator describes the protestors as “Boys and girls aged between
ten and twenty” (78). However, of the main characters, Mzi is twenty-five (Sepamla 7),
Tsi thirty (Serote 15), Pholoso and Oupa both nineteen (Tlali 1, Serote 109). Keke in A
Ride on the Whirlwind is seventeen (Sepamla 181), but he is also “the baby of the group”
(15), implying that the others are older. There are a few younger children among their
ranks, such as Sipho’s seven- and ten-year-old sons who join the protest (Mzamane 53),
and ten-year-old Queen, Bella’s little sister and the youngest of the students in exile
(Mzamane 244). Historically, the ages of children arrested, detained and even tortured in
the aftermath of the uprising ranged from “under 12 to 20” (Gordimer) with some being
“as young as eight years old” (Ndebele, "Recovering" 324). The Truth and
Reconciliation Report states, “One hundred and four children under the age of sixteen
were killed in the uprising” (TRC 4.9, 255). However, most of the characters portrayed
as participating in the uprising in these texts are clearly not children as defined by the
Cape Town Principles, being well over the age of eighteen. Yet, they are repeatedly
referred to as just that. Mzamane’s title, The Children of Soweto, explicitly refers to them
as such. Sepamla makes repeated reference to the Soweto uprising as the “children’s
revolution” (Sepamla 26, 88, 100, 206, 242), a term that has come into common
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currency. One of the characters in To Every Birth Its Blood, John, mourns his twenty-five
year-old girlfriend Nolizwe (96), who was shot dead by police during the “days of
Power” (98)18
, saying, “I do not think that any child should die like that” (105). He
clarifies that it is not simply because he loved Nolizwe that he is horrified by the way she
died, but that he does not think that is the right way for anybody -- more specifically, any
child -- to die. His deliberate use of the word "child" here suggests that he does not
believe that youth specifically should be shot at.
When characters in their late teens and early twenties are called children, clearly
the line between child and adult is somewhat blurred, and contradictions appear. Indeed,
in The Children of Soweto, the narrator’s father exhorts him to “bear it like a man”
(Mzamane 200). Similarly, in A Ride on the Whirlwind, when “the role of the Soweto
child displayed itself”, Keke’s parents come to the realization that “He was a man, a
brave man at that” (Sepamla 81). As he is being interrogated, Roy tells himself “He was
a man: he would stand by Mandla” (Sepamla 180). Despite the respect accorded to the
“children of Soweto” as revolutionaries, all of these characters still think of strength in
terms of (adult) manhood. Serote also points to the instability between childhood and
adulthood. Tsi says of nineteen-year-old Oupa, “His eyes, his nose, his face, his hands,
even his voice, told me he was a young man, a boy. But the way he stood there, cup in
hand, book in hand, looking at me, smiling, also told me that he was not a boy” (Serote
182). Despite coming to this conclusion, however, he later says, “Oupa was just one of
18 i.e. the time immediately following the Soweto protests. “Power” refers to one of the slogans popular
with the students involved in the uprising, as well as anti-apartheid activists more generally, which itself
seems at least partially derived from the Black Power movement in the U.S.A.
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the many, many children who were dead” (Serote 193). The apparent contradiction in
referring to people in their twenties and older as children can perhaps be explained by the
very specific definition of ‘youth’ in a South African context. Jeremy Seekings explains:
The category of youth in South Africa is a political rather than a sociological or
demographic construct. Being young is generally seen as a necessary but not a
sufficient condition for inclusion in the youth; young people must also be
involved in political activity to count as youth. There is also no agreement as to
the age-limits of being young. It is often implied that the upper age-limit of the
youth is somewhere between thirty and forty, but older people are sometimes
described as youth.” (Seekings xi)
Although Seekings is discussing specific terminology here (the term “youth”), his
remarks can potentially be extrapolated to the twenty-something “children of Soweto.”
Moreover, this word “youth” became all but synonymous with “comrade,” the effect
being that “youth” came to signify a certain type of politics rather than a particular age.
Indeed, Nina’s point that “children, youth and comrades were virtually the same category
of people” (56) could explain why the so-called "children of Soweto" are referred to as
such without infantilizing them even when they seem to be considerably older than what
we would usually consider “children.” In a similar vein, Monique Marks reveals that the
young activists she interviewed for her study defined youth in terms other than
chronological age: “To be a ‘youth’ meant to be ‘energetic’ and ‘vigorous’ and hence
able to engage in a variety of activities” (115). She notes that many of these attributes
also appeared in Sayco’s (South African Youth Congress) draft policy document from
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the 1980s. Certainly, young age and energy often go together, but by leaving age out of
the definition, energetic, vigorous comrades in their forties or above could still
conceivably be considered “youth.” This discrepancy could also be explained as a
generational matter. The younger people (however old they may actually be in years) are
rebelling against the elders and their perceived compliance with oppression, but the
actual chronological ages are relative.
As well as being represented as children, the student protestors in the Soweto novels
are also clearly marked as soldiers in the struggle. They are called “true soldiers”
(Mzamane 210) by a pastor delivering a eulogy, and described as standing strong and
silent, “like the soldiers they were” (Sepamla 115). They clearly see themselves as being
at war. Even the white police officer, Colonel Kleinwater, recognizes that “These
children have declared war on the State” (Sepamla 51). Their school-clothes function as
military uniforms. Mzamane’s narrator says, “it was an important part of our strategy that
we should wear our school uniforms, because we didn’t want to be mixed up in
anybody’s mind with any other organisation” (225). Serote makes the comparison
explicit when he writes, “The streets of South Africa’s cities were again filled with two
types of uniforms, both feared: camouflage dress and school uniforms” (201). There are
also references to the military training available to them in other countries like Botswana
and Tanzania (Sepamla 132). However, the students are already operating “in the true
fashion of a military unit” (Sepamla 70). This type of rhetoric was current at the time of
the uprising. A Soweto Students’ Representative Council circular entitled
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“AZIKWELWA!!! From MONDAY” asks Soweto parents, “Aren’t you proud of the
soldiers of liberation you have given birth to?”19
Despite the fact that they are clearly viewed as children and as soldiers in the above
examples, the youth involved in the Soweto uprising have rarely been classified as “child
soldiers.” The Truth and Reconciliation Report uses the term once (4.9, 273) in a brief
section on the psychological effects of the kind of gross human rights violations
experienced under apartheid. Daniel Nina suggests the term “child soldiers” might be
applied to youth involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, but treats it provisionally,
placing it in quotation marks. He then goes on to argue how South Africa’s case differs
from those in the rest of the continent as “unlike Mozambique or Angola, [it] did not
have an open and declared civil war, where people under 18 years participated as part of
the belligerent forces” (46). Moreover, he notes that the children involved in the anti-
apartheid struggle did not necessarily participate in a formal way, “under the command
structure of a particular organisation” (45). Rather, “children participated as ‘proxy
soldiers’ in the formal war. In other words, their direct involvement was limited” (46).20
However, in her study of the psychological effect of violence on South African activist
youth, Gill Straker notes,
19 Here, children in the sense of offspring rather than age are evoked. Childhood is not typically
understood in these terms in the child soldier narratives, where most of the narrators have been separated
from their parents.
20 Another difference we might note between contemporary child soldiers and youth involved in the anti-
apartheid struggle is that the latter organized themselves, rather than being under the command of adults,
who are typically seen to have brainwashed child soldiers.
93
They were not conscripted soldiers within a conventional army fighting battles in
a combat zone. Yet they were engaged in what they saw as a civil war, a
perception shared by many prominent black leaders, despite the fact that no
official war had been declared. There were troops in the townships; there were
deaths and injuries sustained in running battles between security forces and the
youth; there was armed conflict with competing anti-apartheid groups and
vigilantes. (111)
Although Straker is speaking of the young people who subsequently took up the torch
from Soweto in the 1980s and in particular, a group based in Leandra, her comments can
be applied to the immediate aftermath of June ’76 as well. Moreover, those child soldiers
whose status as such is rarely questioned are also rarely “conscripted soldiers within a
conventional army fighting battles in a combat zone.” To be fair, Nina eventually
concludes that, although the war in South Africa was somewhat unorthodox, “fought in
the streets of many communities throughout the country, in particular in the 1980s and
early 1990s, with less military hardware and software than a traditional army or national
liberation force,” it still involved “the same amount of risk, brutality and physical harm”
(70) as a conventional war.
What remains unclear is the role of children in formal paramilitary organizations such
as the armed wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or the
Pan-African Congress’s Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA). Nina claims that
“In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (1998), for example, there is no
mention or suggestion that the two national liberation armies (MK and APLA) did recruit
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young people under the age of 18 years” (74, ftn. 13). However, the TRC Report itself, in
a section which Nina himself later quotes, says, “Many youth saw no option but to leave
the country to take up arms and fight for liberation. Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) formed in
1961, drew many of its recruits from the ranks of the youth” (TRC 4.9, 255). In an
appendix discussing the Bonteheuwel Military Wing (BMV), of which the “vast
majority” were “between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years of age” (280), the
Report states, “A number of young BMW members were recruited into MK and
underwent military training either outside South Africa or within existing MK cells in the
Western Cape” (281). Specifically in terms of Soweto ’76, Elsabé Brink claims that of
the young students who fled into exile in the aftermath of the uprising, “Many were eager
to undergo military training and were immediately recruited by the African National
Congress’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe” (170). In his autobiography, Nelson
Mandela confirms that “Many of these young people had left the country to join our own
military movement” (484). Even Nina himself writes that the Soweto uprising “created
new expectations of the possibility of fighting the regime, and the need to engage in
armed struggle to overthrow it. This led to a new exodus of children across the border to
participate in armed struggle against the regime” (54). However, he qualifies this claim,
saying, “despite the fact that many children left the country, there is no clear evidence
that they returned to fight and engage the regime in direct military action” (54).
Regardless of whether children under eighteen actually joined MK or other paramilitary
groups after the Soweto uprising, young activists who remained in the townships were
seen as doing similar work. As Seekings states, “The role of the youth within township
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politics was seen as similar to that of Umkhonto we Sizwe within the ANC” (6). In any
event, the children in the Soweto novels are clearly represented as soldiers.
Despite the continued reference to these young people as children, they are not
typically treated as fragile innocents, unlike child soldiers in contemporary narratives. In
his chapter on the child soldier in literature, Rosen argues that “the heroic child fighters
of yesteryear, such as Gavroche in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables or the boy spy, Kim, in
Kipling’s eponymous novel, have been replaced by Agu, the battered victim of a
nameless war in Uzodimna Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation” (“Literature” 111). Jean-Hervé
Jézéquel notes a similar phenomenon:
During the American Civil War or the First World War, the participation of child
soldiers was promoted and perceived through a very specific discursive register,
that of the child hero. The actions of these children were “heroicised” and their
eventual deaths seen as sacrifices in the name of a greater good, often the
nation’s. Conversely, the participation of child combatants in the African wars is
always perceived in a negative manner, through the registers of the victimised
child and the stolen childhood. (5)
Perhaps this view persisted even longer than either Rosen or Jézéquel admit, up until the
1980s, and existed on the African continent. In a speech given upon his release from
prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela recognized the contribution of young people to the anti-
apartheid struggle, saying, “I pay tribute to the endless heroism of youth, you, the young
lions. You, the young lions, have energised our entire struggle.” The Soweto novels are
also more likely to portray children as heroes than victims. Bra P, who is sheltering a
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number of Soweto students as they continue to orchestrate the protests in hiding, tells
them: “As far as I’m concerned, you’ve now become our true and veritable heroes,
amaqhawe [heroes], amagora” (Mzamane 177). The minister presiding over the funerals
of several students shot by police echoes these words, saying, “I look at these little ones,
now departed, as having fallen like true soldiers, our veritable heroes, amagora ethu
okwenene” (210). Sepamla’s epigraph is dedicated to “the young heroes of the day . . .
who ride the whirlwind.” Mandla is described as a “legend” and a “star” (Sepamla 26).
The narrator of Amandla writes of the “brave resistance” of the children (Tlali 130) and
calls a group of students who attack a policeman “heroes” (142). The TRC Report
confirms this perception of the children involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, saying,
“Effectively, they saw themselves as ‘soldiers’ and ‘heroes’, fighting against an enemy”
(TRC 4.9, 258). Despite the type of braggadocio seen in the early parts of Beah and Jal’s
narratives, contemporary child soldier never represent themselves (or are represented as)
heroes21
.
As for how child soldiers are viewed by others, most adults in the contemporary child
soldier narrative (with the possible exceptions of Allah and Johnny) pretty uniformly feel
pity for child soldiers, whom they see as innocent victims robbed of their childhoods and
forced to fight. While the Soweto children are sometimes seen as victims, it is usually as
a particular kind of victim: a martyr. At the funeral for Dumi, one of the students killed
on June 16th
, another student leader makes a speech referring explicitly to “our departed
21 One potential reason for this discrepancy is the fact that the anti-apartheid struggle is seen as a war of
liberation and therefore lends itself more readily to rhetoric of heroism. The child soldiers fighting more
recent wars in Sierra Leone, Sudan, etc. by contrast are not typically seen as fighting on behalf of their
community or out of loyalty or for some other heroic virtue.
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martyrs” (Tlali 79). A circular distributed by Mzamane’s characters speaks of “mourning
our martyrs massacred in Soweto by Vorster’s fascist stormtroopers” (126). As per the
demands of the genre, contemporary child soldiers are usually presented as helpless
pawns of controlling adults, but rarely, if ever, as martyrs who choose to sacrifice for a
greater cause. Of course, the political context is different. By the 1970s, South Africa
under apartheid was a pariah state and most citizens of Western countries would have
more or less supported the Soweto protestors and other anti-apartheid activists.22
Belinda Bozzoli notes the "traditionally binary way of looking at anti-apartheid
struggles" (2) as a "conflict between good and evil" (1). As Khotso Seatlholo, president
of the SSRC after Tsietsi Mashinini went into exile, says, “Morality and the World is on
our side” (3). Many of the contemporary conflicts involving child soldiers, by contrast,
are far murkier, with the heroes and villains much more difficult to identify. As Rosen
notes, these contemporary narratives
. . completely remove war from the world of politics . . . Instead, war appears
virtually out of nowhere, usually as a result of adult perfidy, to engulf children and to
turn them into victims and killers. It is almost as if war was a malevolent natural
phenomenon akin to a tornado which lands on a country and destroys it. The novels
attribute a kind of random and feral meaninglessness to war that unmistakably echo
Conradian representations of the near-riotous inhumanity of Africans. (“Literature”
124)
22 Of course, Great Britain and the U.S.A. continued to arm the apartheid state at this time. Universities
and the private sector were also slower to support the anti-apartheid movement.
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Certainly, the “cause” that child soldiers or the group they belong to fight for is often not
as clear or defensible as that of children involved in the anti-apartheid struggle. However,
as Rosen says of Sierra Leone’s RUF, “The gross immorality of and the unspeakable
crimes committed by leaders and soldiers are no more or less rational than those of the
Nazis” (Armies 13). Although Nazis are commonly portrayed as monsters and as
suffering collective madness, it is allowed that they have specific, albeit horrific, goals;
World War II is not represented as senseless and anomic. Moreover, just because
Western readers might not approve of child soldiers’ reasons for fighting does not
necessarily mean the children do not have them. And their reasons are not necessarily
different from adult reasons either. I will discuss these reasons in more detail in chapter
3.
Interestingly, while the literary representation of the Soweto children portrays
them as martyrs rather than victims, the rhetoric used in the actual materials circulated in
the immediate aftermath of the uprising is not that far from that used by humanitarian
organizations in their campaigns against the use of child soldiers. Circulars distributed by
the Soweto Students’ Representative Council refer to “helpless, innocent, armless [sic]
young black students” (Untitled), “black armless [sic] children” (Untitled), “innocent,
defenceless school children” (Seatlholo 4), and “harmless kids” (Seatlholo 4). However,
a distinction must be made between the unarmed student protestors who were shot at on
June 16th
, and the young people galvanized by this event into fighting against the
apartheid regime. It is generally the children killed in the initial protest who are seen as
martyrs or victims mowed down by the state, whereas those who survived and fought
back in the aftermath of this shooting – and therefore have a greater claim to being
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classified as child soldiers – are shown as heroes, or at least agents. Moreover, these
circulars have a specific purpose in galvanizing the public to action, as opposed to the
novels, which definitely have a didactic agenda as "protest literature," but remain literary
works of art23
.
Of course, not everybody views the children of Soweto as heroes or martyrs. The
adults in the South African texts have a variety of reactions to the protesting students: the
children are also underestimated, feared, and seen as menaces. Like the adults Beah
encounters while on the run, many black South African adults are nervous of young
people during the tense weeks and months after June 16th. Styles, a patron at Noah’s
shebeen, reflects: “The children of ‘Power’ were a feared lot” (Sepamla 118). They are
certainly not innocents in need of protection. People in these novels recognize the power
of these children, unlike the UNICEF workers in A Long Way Gone who keep insisting
that “It’s not your fault” even when the children are attacking them and each other. In
fact, there was an element in the student resistance movement that was less concerned
with politics and more with personal gain (Marks 52). These young people were known
as comtsotsis, a portmanteau combining "comrade" with tsotsi, which means a young
thug or gangster (Bundy 62, endnote 5). Belinda Bozzoli argues there was a continuum
from comrade to tsotsi, where criminals were easily able to masquerade as the comrades
who patrolled the streets with whips, confiscating or destroying the purchases of
shoppers who had defied the consumer boycott (177, 236). Marks gestures at the
23 Indeed, Njabulo Ndebele praises Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood for transcending protest literature
with its "infusion of the ordinary into the spectacle" ("Rediscovery" 57).
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comtsotsi phenomenon when she says, “It was assumed that youth engagement in
violence and resistance was reactive and senseless” and that “the boundary between
political and criminal violence was extremely fluid” (6). These are views that her book
rejects. She admits that “the liberation movement’s commitment to armed struggle and
revolutionary violence was key to the spiralling culture of violence” in South Africa, but
her book shows “how young people in the liberation movement had highly conscious
goals and motivations. They were not mindless menaces, but rather agents of change”
(6).
While many people in the community take the students seriously as either
defenders or threats, others look at them as disobedient children. Chabeli calls them
“disrespectful nincompoops” (Mzamane 63). In Tlali’s novel, the black policeman Niki
complains about the student protestors in the following terms:
kids, school-kids are so badly behaved that they turn the whole world upside-
down and parents look on helplessly and do nothing to stop them? Look at the
buildings, the destroyed houses, police-stations, clinics, post-offices . . . The
devils have suddenly gone mad . . . don’t know what’s good for them. (99)
Calling these young people “badly-behaved” kids who “don’t know what’s good for
them” is patronizing; calling them “devils” recalls the chief calling Beah and the other
boys the same thing. The TRC report notes that the rapid rise of student leaders to
positions of power was seen as threatening traditional hierarchies, and consequently,
“Vigilantes mobilised around slogans such as, ‘discipline the children’, and frequently
described themselves as ‘fathers’” (4.9, 257). The generation gap is not limited to those
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who disapprove of the students’ actions. Even Uncle Ribs, who is an ally of the children
and a long-time Resistance fighter himself, gets exasperated with the younger generation
of fighters at times. Mzi, who impulsively decides to take a closer look at the police
station he intends to attack the following day, is likened to “a young boy trying out a new
toy” in his excitement and anticipation, while Uncle Ribs, who disapproves of his
recklessness, “wondered why the Resistance Movement engaged such silly boys in
important missions” (Sepamla 39). However, sometimes being underestimated can be a
tactical advantage. Mzi is almost insulted to discover the police station is unguarded,
saying rhetorically, “Who are we? Babies! They think we are without sting. They must
be thinking we’ve never eyed a police station with the bitter, the hurtful eye. We must
show them how wrong they are. Teach them a lesson!” (37).
Indeed, the state often tried to belittle the Soweto protestors by portraying them
as victims – of manipulation by outside, adult forces. In The Children of Soweto, a
newspaper article quotes the Chief Inspector of Bantu Education posing the rhetorical
question: “‘Have you ever heard of 13-year old [sic] children striking? . . I don’t know
who is behind the strike – but it is not the children’” (Mzamane 96-7). The apartheid
regime refused to acknowledge that children – particularly black children – were capable
of spearheading such effective resistance. There were frequent attempts to deflect blame
to international Communists. In Mzamane’s novel, an “eminent member of the South
African Defence Force” blames the unrest on “communist-inspired insurgents” (137). In
the June 29, 1976 edition of Pretoria News, several letters to the editor similarly suggest
that the involvement of children in the Soweto uprising was a Communist plot. One letter
signed “Sutton, Sunnyside” states, “The riots in Soweto were sparked and instigated by
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irresponsible adult agitators using children as their tools of destruction.” Another letter
from H.W. Trokis of Lynnwood is even more specific, claiming, “It is foreign to the
Bantu to utilise children for violent protest, or allow them to be in the forefront of
possible danger. This is a common communistic tactic.” This refusal to take the children
seriously is infantilizing, and has some rather uncomfortable parallels to the treatment of
child soldiers. Seekings anticipates my own argument about child soldiers when he
discusses the problem with conflating these activists with “youth,” regardless of their
actual age. He points out that “labelling protesters as ‘youth’ serves to delegitimate them
and their actions. The label implies irresponsibility, even irrationality, and disregards the
issues which sparked the protest” (5). However, there is evidence that despite the
rhetoric, the apartheid regime did in fact take these children seriously. The TRC report
claims that “Very early on, the former state became aware of the pivotal role of children
and youth, identifying them as a serious threat and treating them accordingly” (TRC 4.9,
254). It seems that downplaying the real power that these students were capable of
exercising by portraying them as innocent victims manipulated by adults was a deliberate
strategy on the part of the apartheid regime.
Indeed, one of the main differences between child soldiers as we think of them
today and “child soldiers” in South Africa, especially post-Soweto ’76, is that in the
South African context, children held real power. Nina writes about South Africa as a
special case “where the line of command rested with the children themselves” and “child
leadership” was common (44). Ndebele explains that when the ANC and PAC were
banned in 1961, many of the older political leaders were either imprisoned and in exile;
this power vacuum was first filled by university students in their mid-twenties who were
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involved in the Black Consciousness Movement and then, after 1976, when these
organizations were banned and the college-aged leaders fled into exile, the activists who
took their place were even younger, their average age being sixteen to eighteen
("Recovering" 324-25). We see a similar pattern in the Soweto novels, with teenaged
characters such as Pholoso and Mandla functioning as leaders. This is an interesting
contrast to more traditional child soldier narratives, where the child is usually just a foot
soldier following orders and rarely exercises any real power. This certainly could be a
reason for the difference in representation, given that the Soweto children actually
exercise real agency.
This idea of child leadership is not necessarily always positive, however. As Nina
points out later, one of the results of children taking on leadership roles in the struggle
was “the emergence of generations of children that recognised no authority but
themselves” (60). This type of wild, violent, out-of-control, power-drunk child becomes
an object of fear in a way similar to early representations of child soldiers. In the South
African context, Marks writes that “many in South Africa looked upon politicised youth
as a menace, and began to speak about black youth in general as a ‘lost generation’,
excluded from mainstream society, and with poor future prospects” (6). Although Marks
focuses on a different time period (late ‘80s-early ‘90s) and a particular group in a
particular township (Diepkloof) in Soweto, and says her observations should not
necessarily be extrapolated to all South African youth (5), all three of these groups – the
Soweto youth in the aftermath of the ’76 uprising, the Diepkloof youth ten to fifteen
years later, and contemporary African child soldiers – have been at certain times written
off as a “lost generation,” the violence they grew up with necessarily translating into
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more violence and possibly criminality. Once apartheid ended in South Africa, young
activists were pushed out of the leadership as Mandela and other senior figures returned
from prison or exile, resulting in "a so-called ‘lost generation’, which although highly
politico-military [sic] active, is not necessarily trainable for the new era of political
dispensation since 1994" (Nina 60). Due to their interrupted education and commitment
to violence against the state, these youth had no transferrable skills in a post-apartheid
society. Consequently, some turned to crime and became tsotsis24
. Similarly, once
demobilized, child soldiers elsewhere in Africa often find themselves unemployed or
humiliatingly forced to sit in class with much younger children, as they too have little or
no education or skills training. They are also often rejected by their families or
communities, or have none to return to. They then must to turn to crime to survive, or
rejoin armed groups in transnational conflicts.
Despite the largely positive portrayals of the Soweto children in literature, the
largely Western (or at least white) media portrayed them in a manner much closer to the
contemporary portrayal of child soldiers. Rather than the SSRC’s circulars which
portrayed the children as martyrs as well as victims, and urged them to be heroes and
soldiers, the white media expressed more concern about the long-term psychological
effects of this violence, which was seen as abhorrent on both sides. Gill Straker says,
“One point of concern, however, was the negative image of black youth that these
campaigns unwittingly projected. They were portrayed as the ‘Khmer Rouge generation’,
‘Lord of the Flies’, a broken, brutal mass, though there was little hard data to justify this
24 “Small criminal” (Nina 79, endnote 43) or “youthful gangster” (Bundy 62, endnote 5)
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depiction” (2). On the basis of these comparisons, it seems like the international outrage
was directed less at the oppressive apartheid state itself and more towards the general
conditions of violence that resulted from this clash. There is a sense that the children
should not have to fight this battle, that they should step aside, even, with the “Lord of
the Flies” reference, that they are turning on each other or that the youth are not fit for
self-government. While the literary depiction of the children differs significantly from
the media depiction, one of the characters in Tlali’s novel does raise the spectre of a “lost
generation” when she wonders about the long-term effects of the unrest. Nana asks,
“‘How will they ever get over such traumatic experiences? How are they to grow up?
What kind of adults will they be? It’s not going to be easy for them to adjust and settle
down’” (Tlali 26). While it is true that both child soldiers and the Soweto protestors
faced psychological consequences as result of the violence they were exposed to (and
participated in), Pamela Reynolds argues that “To dub youth, as is often done, as the ‘lost
generation’ is to demean their contribution” (223-4).
Related to this idea of a “lost generation” is a “lost childhood;” a generation is
lost because they have missed out on their childhood. Certainly, this type of rhetoric
shows up in a lot of humanitarian materials. In a section of their website entitled “From
Cradle to War,” Amnesty International says of child soldiers that “Such children are
robbed of their childhood and exposed to terrible dangers and to psychological and
physical suffering.” In his introduction to They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like
Children, retired general and activist Romeo Dallaire writes breathlessly, “Alive and
breathing in the hundreds of thousands in not-so-far-off lands are beings who have the
physical form of children, yet who have been robbed of the spirit, the innocence, the
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essence of childhood” (4). This language, which figures childhood as something that can
be lost, stolen or robbed, is also seen in child soldier narratives. My Luck, the protagonist
in Chris Abani’s Song for Night, says: “I have never been a boy. That was stolen from
me and I will never be a man – not this way” (143). Captured by soldiers and taken to the
relative safety of the military-occupied village where he and his friends would later be
recruited as child soldiers, Beah says, “there were no indications that our childhood was
threatened, much less that we would be robbed of it” (101). He also dedicates his book
“to all the children of Sierra Leone who were robbed of their childhoods.” However, this
notion of “childhood lost, destroyed, or at the least, heavily mutilated” (Priebe 13) is
predicated on a particular notion of childhood as a special, protected time that is treated
as universal when it is really particular to the contemporary Western world. As Rosen
notes, “the allegedly purloined childhood of young Sierra Leoneans [or Ugandans or
Liberians and so forth] should not be confused with childhood as it is understood in
middle-class London, Paris, or New York” (Rosen, Armies 62). The childhoods being
mourned as “lost” are really romanticized notions based on Western assumptions about
who is a child and what they should be doing.
Of course, while the reality of this conception of childhood is not necessarily
universal, there is still the argument that it is the universal ideal. Even though some
children are forced to grow up very fast and start working as adults at a younger age than
in much of the Western world, in a perfect world, wouldn’t everybody want every child
to spend their time in school rather than working (as a soldier or otherwise)? However,
why is it a tragedy or a theft if somebody under the age of eighteen becomes a soldier,
and not if somebody eighteen or over does? Certainly, there is no switch that flips in the
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brain of a teenager when they turn eighteen and turns them into a responsible adult, as
opposed to their seventeen-year-old counterparts. I agree with Rosen, who argues that “it
makes little scientific or common sense to assert that every seventeen-year old [sic]
soldier or bride in every society on the planet is a child” (3). I will address these issues
about children’s capacity for agency and decision-making further in chapter three.
Lost childhood often becomes synonymous with lost innocence, which can be
problematic when the assumption is that child = innocent; that a child is necessarily
innocent of any wrongdoing because he or she is a child. However, the South African
texts are more likely to figure this loss in terms of innocence without specifically linking
it with childhood. In her memoir, Open Earth & Black Roses, former student leader (and
one of the so-called “Soweto 11” who were put on trial for sedition) Sibongile Mkhabela
notes a change in the mood of the room at the first meeting of the SSRC that she attended
after her release from detention in 1977. Her fellow attendees were soberer and less
energetic. She says, “I guess we had all seen or heard things that most people spend a
lifetime without seeing or experiencing. We had been hardened and baptised by fire, so
to say. Our innocence was gone” (63). Here, innocence is not restricted to children; it is
something that “most people” benefit from. Moreover, the sense that this innocence was
forcibly taken from them – stolen or robbed – is absent; it is merely “gone.” Although
Sibongile was approximately twenty years old at the time, she and her colleagues still
clearly think of themselves as children or youth: “we wanted to prove ourselves to be
capable future adults, although reaching adulthood was becoming rather elusive or
uncertain to many of us” (64, italics mine). Adulthood is seen as a milestone yet to be
attained. A minor character in Tlali’s novel holds forth on the changes that the uprising
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has wrought: “The smile of carefree innocence has disappeared from the faces of our
young ones. What we have seen has shocked and sobered the elderly ones, it has
transformed our children into adults” (209). Here, innocence is more explicitly tied to the
“young ones,” and the loss of it transforms them into adults. But again, “transformed” or
“disappeared” lacks the rage and sorrow inherent in charges that childhood has been
“stolen;” the loss of innocence is a fact rather than a theft. Moreover, the elders are
equally affected.
Historically, the rhetoric of “stolen childhoods” and the Soweto students was
different than that associated with contemporary child soldiers. For one thing, the TRC
Report notes that one of the psychological consequences of children’s exposure to
violence in the anti-apartheid struggle is “The loss of those aspects of childhood that
many people assume that children should enjoy” (TRC 4.9, 272, italics mine).
Interestingly, this idea of childhood is framed as an assumption, rather than a self-evident
truth, as it generally is when people are talking about child soldiers. Moreover, for child
soldiers, there is typically a sense of (self-)pity that they are denied an experience that
most Western kids have. Young anti-apartheid fighters, by contrast, tend to see this loss
in terms of sacrifice. This hearkens back to the victim vs. martyr dichotomy discussed
earlier: the Soweto kids willingly and knowingly gave up their childhoods for a noble
cause, whereas it was stolen from child soldiers. Again, the Soweto students are
represented as agents while the child soldiers are merely victims. That is not to say that
the South African youth necessarily wanted to make that sacrifice. The TRC Report
notes, “Many who were activists in their youth have had to struggle with a sense that
their active participation and sacrifice resulted in practical and material losses” (TRC 4.9,
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273). There is a sense that, because they gave their childhood to the struggle, they are
owed tangible results; it is the lack of such results that contributes to the portrayal of
these youth as a lost generation. In terms of the primary texts discussed here, most of the
novels end before the students have a chance to get disillusioned in this manner. They all
end with one or more major character fleeing into exile, but remaining hopeful that one
day he (and they all are male) will be able to return to a liberated South Africa.
Moreover, all the texts were published before the end of apartheid. Also important to
consider is the possibility that these childhoods that were allegedly “lost” were perhaps
good riddance. Arguably, black children growing up under the apartheid regime never
really had the idyllic childhoods one might mourn losing. This is not to say that apartheid
successfully dehumanized people. In his essay "The Rediscovery of the Ordinary,"
Njabulo Ndebele observes that "even under the most oppressive of conditions, people are
always trying and struggling to maintain a semblance of normal social order" (55).
However, the type of childhoods imagined in the West, peaceful days of school and play
interspersed with holidays and family vacations, were not the norm for black children
growing up in South Africa under apartheid. For instance, in Kaffir Boy, his memoir of
growing up in Alexandra township during the apartheid era, Mark Mathabane is not
devastated when his birthday passes without the type of celebration generally considered
part of the iconography of (Western, middle-class) childhood. He says, "Having never
had a normal childhood, I didn't miss birthdays; to me they were simply like other days:
to be survived" (162). As such, childhood might not be regretted as something lost or
stolen when lived reality is so different from romantic images rooted in Western
assumptions.
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One of the crucial parts of childhood that child soldiers often miss out on is the
chance to get an education. As Wessells puts it, “The loss of education embodies a loss
of childhood and the opportunities that enable most children to develop into functional,
competent adults” (206). Agu nostalgically recalls his idyllic early school-going days,
how eager he was to start school, being the smartest student in his class, although the
smallest, and his teacher telling him if he kept studying hard, he could go to university
and become a doctor or engineer. But, as he says, “these thing are before the war and I
am only remembering them like dream” (Iweala 28). It is not until he enters
rehabilitation that he recovers these ambitions, telling Amy that he sees himself
“becoming Doctor or Engineer . . and never having to fight war ever again” (141). The
first thing that Emma says when she meets Emmanuel is “You want to go to school?”
(Jal 175). When he replies in the affirmative, she tries to strike a deal: “You school. This
gun stay here” (175). For her, school and military life are incompatible. However,
Wessells actually names education as one of the “pull factors” that motivate children to
join armed groups, noting that when educational opportunities are scarce, many children
“begin searching for other venues where they can develop skills and competencies that
can enable them to build their future. Military life often provides one such venue” (50).
In the specific case of Sierra Leone, Twum-Danso notes:
it has been argued that the RUF bush camps offered alternative schooling for
which many of the youngsters were grateful, as the formal education system had
collapsed. Therefore, in their opinion offering their services to the rebels and thus
participating in the rebellion, was a chance to resume their education. (30)
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Although Beah fought for the army rather than the RUF and seems to have had little
opportunity for education there, it is not his recruitment into the army, nor the war in
general that interrupts his schooling: it is his mother’s poverty and his estranged father’s
refusal to pay his school fees (10-11). In the case of Emmanuel Jal, education is
explicitly offered by the SPLA: he initially leaves the village where he had been living
with his aunt because SPLA soldiers arrive and tell him that they are going to take him to
school in Ethiopia so he can learn how to fly planes. He ends up in an SPLA-controlled
refugee camp where eventually he gets a chance to get some education and start learning
English, although he soon starts training as a soldier as well. One could criticize the
quality and neutrality of such an education, but we should remember that Africa is not
the only place where this type of schooling, entwined with military culture, can seem like
the best option. Wessells points out that in the USA and UK, “Youths who have no way
to obtain a university education or a job that pays a living wage may see the military as
their best path to these ends and to becoming somebody” (55-56).
The case of the South African students is quite different. After all, Soweto ’76
wasn’t just the “children’s revolution”; it was the schoolchildren’s revolution. According
to Mzamane in “My Schooldays in Soweto,” the main impetus for the protest came from
dissatisfaction with how children were being educated, which was symbolic of black
South Africans’ oppression more broadly. Education also inspired the struggle in broader
terms: the students believed they were making history, fighting for their nation, and
showing their own modernity—ideas they had picked up in part because they were
educated. Moreover, education was the medium of their resistance, as they fought back
by boycotting classes and exams, taking as their slogan “Liberation now, education
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later.” As previously discussed, one of the main issues with child soldiers seems to be
that it interrupts their education, making them take on adult labour when they should be
in school. School is part of the “childhood” that is stolen from them. But even this
assumption that childhood is the time for education (which ends at age eighteen) is
culturally biased, given that, as Nadine Gordimer points out, in South Africa under
apartheid “every year thousands of blacks cannot begin school life at the age white
children do because black schools have insufficient room for new admissions. Black
children often start out and finish school older.” Perhaps this is why so many of the
students in these novels seem to be older than we typically expect students to be.
Moreover, education is not forcibly “stolen” from the Soweto student, who made the
strategic choice to boycott school and use this as a weapon against their oppressors.
Mzamane makes this clear when his narrator says he and his fellow students “applauded”
the decision of SRC leaders to drop out of school to focus on organizing the protest, so
“there’s no grain of truth whatsoever in what was later reported in the newspapers that
we were led by non-students, so-called ‘political agitators posing as students’, or that we
were intimidated into boycotting the exams our leaders knew for certain that they were
going to fail” (39). Again, they exercise a certain agency in their decision-making, rather
than being passive victims of a “theft.” We might question their “choice,” given that the
only other option was an education that was oppressive and demeaning, but again, this
lack of choice is not specific to people under the age of eighteen. As in the case of
“stolen” childhoods, it is only in retrospect that the children of Soweto mourned their lost
educational opportunities, and this regret is not portrayed in the novels at all.25
25 Athol Fugard's play My Children! My Africa! provides an interesting contrast. His character, the teacher
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This concept of the child as an agent or a victim becomes important when it
comes to the child soldier taking responsibility for his or her actions. Beah is not the only
one who comes to believe that nothing is his fault. Jal, recalling the "Arabs" he killed in a
raid at Juba, says “I feel no guilt about that day because I was a child who took part in
killings as the hatred and sorrow built up over years was released in mob violence. I did
not kill in cold blood, I killed in war” (Jal 255). Like Beah, he is absolved for the horrific
deeds he committed by virtue of his young age, as well as his status as a soldier. Senait
Mehari, comforting a fellow child soldier who accidentally killed his friend when his gun
went off, says, “This boy had not wanted to do what he had done. None of us was
responsible for all that happened as result of the war” (110). Although she does not
explicitly excuse the boy on the basis of his age, it is implicit in the collective “us.” By
contrast, when Mandla realizes he has killed another police officer instead of the
notorious Batata who was targeted, he takes full responsibility, even though it was not
intentional. He says, “‘I am guilty for the murder of another person, a person I didn’t
want to destroy. I must pay the price’” (Sepamla 209). The price, he decides, is quitting
the struggle and going into exile, seen as a way to purify himself. He says, “‘I hate
myself because I am dirty. I go away to have cleansed this dirt’” (210). Mzi tries to cheer
him up, saying “‘Take it easy pal, one cop is as good as another. Don’t take this so badly,
you are not to blame’” (209). He certainly does not tell Mandla it is not his fault because
he is just a child. Like the boy whom Senait consoles, Mandla has hit the wrong target;
Mr. M., mourns the "wasted lives" (68) of students like Thami, who reject Bantu education in favour of
revolution.
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but, unlike the boy or other child soldiers, he refuses to take refuge in assumed childhood
innocence.26
However, Marks raises an interesting point while discussing the various ways the
youth justify their use of violence. She writes, “Youth believed that collective violence
was both a rational and inevitable response to state violence, and consequently they
absolved themselves from the responsibility resulting from their engagement in violence”
(120). Whereas the youth saw violence as the only appropriate or logical response to the
physical and structural violence of the apartheid regime, Marks is concerned that they
deny themselves agency by putting all the blame on the state. She elaborates: “While
political violence was seen as a rational response, the discourse used indicated that the
responsibility for political violence perpetrated by the youth lay solely with the state. The
unintended consequence of this is that these young people denied themselves as real
actors” (Marks 120). Clearly, her claim has interesting parallels with my discussion of
child soldiers and (non)-responsibility. The denial of responsibility when it comes to
violent actions comes from two different places – a romanticised conception of youth
that is inherently innocent versus a sense that they have been provoked – but both are
predicated on being a victim. As we have seen, this is precisely the problem with the
insistence on portraying the child soldier figure as the innocent victim of manipulative
adults in child soldier narratives. However, even if we see the South African youth as
26 Of course, this difference could also be attributed to the difference between life writing and fiction.
Mzamane can separate himself from his character Mandla; Mehari and Jal have to justify their actions in
media interviews and on book tours.
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reactive rather than truly active, they are not being infantilized in the same way that child
soldiers are.
It is dangerous to take for granted that all people under the age of eighteen
involved in armed conflict are necessarily children and victims. Wessells says, “Because
many child soldiers find meaning in their participation in political violence, one cannot
assume that all child soldiers will be traumatized and haunted by painful memories”
(139-40). He goes on to quote a teenaged anti-apartheid fighter, who told him, “I missed
out on many things and wish I had a better education. But when I think back, I have
mostly good memories of fighting for freedom. If we had not fought, we would have
lived as less than people. I’m proud of what we did” (qtd. Wessells 140). Wessells
continues, “Youth who see themselves as having participated in a liberation struggle not
only exhibit pride in their contributions and have positive memories of their engagement
in the struggle but also show relatively high levels of psychosocial well-being” (140).
Yet, he cautions, “It is ill advised to accept romanticized images of liberation struggles
suggesting that the violence done in the name of ‘liberation struggles’ is somehow
excusable, even condonable” (140-41). The self-perception of the soldiers themselves is
not enough, in his opinion, to justify the inherent wrong of the violence they committed.
However, he is condemning violence more generally, rather than the involvement of
children in these conflicts. Rosen also warns of romanticizing past struggles, but offers a
theory of why these young fighters were not generally viewed as child soldiers. He says,
Rather than mythologize the past and render invisible the thousands of child
soldiers who fought in wars of national liberation, we should ask why there was
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no international child-soldier crisis at that time. The answer, I believe, is that the
child-soldier crisis is the crisis of the postcolonial state. For that reason the
international community of humanitarian and human rights groups and of
governments, once avid supporters of the armies of national liberation, have now
redefined all rebels and their leaders as apolitical criminals and child abusers.
(Rosen 14)
It is not that young anti-apartheid fighters are really different than child soldiers; it is just
that they are interpreted differently, as are the wars that they fight in. It is a lot easier to
reconcile a young person fighting for their freedom than fighting in conflicts where the
causes and rationale are more difficult to understand. Therefore the only way that child
soldiers can be understood is as victims manipulated by unscrupulous adults.
The various ways that young anti-apartheid fighters are represented and represent
themselves, both historically and in fiction, stand in marked contrast to the figure of the
child soldier, who is almost uniformly packaged as an innocent child victim, three words
which are treated as all but synonymous in contemporary humanitarian discourse. There
are numerous problems with portraying all young people under the age of eighteen, in
varying conflicts and contexts, with differing motives and pressures that are not
necessarily unique to a certain age group, homogeneously as victims. However, the genre
of the child soldier narrative does not offer much room for questioning this orthodoxy.
The representation of young student leaders in the Soweto novels, which do not face the
same generic pressures, demonstrates that there are ways to recognize the youth of child
soldiers without infantilizing them or denying them their agency.
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Chapter 3 "We had no choice:" Decision-Making in Adult & Child
Soldier Narratives
Child soldier narratives may arguably be a new (sub)genre of African literature,
but African war narratives have been around for some time. In this chapter, I will be
looking at a group of texts narrating the experiences of young adult -- that is, over the
age of eighteen -- soldiers in the Zimbabwean war of liberation (1964-1979).27
Charles
Samupindi's poetic, fragmentary Pawns (1992) gradually reveals the story of Daniel, who
joins Robert Mugabe's guerillas at the age of eighteen to fight in the Zimbabwean war of
liberation, adopting the nom-de-guerre Fangs. In Echoing Silences (1997) by Alexander
Kanengoni, the protagonist Munashe suffers from debilitating flashbacks and what seems
to be a form of post-traumatic stress disorder after his experiences fighting in the Second
Chimurenga. Dan Wylie's memoir Dead Leaves (2002) presents the war from a different
perspective: that of a white Rhodesian conscript. These narratives and their adult
protagonists share striking similarities with child soldier narratives, yet the
Zimbabwean/Rhodesian soldiers are much more likely to be presented as taking
responsibility for their actions, particularly the decision to join the struggle in the first
place. Even though the age difference between adult and child soldiers is often
insignificant (at least two of the Zimbabwean protagonists are just eighteen), the generic
pressures of the child soldier narrative demand that the child soldier be represented as a
27 I adopt the straight-18 position to differentiate between child and adult soldiers not because I believe it
is an accurate or meaningful reflection of the transition between childhood and adulthood, but to illustrate
the problems in relying on such a paradigm.
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victim who is not really responsible for his actions, including the choices he may seem to
make of his own free will.
Of all the child soldier narratives under study here, only two former child soldiers
are clearly forced against their will into joining armed groups. In Girl Soldier, Grace
Akallo describes being woken up on October 10, 1996 by LRA rebels surrounding her
school dormitory, threatening to burn it down, then tying up all the girls inside before
they were "forced into the prickling cold night" (94). She explicitly says they were "Led
like slaves" and "left their independence behind" (105). It is important to the
representation of the child soldier as innocent victim (which dominates these types of
narratives) to portray them as being kidnapped or otherwise forced into combat, as
Akallo was. The prevailing wisdom is that no child would want to fight. In Heart of Fire,
Senait Mehari recounts how her abusive father drops her and her two older half-sisters in
the care of soldiers at an Eritrean Liberation Front recruitment office, where they are
welcomed "as if we were a delivery of sheep or goats" (53). They have no choice in the
matter, and in fact, "no idea what was going to happen to [them]" (53). Interestingly,
Mehari says of that moment she became a child soldier, “All it meant to me, though, was
that my father would leave me alone at last” (54). Although she does not volunteer to
join the ELF, she is pleased, at least initially, to escape the domestic abuse of her civilian
life.
I have already spent some time in earlier chapters talking about the role of choice
in child soldier narratives, particularly in terms of slavery. Of course, at issue is how
much “choice” these children really have when their options are so severely limited.
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Critics disagree as to whether children's choices can ever be considered free and fair.
Afua Twum-Danso quotes Isabel McConnan saying children in Sierra Leone specifically
had “clear rational reasons for joining a militia force . . . these are neither dupes nor
victims” (qtd. Twum-Danso 30). Yet Twum-Danso makes her own opinion clear by
declaring that “Although the reasons children ‘volunteer’ include a desire for revenge,
adventure, fun-seeking, a sense of belonging and peer pressure, most of the evidence
points to survival as the primary reason for enlisting” (Twum-Danso 30). She also quotes
Graça Machel, who in her seminal 1996 report for the UN, Impact of Armed Conflict on
Children, acknowledges that sometimes children may seem to join armed groups
willingly, but claims that "It is misleading, however, to consider this voluntary. While
young people may appear to choose military service, the choice is not exercised freely.
They may be driven by any of several forces, including cultural, social, economic or
political pressures" (Machel 12). David Rosen sees this slightly differently. He analyzes
Machel's choice of language in subsequent passages, its focus on what children "feel"
and "believe" rather than what they "judge" or "decide" (Armies 134). He says, "In such
descriptions it seems as though no person below eighteen years of age has any capacity
for rational judgment. No credibility is given to the fact that volunteering for the armed
forces may be the only way to survive or that armed children may be safer than unarmed
civilians" (134-5). He actually comes to the same conclusion as Machel, that children
join armed groups to survive, but whereas he sees survival as a choice, and a rational one
at that, she questions any "choice" made by children whom she sees as at the mercy of
forces beyond their control.
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Beah's portrayal of his recruitment into the Sierra Leonean army is a good
illustration of Twum-Danso and Machel's skepticism about children's alleged "choices."
He and his friends are captured by soldiers who take them to the relative safety of
military-occupied Yele, but as the fighting grows nearer and fiercer, the lieutenant in
charge asks all able-bodied men and boys to help. He says, “‘If you do not want to fight
or help, that is fine. But you will not have rations and will not stay in this village. You
are free to leave, because we only want people here who can help cook, prepare
ammunition, and fight’” (106). On the surface, it would seem that they are being offered
a choice, and thus must have joined of their own free will. However, leaving the village,
which is already surrounded by rebels, is not really an option: as one of the other boys,
Alhaji, points out, “‘The rebels will kill anyone from this village because they will
consider us their enemy, spies, or that we have sided with the other side of the war’”
(106-7). Beah explicitly states, “We had no choice. Leaving the village was as good as
being dead” (107). This lack of options is underscored when the lieutenant orders all
villagers to gather in the square and shows them the bodies of a man and boy who tried
to leave and were shot by rebels. He says, “‘This man and this child decided to leave this
morning even though I had told them it was dangerous. The man insisted that he didn’t
want to be a part of our war, so I gave him his wish and let him go. Look what
happened” (107). He then launches into a recruitment speech. This graphic warning
vividly illustrates the consequences of refusing to join the soldiers and fight. As Twum-
Danso suggests, survival is thus the real motive for joining. The rhetorical strategy here
is obvious: by making it clear that, despite appearances, he had no real alternative other
than becoming a child soldier, Beah seems to imply that extenuating circumstances
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mitigate his responsibility for the atrocities he later committed. Certainly, the
circumstances of recruitment and the lack of real choice in the matter are often cited in
the defenses of child soldiers such as Omar Khadr and Dominic Ongwen who are
charged with war crimes. By presenting his recruitment as involuntary, Beah implicitly
suggests that his subsequent actions as child soldier were involuntary as well; that is, that
he never would have carried out these deeds if he had not been compelled to enlist.
Similarly, on the surface Agu seems to have been given a choice to join
Commandant and the other soldiers in Beasts of No Nation. Rather than automatically
being forced to join, the question is posed to him in gentle terms: "Do you want to be
soldier, he [Commandant] is asking me in soft voice" (11). As an even younger child
listening to his mother read to him from the story of David and Goliath, Agu is “thinking
that I am wanting to be warrior” (25). He also enjoyed playing war games with his
friends, “thinking that to be soldier was to be the best thing in the world because gun is
looking so powerful and the men in movie are looking so powerful and strong when they
are killing people" (30-31), although he later revises this opinion. It is this kind of
longstanding desire for power and prestige that seems to inform his decision to join the
group at that moment: "I am thinking of before war when I am in the town with my
mother and I am seeing men walking with brand-new uniform and shiny sword holding
gun and shouting left right, left right, behind trumpet and drum, like how they are doing
on parade and so I am nodding my head yes” (Iweala 11). He is attracted to the idea of
being a soldier with a uniform and gun, and all the power that implies. However, this
longing for power can also be linked to the types of economic pressures that arguably
invalidate children's choices. Machel notes: "Young people often take up arms to gain
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power and power can act as a very strong motivator in situations where people feel
powerless and are otherwise unable to acquire basic resources" (12). Moreover, the
reader must remember that Agu has just been separated from his father, hauled out of
hiding, accused of being a spy, beaten and threatened, and thus is not really in a position
to rebuff the Commandant's offer to take him under his wing as a soldier:
I am seeing all of the soldier with gun and knife and then I am thinking about my
father just dancing like that because of bullet.
What am I supposed to be doing?
So I am joining. Just like that. I am soldier. (Iweala 11)
Like Beah, the choice is superficially his to make, but the realities of his situation make it
extremely difficult to refuse the relative protection and safety being offered to him as a
soldier. He notes the menacing presence of the armed soldiers, and remembers his last
vision of his father "dancing" in a hail of bullets. He then asks rhetorically what (else) is
he supposed to do? What other choice did he have? He admits to a previous attraction to
the idea of being a soldier, and all the material advantages that implies, but rhetorically,
Iweala makes it clear that Agu's recruitment follows a dearth of alternatives. In neither of
these instances, however, are the limited options available to either Agu or Beah directly
related to their underage status, a distinction I will discuss in more detail later.
It is a little more difficult to dismiss Emmanuel Jal's apparent choice to join the
jesh a mer as a child soldier. Alison Mackey notes, "Challenging popular assumptions
about child agency, Jal recalls that he took on this role as soldier willingly and with
pride" ("Apparitions" 195). Early experiences of discrimination and violence at the hands
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of the murahaleen28
have shaped his hatred of Arabs: "Arabs and murahaleen became
one in my mind -- jallabas -- who I hated more and more . . . The jallabas were to blame
for all I had seen; they were the reason my family had been tossed onto the wind as our
world disappeared" (Jal 29). His simplistic understanding of the situation in Sudan as a
black-versus-Arab struggle29
is in part because of his youth. As Jal himself says, "Stories
woven tight with threads become simple ones in the mind of a child" (28). However,
many adults share similar views. Jal's parents are supporters of the SPLA, and his father
even joins them: "secretly I told myself I would attack the Arabs with my father when I
grew up" (29). After his mother is killed, SPLA soldiers come to collect him, saying they
have been sent by his father to take him to "school" in Ethiopia. His aunt Nyagai, who
has been caring for him and his siblings since their mother's death, sees right through this
thinly-disguised recruitment attempt, telling him, "'You cannot go, Jal. I've heard about
these places. You won't go to school. Instead the SPLA will sell you for guns'" (40). But
Jal is entranced by their promises that he will learn to make guns and, even more
temptingly, airplanes:
Excitement bubbled up inside me as they talked. I wanted to fly a plane and know
how it felt to be a bird. I wanted to soar in the blue sky and look down on the
world below me. I also wanted to help Babba fight the Arabs and punish them for
28 "[A]rmed Arab militias" (Jal 12) who fought on the side of the Muslim government in Khartoum.
29 The adult Jal narrating the text (through ghostwriter Megan Lloyd Davies) notes that "the war in Sudan
was less distinct than a fight between black and Arab, Christian and Muslim. Centuries of marriage had
blurred our tribes . . and black Muslims from Darfur fought alongside Arab Muslim troops in the belief that
they were taking part in a holy war against the infidels from the South" (Jal 28).
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taking Mamma from me.
"I will come with you," I said finally. (40)
Jal's reasons are not particularly thoughtful or mature: he wants revenge and opportunity.
He is not in the same situation as Agu in being entirely alone in the world, without
family, and is in fact reluctant to leave his siblings behind, feeling responsible for them
(40). There is not always enough food in the village during the hunger season, but,
overall, Jal "had eaten well in Luaal" (53), so he is not motivated by basic survival.
Although the soldiers tell Jal that he "has to" come with them (39), they are not
obviously threatening in the way that Commandant's men are in Beasts of No Nation.
There is family pressure implied by the soldiers' invocation of his father's name. But Jal
makes the decision himself, despite his aunt's disapproval and tears.
Her suspicions turn out to be correct to a certain extent. En route to Ethiopia, Jal
has a brief reunion with his father, who gives a speech in his capacity as SPLA
commander assuring all the other boys being sent to school by their families that they are
making the right decision: "'We have all heard the stories of children being sold for guns
or made into soldiers, but they are not true. My own son is with yours. Would I send him
to school if there was any danger?'" (43). However, after a long, treacherous journey on
which many boys die or disappear, Jal ends up in the Pinyudu refugee camp, where
"School had become a distant dream as we grew hungrier" (58). Although foreign NGOs
appear to run the camp, "it was the SPLA who were really in charge" (66). It is at
Pinyudu that Jal first learns about the jesh a mer, or Red Army. He and his friend Nyuol
spot an SPLA soldier; not an unusual sight at Pinyudu, but this soldier "was different
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from the soldiers we were used to seeing -- he was a boy" (63). Like Agu, they are
impressed by the appearance of these "small soldiers" who are "so clean with smart boots
and they marched and saluted like the big SPLA" (63). They also identify with these
soldiers who are "just like us" (63). An elder explains that these boys are jesh a mer,
"young people who are trained to fight in war," and speaks of them admiringly: "The Red
Army is our future . . . There is nothing braver than a jenajesh. They never run from a
battle, they would fight a lion if they had to" (64). Jal seems to think their situation is
preferable to his: "How lucky they were to have guns and boots while we scratched in the
dust" (64). Not long after, he sees the jesh a mer again: "My heart beat as I looked at the
little soldiers. They look so fierce and strong" (73). They are accompanying SPLA
commanders who are addressing a crowd, reminding them of everything they have
suffered at the hands of the jallabas:
'Children of Pinyudu,' the officer screamed. 'You must never forget what you
once had and what you could still win back. With your help we will win this war,
and you will return to the land of your birth, your country, your homes. You too
could be jesh a mer -- brave young men who are fighting alongside us for
victory.' (74)
Clearly, this is a recruitment speech aimed squarely at the underage boys in the camp.
Those who are already jesh a mer are evidently role models to Jal, who says, "I stared at
the Red Army." To him, "They looked so proud and tall. They would fight like men.
Crush the spear inside them [of anger and hated for Arabs] with their guns" (74). The
officer poses the rhetorical question to the boys: "how many of you are brave enough to
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fight? How many of you are ready to be soldiers?" (74). Jal and every other boy in the
crowd raise their hands to volunteer, apparently exercising free choice. However, P.W.
Singer describes s very similar scenario involving the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
in Sri Lanka: "LTTE recruiters would visit schools . . . child soldiers already in the
group, wearing natty new uniforms and shiny boots, would be presented to the class.
They would ask for a show of hands for whoever supports the cause of independence.
Upon this, all those with hands raised would be driven to the LTTE training camps" (68).
He terms this "Peer pressure" (68) and "A Less Than 'Voluntary' Recruitment" (61).
In Allah is not obliged, Birahima is actually desperate to go to Liberia and
become a child soldier. The big-shot con man Yacouba aka Tiécoura convinces him by
telling him
Wonderful things. He said they had tribal wars in Liberia, and street kids like me
could be child-soldiers . . . Small-soldiers had every-fucking-thing. They had
AK-47s. AK-47s are Kalashnikov guns invented by the Russians so you can
shoot and keep shooting and never stop. With the AK-47s the small-soldiers got
every-fucking-thing. They had money, they even had American dollars. They
had shoes and stripes and radios and helmets and even cars they call four-by-
fours. I shouted Walahé [I swear by Allah]! Walahé! I want to go to Liberia.
Right now this minute. I want to be a child-soldier, a small-soldier. (Kourouma
37)
It is rather ironic that it is the war and child soldiers that Birahima considers "wonderful
things" in Liberia. He further elaborates that he envies these child soldiers for their
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possessions and power. Their guns make them feared so that they can access money and
cars and clothes that Agu also references as part of his initial attraction to the idea of
being a soldier. Birahima then virtually throws a temper tantrum to express his
excitement and impatience to immediately become a child soldier. One can almost
imagine him stamping his foot in his need to have his way "Right now this minute."
Although he is apparently exercising agency in choosing to become a child soldier, his
decision is not presented as a thoughtful, reasoned one. He does the same thing when he
and Yacouba are captured by child soldiers in Liberia: “I was blubbering like a spoiled
brat, ‘Child-soldier, small-soldier, soldier-child, I want to be a child-soldier” (50). The
crying and the repetition, not to mention his explicit admission that he is behaving like a
"spoiled brat," further the impression that Birahima is a child throwing a tantrum to get
his own way. Of course, in this instance, he is facing a group of established child soldiers
who are furious because a member of Birahima's convoy has shot one of them. The child
soldiers retaliate by firing on the convoy and then forcing the survivors to strip.
However, Birahima is not actually crying in fear. When the child soldiers release all the
naked survivors, ordering them off into the jungle, he refuses to go, continuing to cry that
he wants to be a child soldier until they threaten him with a Kalashnikov to shut him up.
Even so, he hangs around until Colonel Papa le Bon, a big shot in Charles Taylor’s
National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), shows up. At this point, he starts to cry again,
"'I want to be a soldier-child, small-soldier, child-soldier, I want my auntie, I want my
auntie in Niangbo!'" (52). In response to this childish, rather contradictory demand (he
wants to go with them and become a child soldier at the same time as he wants his aunt
and presumably just to be a child), Papa le Bon stops the child soldier threatening him,
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comes over and pats his head "like a proper father" (52), further reinforcing Birahima's
position as a dependent child. Then, Birahima's dream comes true: "With all his majesty,
Colonel Papa le Bon gave a signal. A signal that meant they were going to take me with
them" (52-3). He is brought back to the village and after the funeral for the child soldier
who was killed, sent to the barracks, where he is given a uniform and a Kalashnikov (66).
Although Birahima is not portrayed as an innocent victim of circumstances beyond his
control at any point in this novel, by emphasizing his childish (and bratty) qualities here,
Kourouma undermines the legitimacy of his protagonist's decision to become a child
soldier.
In addition to representing Birahima's apparent zeal to be a child soldier as
childish, Kourouma also makes it clear that his protagonist (and his comrades) have few
other options. Birahima alludes to the circumstances that made it so attractive for him
personally to join the child soldiers: "Refugees had it easier than everyone else in the
country because everyone was always giving them food, the UNHCR, NGOs, everyone.
But they only allowed women, kids younger than five and old people. In other words I
wasn't allowed in. Gnamokodé [bastard]!" (63). If he cannot access food and protection
as a refugee, then he will have to seek it elsewhere, with the soldiers who have "every-
fucking-thing" (37). In recounting the grim life story of his comrade Kik whose entire
family was killed, Birahima poses the rhetorical question: “And when you’ve got no one
left on earth, no father, no mother, no brother, no sister, and you’re really young, just a
little kid, living in some fucked-up barbaric country where everyone is cutting
everyone’s throat, what do you do?" (90). The answer is "You become a child-soldier of
course, a small-soldier, a child-soldier so you can have lots to eat and cut some throats
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yourself; that’s all [sic] your only option” (90). Although the specific details about Kik,
who "[g]radually" (90) became a child soldier, and his recruitment are not given, the
implication is that even if he was as enthusiastic about becoming a child soldier as
Birahima was, he had no real alternatives, being an orphan in a war zone who needs to
eat and protect himself. Here, unlike Beah or Iweala, Kourouma seems to attribute this
lack of options at least in part to his being "really young, just a little kid" (90). Although
arguably adults are equally susceptible to violence, war, and the loss of loved ones,
Kourouma makes Kik's situation seem more dire because of his tender age.
Birahima reiterates this sentiment when recounting the story of another dead
comrade, Sosso, who joined the child soldiers for lack of other options: “When you
haven’t got no father, no mother, no brothers, no sisters, no aunts, no uncles, when you
haven’t got nothing at all, the best thing to do is become a child-soldier. Being a child-
soldier is for kids who’ve got fuck all left on earth or Allah’s heaven” (114). The lack of
family is again given as a reason for children becoming soldiers. However, while we
might assume that the lack of adult supervision and protection, usually from members of
a child's extended family, might make young children particularly vulnerable to
recruitment efforts, Sosso's case is a little more complicated, given that he was the one
who killed his drunk father to protect his mother. Consequently, "The only thing left for
Sosso the Parricide (a 'parricide' is a boy who kills his father) was to join the child
soldiers" (114). The implication is that the stigma attached to having committed
parricide, which could also apply to an adult who killed his father, is what forced Sosso
to leave his home and become a soldier. Moreover, the relatives whose absence is given
as the reason children have no other choice but to become soldiers are not just parents or
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other older relatives that might reasonably be expected to act as caregivers and guardians,
but siblings (whether they are older or younger is not specified) who are more likely to
be peers. As such, adults are not exempt from the loss of their entire families either.
Many of the reasons given to rationalize child soldiers' choices are not specific to
children. Like Machel, Alcinda Honwana acknowledges that some young people
volunteer for ideological reasons, but that "[i]ndirect coercive mechanisms" (Makers 41)
such as intimidation, access to food, security, opportunity for revenge, etc. make the line
between voluntary and forced recruitment ambiguous. However, these mechanisms do
not exclusively affect children; people over the age of eighteen are influenced by similar
factors. Rosen notes:
Children are described as being prodded by economic, social, cultural, and
political pressures into ‘volunteering’ instead of exercising the ‘free choice’ of
adult soldiers. The implication is that somehow adults join armed forces by
exercising free and unfettered rational choice or informed consent in the absence
of any social pressure. It is hard to imagine a less authentic description of adult
participation in war. (Armies 134)
Certainly, adults are affected by various coercive pressures as well: they too need food
and security, seek revenge, etc. Rhetorically, the critics who insist that extenuating
circumstances outweigh any agency that a child might demonstrate by volunteering to
join an armed group -- while failing to extend the same consideration to adults -- are
insisting on the child's essential victimhood by virtue of their age. We see this rhetorical
strategy reflected in many of the child soldier narratives. This is not to argue that child
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soldiers are unfettered agents that should be held fully accountable for their actions,
including their decision to fight. Certainly, the human ability to exercise individual will,
an ability that is arguably never absolutely free insofar as it never occurs in a vacuum, is
far more constrained by the exigencies of war and other crises than it is by their absence.
However, as we will see in the Zimbabwean war narratives, the extenuating
circumstances that are often seen as invalidating the child soldier's choices do not seem
to have the same effect on adult decisions. By trying to avoid casting the child subject as
passive and helpless, I do not mean to suggest than I locate in him/her all of the forces at
play in his/her decision-making, only that adults also face similar constraints on their
agency.
A more complex category than simply "victim" or "agent" is perhaps needed to
deal with the figure of the child soldier. Erin K. Baines suggests that Erica Bouris's
notion of a "complex political perpetrator" is a useful way to consider child soldiers such
as Dominic Ongwen who are charged with war crimes.30
Baines defines Bouris's theory
as "the ability of victims of mass human rights abuses to engage in activities that resist or
challenge the passivity equated with victim discourse" (Baines 177). According to this
theory, Baines concludes that although Ongwen should be held accountable for his
actions, his responsibility is mitigated by the circumstances that simultaneously made
him a victim as well as a perpetrator (180-81). Alcinda Honwana finds Anthony
Giddens's theory of agency helpful for understanding child soldiers. She says,
30 It is important to distinguish between the decision to join armed groups and the decision to commit
atrocities. However, implicit in whether a child was forced to join an armed group or joined willingly
seems to be a judgment on whether they should be held accountable for their actions as a child soldier or
not.
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For Giddens, the agent is a human being with transformative capacity --with the
power to intervene or to refrain from intervention. Agency is intrinsically
connected to power. To be able to act otherwise, the individual must be able to
exercise some sort of power. The power of the individual can be constrained by a
range of circumstances. To 'have no choice' (as many former child-soldiers
mentioned) does not mean, in Giddens's terms, the dissolution of agency as such.
Giddens conceives power as presuming regularized relations of both autonomy
and dependence between actors in contexts of social interaction. All forms of
dependence offer some recourses whereby those who are subordinated can
influence the actions of their superiors. This view of agency and power makes
these young combatants agents in their own right because they can, at certain
moments, mobilize resources to alter the activities of their superiors. (Makers 48)
Honwana and Alison Mackey both point to de Certeau's notion of "tactical agency" as a
helpful way of understanding this type of agency exercised by child soldiers under such
conditions. Honwana defines this as the limited form of agency exercised by child
soldiers in order to make short-term choices to cope with their immediate reality within
their violent environment (Makers 49). As examples, she cites child soldiers who pretend
to be sick to get out of tasks that they do not want to do, or who do the assigned task
badly so they will not be asked again. Such interpretations of agency offer alternatives to
viewing it as the polar opposite of victimhood, and the expression of unfettered free will.
It is also important to note that a position of subordination and dependence is not the
exclusive preserve of children: in a military scenario, with the focus on rank and the
potential violence inherent in a war situation, adult soldiers also have limits placed on
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their agency and presumably would need to find their own tactical methods of resisting
their superiors. Under circumstances of war, poverty, etc., the idea of “agency”
understood as the expression of unfettered will is thus quite absurd, regardless of the age
of the agents.
One argument that is arguably specific to children is that they simply do not have
the maturity to be making reasoned choices. Singer says, "Children are defined as such,
not only because of their lesser physical development, but also because they are judged
to be of an age at which they are not capable of making mature decisions" (62). Indeed,
many of his arguments are based in developmental psychology. He claims that young
people are particularly susceptible to the prestige and sense of belonging that
membership in an armed group can create because "adolescents are at a stage in life
where they are still defining their identity," a fact that "some groups may take deliberate
advantage of " (65). Michael Wessells, who is a psychologist, makes a similar argument:
Psychologically, young people may not be able to assess fully the depth of the
danger associated with a particular action, and they lack a sense of their own
mortality. Teenage boys may take on dangerous assignments to demonstrate
machismo at a time in their lives when they feel it is vital to impress their peers
and demonstrate their manliness. (36)
These are the types of assumptions that seem to underpin many of the child soldier
narratives. I have already discussed the eagerness of Beah and Jal to conceptualize
themselves as men rather than children in Chapter Two. However, like the assumptions
that all teenagers under the age of eighteen are children, such blanket pronouncements
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about how young people behave at certain stages of their lives presumes that the
developmental model is universal. In the context of her study of young South African
anti-apartheid activists, Gill Straker (also a psychologist) notes that while adolescence is
traditionally seen as a time of rebellion against authority figures as well as a desire for
conformity, it is important to remember that the notion of adolescence itself is culture-
bound and “the degree to which conventional psychological literature is applicable to
black township youths" -- or, I would argue, African child soldiers -- "is clearly open to
debate” (87). Rosen argues the developmental model, which has particular currency in
the fields of psychology and social work, problematically posits that "transition from
childhood to adulthood takes place in universal, naturally determined, and fixed steps"
whereas "empirical studies in anthropology, history and sociology offer a new
paradigm", one which "stresses the diversity of childhood and embeds the understanding
of childhood in a cultural, historical, and social context" (Armies 133). He thinks that
humanitarian narratives have stretched this developmental model even further: “Even
developmental models of childhood have long advanced the idea that the capacity for
adult reasoning is present in teenagers as young as fourteen” (135). He further notes that
British common law defines the age of capacity as seven (135). He also points to the
irony that this notion of African child soldiers being unable to make choices and truly
consent to join armed groups exists simultaneously with a growing tendency under U.S.
criminal law to try minors as adults (136).
We can see the ways in which some of the explanations given for child soldiers'
decisions to enlist are not specific to children in narratives of the Zimbabwe liberation
struggle. Wessells says, "Even where a child does not appear desperate and chooses to
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join an armed group for money, this choice may reflect a lack of options available in
civilian life. The child may see himself as a burden on his family and may regard his
entry into soldiering as a way to support them" (33). This is exactly what motivates
Daniel, the protagonist of Charles Samupindi's novel Pawns, to approach Robert Mugabe
and join his ZANU party in the war for independence. At age eighteen (Samupindi 22),
Daniel would not be considered a child soldier under the UNICEF definition, even
though, as previously discussed, some critics treat him as one. However, after his father
is killed in an accident, his mother struggles to feed the family, something for which
Daniel feels immense guilt: “here I was, the eldest, and I could not find a job to fend for
my family. I cannot even fend for myself. I still continue to be a burden to my already
overburdened mother” (20). He is certain that “Amai [mother] thinks I’m useless” (20)
for this reason. Making the decision to speak to Mugabe is explicitly linked to the relief
of this guilt: “But today I feel exhilarated. I have just made a decision. For once I have
made a decision. And not just any decision. For once I have proven amai wrong” (21).
Despite the contributory circumstances, he characterizes the choice to join Mugabe as a
real decision, and one that brings him considerable pride and happiness. What seems to
make the difference is that he is (at least nominally) an adult and therefore not trapped by
the conventions of the child soldier narrative that demand his choices be presented as
coerced or immature.
Interestingly, though he characterizes it as a decision, Daniel's involvement with
ZANU as a soldier seems to be a more gradual process than Jal raising his hand to join
the jesh a mer or Birahima's demand to be a child soldier. The actual decision he has
made is simply to go to Mugabe’s house and ask him a question, which he only manages
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to do with great difficulty and stuttering: “‘We . . . we . . . we . . . want . . . to . . . to . . .
understand wha . . . what’s going on.’ I have said it!” (22). Mugabe is straightforward
with him and says, "'What we believe in is a war for liberation. Armed struggle'" (23). He
warns Daniel, and tells him to pass on the message: "'If you have chosen to get involved
you must be aware that this is a very serious issue. It’s not a matter of rat-hunting'" (23).
At this point, the decision still seems up to Daniel and his compatriots: if they choose to
get involved. However, Mugabe continues, "'You are now involved, you have chosen to
be involved. You may also be arrested and even killed. It’s no small thing.'" The
conditional has vanished; the deed is done. Daniel seems taken aback to find himself in
this position: "I look at him, stunned. I swallow. This is too serious. Can I take it? I don’t
think . . . I can’t think” (23). Apparently he can, because the next section begins, "I
continue to see Robert Mugabe. He sends me on party errands" (23). However, it seems
that this initial choice has determined all future choices. Wessells notes, "Children who
decide to join armed groups may enter without obvious coercion yet may subsequently
be forced to stay with the armed group" (33). But adult soldiers can also face this
predicament; to do otherwise would be considered desertion. When ZANU decides to
move its headquarters to Mozambique, Daniel must go, even though he is terrified. As he
says "I have already committed myself too much to withdraw" (27). En route, he thinks,
“The privilege of choice has been snatched away by my decision to join the struggle.
From hence, there is no me. I am only a tool in the revolution. Expendable raw material
in the manufacture of an independent nation. My hands belong to ZANU. My feet belong
to ZANU. My whole body belongs to ZANU” (38). Although he made the initial
decision to join, this decision has led not only to the relinquishment of all other choices,
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but also the dissolution of his individuality: he is no longer Daniel, but the property of
ZANU, to use as they see fit.
Child soldiers are not the only ones who face a dearth of options. After a brutal
attack on her home by Rhodesian soldiers in which her mother and four of her siblings
are killed, Daniel's love interest Angela tells him that she is going to join the struggle.
She phrases it as a matter of necessity: "'I think I'll have to cross and join you'" (148).
Like Beah, she feels she has no real alternative. There is also a sense that her duty is
clear. She asks Daniel (now known as Commander Fangs) rhetorically, “‘Do I have any
other option?’” (148). Separation from family, particularly in traumatic circumstances
such as an attack, is often cited as a reason why children become soldiers. Wessells says,
"Not uncommonly, a separated child who encounters an armed group joins because the
armed group provides the only hope of food, medical support, or protection from further
attack" (47). Although she is an adult, Angela feels a similar insecurity. Like Kik and
Sosso in Kourouma's novel, the decision to join is directly attributed to the violent loss of
her family. She tells Daniel/Fangs, "'had my family not been killed, I don't think I would
choose to leave the country. I'm frightened but, now that Crispen has gone to an uncle in
Gokwe, I'm also alone. I feel very afraid" (148). Her father has also died, and her
surviving brother has gone to live with an uncle. She is frightened about the life that
awaits her fighting with ZANU, but she is also frightened of being alone and
presumably, of being unprotected. It is not simply her gender that makes her feel
vulnerable and as though she has no other options. Fangs tells her that many of her male
comrades also felt compelled to make that choice: “No one joined the war because of the
excitement, the danger or because they are attracted by violence. We joined because it
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was one of the few, perhaps the only, options available. It seemed the best of all evils’”
(148). The circumstances that result in adults choosing to become soldiers are very
similar to those that motivate children; the difference is that the adults are presented as
accepting their duty and taking responsibility for their choices, even if they are scarcely
older than the children. Whereas Beah and Kourouma seem to suggest that the lack of
options is responsible for these children becoming soldiers and for all the horrific deeds
they subsequently commit, Samupindi's characters are resigned to their lack of options
and still see themselves as ultimately responsible for the decision to join.
Poverty, hunger and other economic forces are frequently cited as a reason why
children specifically would appear to volunteer for armed groups (Singer 62, Wessells
54, Machel 12). However, hunger knows no age. Indeed, Daniel can hardly conceive of
any other reason to enlist. He questions his comrade Joseph’s rationale for joining: “I
wonder why he decided to cross. His parents were quite well off. He was getting three
meals a day. Why did he leave? Why?” (42). Similarly, he asks Peter, son of a well-to-
do businessman, why he chose to join the struggle: “‘You had everything you wanted at
home, what made you join us in this mess?” (64). When Peter is evasive, only saying
"each and every one of us has his own story" (65), Daniel continues to ponder the other
soldier's motivations. He decides, "Whatever it was that propelled him into this horror,
could not have been propaganda. No. That had never had any effect on me. The promises
of utopia somewhere in the very distant future made no impression on the demands of the
immediate present" (65). He easily moves from Peter's reasons for joining the struggle to
his own: just because he is (or thinks he is) immune to propaganda, it does not
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automatically follow that Peter is as well. Moreover, when Angela asks him if it was
poverty that drove him to join ZANU, Fangs gives a slightly different response:
I suppose one might say so. But at the time I really needed to prove myself,
especially to my mother. I needed to prove that I was not totally worthless, that I
could do something worthwhile, something I could be proud of . . . The idea, or
the romance, of being a war hero gave me the incentive to join the struggle. I felt
I wanted to establish an identity . .. that’s how it was. (151)
Although he previously claimed to have joined purely for economic and other immediate
reasons, here Fangs seems to allow that a certain romanticization of the figure of the
soldier, a kind of subtle propaganda, did influence his decision. He also appears to draw
on some of those ideas from developmental psychology that are often used to rationalize
children's choices. Singer claims “childhood is the period of identity formation" (114),
but Fangs is speaking of seeking to form his identity even after ostensibly reaching
adulthood. Interestingly, after making this confession to Angela, Fangs "felt like a silly
little boy” (151).
Wessells, whose book argues that "adult exploitation of children lies at the heart
of the problem of child soldiers," says, "Particularly regarding children who were
abducted and forced to commit atrocities by armed groups, it seems wiser to regard the
children as pawns rather than as willful perpetrators" (219). Although Daniel was not
abducted, he still sees himself in similar terms. The novel's title, Pawns, refers to how he
views himself and the other foot soldiers in the liberation struggle. At the end of the
novel, narrator says,
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I am the man who chooses the man who makes the law.
I am the victim of my own act, of my own action.
I am a pawn. A pawn in a game I know not the rules. (Samupindi 195).
Although he sees himself merely as a "tool in the revolution . . . Expendable raw
material" (38), he does not consider this role incompatible with responsibility. He calls
himself a victim, but notes it is because of "my own act" (195). Although he was
motivated by the same types of circumstances that are often cited as influencing child
soldiers like Birahima, Daniel takes responsibility for his choices. Nor is being a pawn
predicated on being a child; despite critics like Stephen Gray who treat Daniel as a child
soldier, here and elsewhere he insists on his manhood, which, at the age of eighteen, he
has achieved even by UNICEF standards.
Similarly, Munashe in Alexander Kanengoni's Echoing Silences takes
responsibility for his choices, no matter how much he regrets them. He has clear reasons
for joining the struggle, at least at first. He is angered by the poverty he sees his people
suffering: “He wondered how some people could live with such deprivation and still
pretend that things were normal. He could not and that was why he was going to the war
to fight to change it” (Kanengoni 69). Like Jal, he is motivated by politics to a certain
extent, enraged by the condition of the black majority under white minority rule: "What
sort of fate determined that his people should be condemned to live like this? No!
Something had to be done to change all this" (69). Emmanuel Chiome and Zifikile
Mguni claim that Munashe initially romanticizes the war, and the novel subsequently
satirizes this romanticization with reality (171). Yet, like Angela and many child soldiers,
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he also feels like it is his only option. He cannot continue with his studies when his
people are living in such conditions. When his sister tries to talk him out of joining, he
says "I am sorry tete, there is nothing else I can do" (71). He sees no alternative to
joining the struggle; the situation is so intolerable that he believes Zimbabweans can no
longer wait, but must actively fight for their freedom. Later, marvelling at how quickly
he has grown disillusioned, he thinks, "It was as if he had been press-ganged to join the
war" (11). He can hardly remember why he wanted to join in the first place, and
struggles to regain his initial excitement. Despite circumstances that led him to believe he
had no alternatives, he still acknowledges that the choice was ultimately his: "He wanted
to weep for himself for his decision to join the horrible, horrible war" (49, italics mine).
He has nobody but himself to blame "for joining the crazy fucking war" (17).
However, as in Daniel's case, making this choice seems to have resulted in
Munashe's loss of agency in other respects. In a pivotal scene early in the novel, he is
ordered to kill a woman and her baby, the wife and child of a participant in the
Badza/Nhari revolt against ZANU leadership. When he expresses reluctance, the security
officer in charge accuses Munashe of being "one of them" (4) and shoots his gun in the
air to emphasize his point. Fresh in Munashe's mind is how he was accused of being a
spy and tortured immediately upon arriving at training camp in Lusaka simply because
he had brought a book with him and those in charge believed that "all educated people
from Salisbury were spies because they dined and wined with the white man" (9-10).
This recalls how Commandant in Beasts of No Nation convinces a reluctant Agu to kill a
prisoner, saying, "If you are not killing him, enh. Luftenant will be thinking you are spy.
And who can know if he won't just be killing you" (Iweala 20). This threat is particularly
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potent for Agu because, like Munashe, this is not the first time he is accused of being a
spy. When he is first captured and brought before Commandant, Luftenant says, "He is
spy oh. It is ambush oh. Let's just kill him and clear from this place" (7). The
Commandant asks Agu if this is true, shows him the knife he carries, and threatens to
hand Agu over to the Luftenant if he does not answer (10). In both cases, the soldier is
threatened with immediate violence, and memories of past violence are evoked to
frighten him into following orders. A key difference is that, whereas Commandant guides
Agu in striking the first blow, Munashe finally raises the hoe himself:
Then he looked at the haggard figure of the woman and it lost its shape and its
edges got torn and the baby on her back became a protrusion of her hunched back
and then he swung the hoe, and he heard the blade swishing furiously through the
air and he thought of the sound from the enormous wings of the bateleur as it
took off from the towering mukamba tree at the mouth of the cave on the side of
the mountain and the foul smell from inside as Gondo groaned, decayed, dying.
(Kanengoni 30)
This flashback blurs with other traumatic memories, as he recalls watching a bateleur
eagle alongside his dying comrade Gondo as they hid from the Rhodesians in a cave. The
paratactic sentence creates a sense of inevitability, because nothing is subordinated to
anything else but is equal in terms of syntax. He is able momentarily to stop seeing the
woman as a person, and sees her as a shapeless "it", and her baby as merely an extension
of "it." Dehumanizing her is what finally allows him to do the deed he is ordered to do:
"then he swung the hoe." By comparison, Agu says Commandant is "squeezing my hand
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around the handle of the machete" and "lifting my hand high" (20) before finally "He is
taking my hand and bringing it down so hard on top of the enemy's head" (21). However,
although they strike the first blow together, Agu immediately feels like "electricity is
running through my whole body" (21) and continues to hit the man on his own. The
man's screams and futile attempts to staunch the blood flowing from his head quickly
begin to irritate him: "He is annoying me and I am bringing the machete up and down
and up and down hearing KPWUDA KPWUDA every time and seeing just pink" (21).
The repetition of the run-on sentence here is very similar to Kanengoni's description.
However, the fact that Iweala shows Agu as being incapable of initiating the violence
without adult intervention speaks to the desire (and the narrative imperative) to represent
the child soldier as essentially innocent and manipulated by evil, blood-thirsty adults.
The differing reactions of Munashe and Agu to these horrific deeds that they are
forced to commit are interesting to consider in terms of responsibility. Agu has a
contradictory physical reaction to his first kill, disgusted and aroused, as he
simultaneously vomits and gets an erection. The next chapter opens with his attempt to
rationalize his behaviour: "I am not bad boy. I am not bad boy. I am soldier and soldier is
not bad if he is killing" (23). He tries to convince himself that he is not responsible for
his actions because he is simply fulfilling his role as a soldier. However, he also
implicitly invokes his youth as a mitigating factor by insisting that he is not actually a
"bad boy." By contrast, Munashe is overcome with guilt. Eventually, the base
commander has to hold him back as he is "shouting that he wished that someone had
killed him because he could not live with such a memory" (31). He is haunted by the
memory of the woman with the baby on her back throughout the entire novel, to the
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extent that he is possessed by her spirit in a ritual meant to drive out his demons. His
ancestral spirit directs him to visit the woman's village and tell her family what happened
to their daughter. Her family does seem to forgive him, though it is not because he “was
just a little boy” but because he is “as helpless and tortured as we are” and their problems
are the same (128). In fact, when Munashe encounters the woman he killed in the
afterlife, she pats him on the shoulder and tells him “It wasn’t your fault,” those key
words that echo throughout the child soldier narratives. However, it is not stated or
implied that it was not his fault because he was too young to know what he was doing.
What relieves him of responsibility is not a conception of childhood innocence, but an
understanding of the madness of war, despite its ostensibly noble purpose of Zimbabwe’s
liberation.
Like Samupindi, Dan Wylie sees the soldiers who fought in the Rhodesian war as
pawns. Again, this is not because of age; the conscripts are all aged eighteen and above
(13). Wylie's metaphor of choice is the title of his memoir: Dead Leaves. One of his
epigraphs comes from T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom talking about being
possessed or enslaved by the need to fight: "By our own act we were drained of morality,
of volition, of responsibility, like dead leaves in the wind" (xvi). Here, Lawrence and,
by extension, Wylie seem to be saying that soldiers are aimless, helpless pawns who just
follow orders rather than making their own moral choices, like dead leaves blown any
which way by the wind. However, this is complicated by the fact that it is by their own
act that they become this way. Just as the narrator of Pawns sees himself as "victim of
my own act" (Samupindi 195), the soldiers in Dead Leaves seem to have made the choice
to give up choices. As the war draws to a close and faith in Ian Smith, the prime minister
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of Rhodesia, dwindles, Wylie draws on this metaphor again, saying he and his fellow
soldiers “are beginning to feel like dead leaves – irrelevant, swirled in ever-diminishing
circles. We are trapped in a whirlwind, caught in the centrifuge of its own
purposelessness” (114). Again, this sense of helplessness and insignificance is evoked,
though without the admission of responsibility here.
However, Wylie's situation is different from that of the protagonists in the two
Zimbabwean novels or in the child soldier narratives in that he was conscripted into the
Rhodesian Army. On one level, then, he had no choice in the matter. As a white
eighteen-year-old Rhodesian male in 1978, he was required to fulfill his National Service
(White 105). Yet, both because of his age and his position on the wrong side of the war
and history, there is little sense that he is a victim. In her review of Wylie's memoir,
Norma Kriger notes, "Many young whites, for instance, did evade conscription, and it
would be valuable to learn what marked them off from their more obedient compatriots"
(492). She seems to suggest that Wylie could have done more to avoid fighting for Ian
Smith. Luise White states that "half the eligible 3,000 men evaded conscription in 1973,
and 6,500 evaded it in 1976" (107). Of course, many of these men did not evade
conscription on principle, but to avoid risking their lives in a losing war. By the time
Wylie was conscripted, the war was seen as even more futile and unwinnable. While
conscription seems like a lack of choice, some critics appear to think Wylie did have one
and chose not to resist. In a conference presentation he gave about writing Dead Leaves,
Wylie defends himself from such accusations, saying that, as a participant in war,
"Actions are squeezed out of you like a sweat under torture, for which you are not fully
responsible; they are actions evoked by the ideology of the situation; they are not in any
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simple sense choices" ("Reflections" 191). Although Wylie is grappling with the guilt of
fighting for the wrong side rather than specific atrocities committed, his language mirrors
that used to justify the choices of child soldiers. However, he continues, "Yet this much
has to be admitted: blindness was never total, volition was never entirely drained"
("Reflections" 191). Although the context is very different, the pressures of the child
soldier narrative genre would never allow such an admission.
Responsibility and choice are ideas that Wylie grapples with in this memoir,
further complicated by the fact he fought for a racist and discredited regime. In his
prologue, he tells a student considering joining the military that it is “the most
destructive, the most demonic system humans have ever invented" (2), but then is
unsettled to find an essay he wrote as a young man fresh out of the military in which he
says he would advise others to join, "for the experience" (3). He rationalizes this
discrepancy between his past and present self as an attempt to convince himself that the
time he spent in the military had a purpose. He notes that when he wrote that essay, "I
had just spent fifteen months of my youth in a war, then in its most intense and futile
phase . . . I was terrified that those months might turn out to be perfectly meaningless"
(3). At the time, he wrote, "Given the choice, I would not have gone through with it, but
now that I have I will never regret it, would do the same again" (3, italics mine). This
implies that he did not have a choice at the time as a conscript. However, he seems to
suggest that he is glad he was denied choice because now he has an experience he
otherwise would have missed out on. The older Wylie says that these reflections “could
only have been written by a boy who had not yet confronted the real enormity of what he
was doing, and the greater horror of his absolute lack of guilt” (3). Interestingly, he sees
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his eighteen-year-old self as a boy, aligning these opinions that shock him now with
immaturity. He continues, “But then guilt had never been allowed. Guilt implied caring,
a conscience, and choice. Conscience was precisely what we had been systematically
shut out of. Choice was like a garden filled with light and steaming plants, where growth
happened, and new flowers were painfully born” (3). Clearly, guilt and a conscience
about basic human rights and taking land away from the original inhabitants were not
encouraged in the Rhodesian Army: it would have been suicide to their mission and very
reason for existence. Guilt is linked here to choice. One could feel guilty about choosing
to fight "for the indefensible," as Anthony Chennells puts it in his Foreword to Dead
Leaves (xv), but they are exempt from guilt or responsibility because they did not choose
to fight, or so they need to believe.
Wylie interrogates his reasons for writing, considering the motives of Primo
Levi, who thought telling of his experiences in Auschwitz would purify him and help
him become human again. However, he ultimately decides that he does not write for
mere catharsis, but to “reassert a freedom of choice which I feel I have been denied, or
have not had the courage, and have been too blind, to exercise” (4). Here, he seems to
recognize that he might have had a certain amount of choice to avoid conscription. He
continues, “I must choose to recall what happened, and I must choose to imagine the
alternatives. Only then can I make any judgment about who I am, how I behave, and
what I write. Only in this imagining can I gain and demonstrate the freedom which
permits me to rebuild my humanity” (4). He has to make the choice to confront his rather
unsavoury past and think about the different choices he could have made back then.
Unlike Levi, he is not a victim; he arguably has a more complicated legacy to grapple
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with to see himself as human again in a moral sense. But writing "has become perhaps
my only remaining way of facing our responsibility for what we were doing out there"
(Wylie, "Reflections" 193-4)
Regardless of whether or not Wylie had a choice to fight for Rhodesia, he faced
many of the same circumstances characterized as extenuating for child soldiers. As we
saw with Jal, a desire to avenge the deaths of loved ones often motivates child soldiers.
Singer notes, "Many children may have personally experienced or been witness to the
furthest extremes of violence . . . Thus, vengeance can also be a particularly powerful
impetus to join the conflict" (64). However, revenge is hardly the preserve of children.
Wylie makes this clear in a conversation with his comrades about the various reasons to
fight:
"Listen, stuff all that, my cousin was raped and cut to bits and left in a field to
bleed to death," growls Bellicat. "That's the reason I'm here, and it's the only
reason, and it's the only good reason."
We fall silent. Almost all of us personally know people who have died,
been murdered, brutally ambushed. Our conviction has become strong and
crystalline, like the callous on a bone from which the ligament has been
repeatedly torn. (Wylie 22)
Not only is revenge a reason that people choose to fight, but according to Wylie's old
school-mate Bellicat, it is the only reason. Although Wylie does not specify here if he is
among the "almost all of us" who have a personal vendetta, he later describes the
"cowardly and merely terroristic attacks" (178) that claim the lives of old friends and
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neighbours back home in Umtali. Wylie also shares a tent at one point with a black
soldier, Patterson. Despite the racist rhetoric spouted by the Rhodesian regime, there
were many black African soldiers who fought in the Rhodesian Security Forces. As
Wylie notes earlier, quoting a comrade, "three-quarters of the Army is already black"
(14). When Wylie asks Patterson why he is fighting for the Rhodesians, "His eyes go flat
black. Gandangas -- terrorists -- murdered two members of his family. They hacked his
sister to death in front of him. If he ever catches a gandanga, he will shove a stick of
dynamite into his rectum and blow him to pieces" (49). This graphic description mirrors
Beah's elaborate revenge fantasy in response to his corporal's exhortations that the rebels
are responsible for killing the families of the newly-recruited child soldiers: "I imagined
capturing several rebels at once, locking them inside a house, sprinkling gasoline on it,
and tossing a match. We watch it burn and I laugh" (113). Vengeance clearly motivates
soldiers regardless of race or age.
Singer claims that "Social motivations may also play a powerful role in inducing
children to join [armed] groups, often with their parents' approval" (122). It does seem
that Wylie was brought up in a family culture that aided his entrance into Rhodesia's
security forces. His father, a former merchant marine and member of the Police Reserve
who has tried to raise his son in "the philosophy of practical aggression," teaching him to
box and shoot and enrolling him in karate lessons, salutes him with a fist both
"supportive and daunting" (Wylie 9-10) as he enters the army. Wylie even characterizes
going off to war as "entering my father's world" (9). His experience mirrors how Jal was
encouraged by his soldier father to follow in his footsteps and join the SPLA. Wylie
notes, "as conscripts, we were also victims of our own leaders', community's, friends',
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parents; coercive pressures" ("Reflections" 191). Indeed, not only did his parents subtly
encourage the fulfillment of his National Service, but the larger culture of white settler
Rhodesia was highly invested in the idea of the war as a noble struggle for civilization
and tradition. Wessells notes that in the process of political socialization, "societies teach
children to sacrifice for their group, fighting when necessary, and to honor their history
and way of life" (52). This description of how children can be conditioned to join armed
groups parallels not only how Jal was socialized to fight against the Arabs, but also the
way Rhodesia groomed its future conscripts. Wylie says of himself and his comrades, en
route to basic training:
It is the heritage of [the Anglo-Saxon] race which, stumbling sleepily from our
train, we are about to begin to fight for.
Or so we have always been told. (Wylie 12)
Wylie has structured Dead Leaves as a "memoir within a memoir" (Kriger 491),
including letters, diary entries and other writings from his time in the Rhodesian army
alongside an older narrator who struggles to reconcile these with his memories and
feelings of guilt. In the above passage, the retrospective narrator intervenes to cast doubt
on his younger self's motivation, recognizing the role that socialization has played in
encouraging young soldiers to fight for Rhodesia that the young Wylie was not fully
aware of at the time
While in the army, Wylie subscribes to a series of Rhodesian settler narratives,
which he says, "feels like a mild act of patriotism. One can find there unlimited
justification for current attitudes" (102). However, reading Hans Sauer’s description of
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the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, and his arrogant refusal to believe that they could have
been built by Africans, Wylie says, “I am beginning to think that it’s simplistic claptrap.
But it has become part of our identity, a crucial component of that ‘civilisation’ in
defense of which Ian Smith says he declared UDI in 1965” (103). This questioning of his
purpose as a soldier and identity as a Rhodesian troubles him greatly:
For a moment, I am almost nauseous with the suspicion that this war is a conflict
we have brought down upon ourselves, under totally false presumptions.
But then I cannot say it, not to my parents, not even to myself. (Wylie
103)
But this moment of doubt is fleeting, as Wylie is not ready at this point to accept that
everything he has learned is wrong. Still, most of the African child soldier narratives do
not reveal even a glimmer of this kind of critical thinking31
. This observation is not to
pass judgment on child soldiers, but to point out the generic demands that the child
soldier be represented as an innocent victim who either has no understanding of what he
or she is fighting for, or whose brainwashing is complete. Of course, Wylie is writing
from a very different subject position as a member of the privileged white minority who
is newly conscious of his own complicity in the war – his own deliberate refusal to
acknowledge and confront his doubts about colonial ideology as spewed by his father,
31 Jal, who has been socialized to see all Muslims as both Arab and the enemy, does have a brief moment
of doubt about the legitimacy of his cause when he sees that the jallabas he has killed have black skin just
like him, but is quickly convinced by one of the older soldiers that black Muslims are just as bad as Arab
Muslims, if not worse (141). Even after he leaves the SPLA, he still imagines stabbing Emma's Muslim
friends (182) and fights with the Muslim boys at school (189). It is only as an adult that he learns to stop
hating Muslims and records a duet with a Muslim musician (241).
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the colonial army, and the colonial state. Moreover, the conflicts that the protagonists
find themselves embroiled in differ dramatically, the wars that child soldiers fight in
often being informed by murkier ideologies than liberation struggles.32
Still, the fact
remains that child soldiers rarely question their involvement in war for reasons of
ideology. With the intervention of white saviour figures or formal rehabilitation, child
soldiers gradually come to understand that their participation in war is wrong; however,
they learn it is wrong because of their young age, not the ideological underpinnings of
the conflict itself.
Undoubtedly, propaganda is part of this socialization that Wylie finds so hard to
shake. At one point in Dead Leaves, Wylie and some of his comrades find themselves at
the Mana Pools Game Reserve, ostensibly to complete a course that will teach them to
track their enemies. However, to their chagrin, chief ranger Tim has refused to train
them, instead putting them to work patrolling the park. Tim explains his rationale to
Wylie: "I'd rather you stayed here and got stomped on by an elephant than got yourselves
shot for a dumb, misconceived, lost cause. You guys are so young, so stupid, so full of
the delusions of the Smith propaganda" (71). Wessells claims that young people are
particularly vulnerable to this type of persuasion. He says,
32 This lack of clear motivation can at least be partially attributed to the genre. Eleni Coundouriotis argues
that child soldier narratives show a lesser engagement with history than other African war narratives as
they shift attention away from the political and social reasons behind wars and children's involvement in
them ("Child" 191). Certainly, child soldier narratives seem to have little interest in the historical and
ideological causes of the conflicts they represent, which may be less clear-cut than those behind liberation
struggles, but still exist. For example, Rosen points out that despite the fact that the civil war in Sierra
Leone is typically portrayed as having been irrational and anomic, soldiers were fighting for specific goals,
including the control of resources (Armies 13). However, in child soldier narratives war is often
represented (particularly in the novels) as atavistic, incomprehensible violence that comes out of nowhere,
with any historical causes being relegated to a paratextual chronology.
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Teenagers are susceptible to manipulation by propaganda because they lack the
broad life experience needed to think issues through critically, particularly in
contexts where they have had little education or education that does not favor
critical thinking. At a developmental stage in which they search for meaning and
direction in their lives, teenagers often find that the heroic imagery of propaganda
speaks to their idealism and provides a clear sense of direction. (53)
However, this claim conflates age with experience and education. Clearly, adults like
Wylie can also be uneducated and vulnerable to propaganda. Due to "the deficiencies of
our colonial education," Wylie is only vaguely aware of Mbuya Nehanda (the medium of
the Shona spirit Nehanda), the role she played in the 1896 Mashona revolts, and her
lasting significance as a "potent symbol of resistance to white rule" (41). He notes that
most Rhodesian soldiers "still believe that all forms of 'native unrest' arise from some
inconvenient and whimsical superstition" (41). Moreover, education may not even be
enough to counter the power of propaganda. Kriger notes that Dead Leaves "captures the
power of Rhodesian propaganda to make a victim of even an educated and intellectual
young man" (492). While Tim does link susceptibility to propaganda to youth -- "You
guys are so young" -- and, at eighteen, Wylie is still a teenager like the ones Wessells say
are attracted by such "heroic imagery," the fact remains that he is technically an adult.
Scholars writing about child soldiers often point to extenuating circumstances or
coercion to rationalize their decisions to join armed groups and commit horrific deeds.
However, as the Zimbabwean war narratives illustrate, these pressures do not exclusively
affect children. Daniel/Fangs, Munashe and Dan Wylie cite many of the same
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motivations as child soldiers like Jal and Agu. However, despite being only a year or so
removed from being classified as child soldiers themselves, the Zimbabwean characters
are represented as taking responsibility for their choices. These narratives allow for the
portrayal of characters who might be considered "complex political perpetrators."
Conversely, the genre of the child soldier narrative insists that its protagonists' choices be
represented as not truly being choices in keeping with the necessity of portraying the
young soldier as innocent child victim. The next chapter will explore why the genre
makes these demands.
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Chapter 4 Child Soldier Narratives: An African Genre?
What is left unspoken, but usually understood, when speaking about child soldier
narratives is the qualifier "African." Despite the substantial numbers of child soldiers
elsewhere in the world, the archetypal child soldier is perpetually imagined as African.
This persistent association of the child soldier, an agent of war and destruction, with the
continent, as well as the hunger for narratives that portray the young soldier as an
innocent, victimized child, suggests an Orientalist-type desire to see Africa specifically
as a place of violence and lost innocence that can be redeemed through Western
intervention. Indeed, child soldier narratives seem strongly oriented towards the global
North: they are published in the West, primarily marketed to and consumed by a Western
audience, and reflect certain ideas about Africa and Africans common in the West.
Moreover, child soldier narratives share these characteristics with African literature in
general: it, too, tends to be published in non-indigenous languages by Western publishing
houses who may try to shape texts to their own preconceptions of "Africa" and
"Africans," and to be largely only read in the West for various reasons that include
economics, literacy, and lack of a reading culture. The child soldier narrative therefore
reveals something important about the reception of African literature in general. Niromi
de Soyza's Tamil Tigress is the one real exception to the rule of child soldier narratives as
African, being a memoir of the author's experience fighting in the Sri Lankan Civil War
as a young girl that, crucially, is marketed as a child soldier narrative. However, the
many ways in which this memoir differs from other child soldier narratives suggests that
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it is an outlier and does not really fit into the genre, which remains almost exclusively
African.
Almost invariably, the figure of the child soldier tends to be imagined as "a small,
barefoot black African boy wielding an AK-47” (Mackey, "Apparitions" 182). This was
not always the case. Lorraine Macmillan notes that in the 1980s, child soldiers were
"wedded to a different geography--and race--than they are today. Early on, they were
often associated with Iranian forces pitched in a long and costly war against Iraq" (46).
However, since then, they "have become virtually synonymous with the new wars of sub-
Saharan Africa" (46). Alison Mackey notes “Even though more than half of the conflicts
involving child combatants do not take place on the African continent, the vast majority
of popular cultural representations of them feature African child soldiers” ("Apparitions"
173). The 2008 Child Soldiers Global Report lists nineteen countries where children
were actively involved in armed conflict between April 2004 and October 2007. Eight of
these countries were in Africa,33
but as many were in Asia.34
Afua Twum-Danso states,
“The case of Myanmar is particularly illustrative. Despite repeated denials from the
government, Myanmar is believed to have more child soldiers than any other country in
the world; more than 70,000 children may currently be serving in the national army
alone, making the government of that country the greatest single global user of children
as soldiers” (20). Sarah Maguire notes that this constitutes 23-28% of the estimated
33 These countries were Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Somalia, Sudan and
Uganda in Africa.
34 The Asian countries are Afghanistan, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka and
Thailand.
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250,000-300,000 child soldiers worldwide (240). Indeed, as of 2005, there were an
estimated 75,000 child soldiers in Myanmar (Singer 27) as opposed to 30,000-50,000
child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Singer 21), which has a similarly-
sized population and almost twice as many citizens under the age of eighteen. Yet, no
former child soldier in Myanmar has yet produced a mainstream memoir. Nor has any
notable adult fiction about non-African child soldiers been published (children’s
literature is a slightly different case, although it is still predominantly about African child
soldiers35
). In his review of A Long Way Gone and other child soldier narratives in the
New Statesman, Dinaw Mengestu writes, “Of course, child soldiers can be found not
only in Africa, but also throughout Asia, from Afghanistan to Thailand. What attracts
immediate and superficial attention to Africa's child soldiers, however, is that the brutal
existence of a child soldier dovetails neatly with depictions of Africa both as a place born
of hell and misery and as a continent that, like a child, can be saved” (n.p.). The common
perception seems to be that child soldiers are by and large an African problem, and this
perception is reflected in literature.
At the same time that I argue that child soldier narratives are almost purely an
African genre (meaning they are almost always by and/or about African child soldiers,
rather than child soldiers from any other part of the world), it could equally be argued
35 Mitali Perkins's Bamboo People is about child soldiers in Burma and Patricia McCormick's Never Fall
Down is based on the true story of a child soldier in Cambodia, but Chanda’s Wars by Allan Stratton, AK
by Peter Dickinson, War Brothers by Sharon McKay, and Son of a Gun by Anne Degraaf all feature child
soldiers from various parts of Africa.
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that they are a Western genre.36
As Mackey notes, “these narratives are written from
within the geographical and intellectual space of the global north” ("Apparitions" 220).
All of the child soldier memoirists left their respective armed groups and emigrated to
Western countries including the United States (Beah, Missamou, Akallo), the United
Kingdom (Jal), Germany (Mehari) and Denmark (Keitetsi). As for the novelists, Chris
Abani has lived in the United States since 2001 ("About Chris"); Uzodinma Iweala was
born in Washington, D.C., wrote his novel while at Harvard, and was based in New York
City at the time of its publication. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of their texts were
subsequently published in the global North rather than Africa. A Long Way Gone and
Beasts of No Nation were published by the mainstream American companies Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux and HarperCollins respectively. Major Western publishers had a
bidding war over Jal’s War Child, with St. Martin's Press (Macmillan) and Little, Brown
triumphing for the U.S. and U.K. rights respectively (Rushton). Song for Night is
published by the independent Akashic Books, which "has a reputation for courting
alternative and African-American markets" (Schultheis, "Global" 315, ftn 3), but this
small press is still based in Brooklyn and has no special interest in continental Africa.
Moreover, many of the child soldier narratives have succeeded in reaching wide
36 By using the word "genre" here, I mean to suggest that child soldier narratives as a genre are found in
particular geographic contexts. I have already established in chapter 1 that child soldier narratives
constitute a new (sub-)genre based on their formal and thematic features, and their similarity to other
established genres such as the slave narrative. Now I wish to suggest that this genre has become associated
with specific geographic regions, based on either the narratives' authorship and setting, or their intended
audiences and circumstances of publication. This is not to suggest that "African literature" or "Western
literature" are themselves genres, but that the child soldier narrative is a genre typically wed to a certain
geography, similar to the association of the haiku with Japan. As Alistair Fowler says, "Genres have
circumscribed existences culturally. Individual works may sometimes partly elude locality; genres never"
(Kinds 132).
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audiences in the global north. A Long Way Gone debuted at number two on the New York
Times bestseller list and was sold at Starbucks as the second selection in its book club
program, following For One More Day by Mitch Albom, of Tuesdays with Morrie fame
(Bosman). According to promotional material on the front of the HarperPerennial
edition, Beasts of No Nation was chosen by Time, People, Slate, Entertainment Weekly
and New York Magazine as "A Best Book of the Year." Johnny Mad Dog was reviewed
by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and chosen as a Los Angeles Times Book
Review Favorite Book of the Year.
Of course, one could conceivably argue that all African Literature qualifies as a
Western genre by this definition, given that most of what we call by that name is
published in the West, increasingly by expatriate writers. Indeed, Eleni Coundouriotis
writes that “The recent proliferation of African child soldier narratives largely reflects
this new shape of African literature, written and marketed outside of Africa” ("Child"
192). The question of child soldier narratives is part of a larger ongoing debate over the
“Africanness” of what is generally termed “African literature," given “the displacement
of the production and study of African literatures outside of Africa" (Coundouriotis,
"Child" 191-92). Almost twenty-five years ago, Biodun Jeyifo wrote how “the center of
gravity of African literary study” had shifted from Africa itself to Europe and North
America (40). Somewhat more recently, Lila Azam Zanganeh writes in the New York
Times of “a constellation of phantom writers who live in Western Europe and primarily
write for — some say cater to — a Western readership.” Although she is referring
primarily to Francophone African writers, her comments can be extrapolated to
Anglophone African writers based in the global North, including writers of child soldier
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narratives. Also in the New York Times, Nigerian novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani notes
the assumption that any internationally successful African writer must be based in the
West. She says, "When I speak at events in Nigeria, I’m often asked, 'For how long are
you around in Nigeria?' no matter how many times I’ve mentioned my home in Abuja."
She claims that this shift to the West has caused African readers to renounce ownership
of an African literature which they increasingly do not recognize. She says,
All this combined can make African readers feel that African literature exists not
for them, but for Western eyes. Why else have brutality and depravity been the
core of many celebrated African stories? It appears that publishers have allotted
Africa the slot for supplying the West with savage entertainment (stories about
ethnic cleansing, child soldiers, human trafficking, dictatorships, rights abuses
and so on).
She argues that it is the publisher, not the author, who caters to a Western audience and
their prejudices, specifically referencing child soldiers as one of those stereotypes.
Publisher demand fuels the stories told because, as Nwaubani says, "Success for an
African writer still depends on the West." She gloomily predicts that "Some of the
greatest African writers of my generation may never be discovered, either because they
will not reach across the Atlantic Ocean to attract the attention of an agent or publisher,
or because they have not yet mastered the art of deciphering Western tastes."
Most of the Soweto novels and the Zimbabwean war narratives discussed in
chapters 2 and 3 were, by contrast, originally published by African publishing houses
that, moreover, made an effort to be accessible to the African public. Before they were
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picked up by London-based Heinemann and its famed African Writers Series (AWS),
Sepamla and Serote's novels were published by Ad Donker and Ravan Press respectively,
anti-apartheid South African publishing houses described by James Currey as part of "a
heroic band of independent publishers" that faced down censorship in order to reach "an
enthusiastic and committed audience who saw writing as part of the struggle" (185).
Amandla was also published by Johannesburg-based Ravan Press as part of the Staffrider
Series, whose goal (as stated on the first page of the novel) was "bringing new books at
popular prices direct to the readers of Staffrider," the famed South African literary
magazine. In the editorial of its first issue, Staffrider made clear its commitment to
publishing writing that is a "'direct line' to the community in which the writer lives . . .
The writer is attempting to voice the community's experience ('This is how it is') and his
immediate audience is the community ('Am I right?')" (qtd. Oliphant & Vladislavić, n.p.)
Echoing Silences is another AWS title, but was originally published by Baobab Books,
the influential Zimbabwean press, as was Pawns. Terence Ranger notes that Zimbabwean
writers have long "relied on Baobab to present their work inside Zimbabwe at a price that
Zimbabweans can afford" (701). All of these publishers -- Ravan, Ad Donker and
Baobab -- were locally-based and had an interest in reaching a local audience. Perhaps
this difference in publisher and presumed market could account for the difference in the
portrayal of the "child soldier" figure in these different narratives. However, these texts
were all -- with the exception of the white Rhodesian Dan Wylie's narrative -- published
in the 1980s and 1990s, suggesting that the move to Western publishers and Western-
based African writers might be a contemporary phenomenon after all. Moreover,
Coundouriotis identifies the genre of the war novel (a category these narratives fit into
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much more easily than child soldier narrative) as one that is "counterposed" to most
African literature and more likely to be published by African companies ("Child" 192).
Regardless, publishers in the global north have long been interested in Africa.
Historically, Western publishers produced the textbooks for colonial African markets,
which typically reflected "a British [or French] point of view" (Griswold 61). As
independence approached, they saw an opportunity to publish African literature in order
to access an untapped market of newly literate and educated readers who were caught up
in the celebratory mood of liberation and eager to see themselves reflected in the books
they read (Bgoya & Jay 18, Griswold 62). Wendy Griswold writes that the renowned
Heinemann's African Writers series was the result of "supply and demand converging: a
generation of writers educated after World War II, often at the new African universities,
coincided with the educational ambitions and cultural aspirations of the new nations"
(62). At the same time, Western publishers also continued their highly profitable
textbook publishing (Bgoya & Jay 18, Davis 9). Griswold notes, "No doubt these
publishing companies were committed to encouraging the development of African
literature, but with ever greater numbers of African youth growing ever more literate,
they were also intent on doing well by doing good" (61). Caroline Davis takes a slightly
more cynical view. She notes,
There are two prevailing models that have been used to explain the relationship
between the Western publisher and the African writer: one which presents the
publisher as a benign influence, 'a necessary mid-wife to the author's prose' to use
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the metaphor employed by Juliet Gardiner, and another that presents the publisher
as an agent of cultural imperialism. (2-3)
She argues that publishers have a vested interest in representing themselves according to
this first model in order to downplay the economic significance of the African
educational market, potentially "deflecting charges of neo-colonialism" (9). However,
she notes that even the model of the publisher as "benign influence" itself does not
entirely escape the language of colonialism: "In the first model, the residual rhetoric of
the 'civilizing mission' persists. The European publisher is depicted as an important
patron, offering vital support for African writers and bringing books, and thereby
education and enlightenment, to the continent" (Davis 3). However, as in the so-called
"mission civilisatrice," the idea of the publisher/colonizer as benevolent patron merely
disguises the true motivations of profit, expansion and indirectly, cultural imperialism.
Despite these issues, in this first phase of post-independence publishing, Western
companies were still producing books aimed at the African market (Huggan 54) and
some local African publishers were also publishing African literature (Bgoya and Jay 19,
Griswold 69). However, after the financial crises of the 1980s, the bottom dropped out of
the African market, indigenous publishers began to be shuttered and even local branches
of Western publishers began to withdraw (Griswold 69-70, Bgoya and Jay 19-20).
Today, Pucherová calls the state of African publishing "dismal," which, she says, "is
related to the overall economic decline on the continent, continued low literacy rates, and
a fragile intellectual infrastructure. In addition, there are the effects of the corporatization
and monopolization of the global book industry" (14).
164
This lack of local publishers is certainly one reason why African writers,
including authors of child soldier narratives, choose to publish with Western companies.
There is also the need to access larger audiences for their books. Pucherová notes, "for an
English-language writer to break into the global market necessarily means to publish in
London or New York" (14). However, in addition to such practical considerations, there
are other motivations to choose a Western publisher even if an African one was
available. Bgoya and Jay note that even from the early days of indigenous publishing in
Africa, "because education had been colonial and all things of value were thought to
emanate from the metropolitan centers in the north, there were psychological and
economic reasons for authors to prefer a European publisher" (26). Pucherová says that
the continuing reliance on Western publishers "indicates the persistence of what Graham
Huggan calls a 'neocolonial knowledge industry': the dependency-mechanisms whereby
Africans believe that cultural value is located elsewhere" (15). The result of this
inferiority complex "has implications for the ways in which African writers’ work is
marketed, and for what markets it reaches" (Pucherová 14). Certainly, the authors of
child soldier narratives are not immune to such mechanisms.
Another reason that so much African literature is published by Western
companies is simple proximity. Attree notes, "Much contemporary African writing
emanates from writers living in the diaspora, living and working outside the countries in
which they were born" (36). This is particularly true of child soldier memoirists, who,
having escaped their armed groups and made their way to Western nations, are unlikely
to return to insecurity, uncertainty, and often, continuing violence. Because of their
involvement with certain groups, it may or may not be safe for them to return if the
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group is still active or banned by the current government. Their mere status as former
child soldiers may also open them up to reprisal attacks. Many have lost their families,
and thus have little to return to. In some ways, they face similar circumstances as an
earlier generation of African writers in exile, who, as Charles Larson laments, "cut off
from their roots, have experienced a diminishing of their productivity" (145). However,
on the contrary, the condition of escape and exile is actually necessary for the child
soldier memoirist to produce his/her narrative. A (non-fictional) child soldier narrative is
always the narrative of a former child soldier. A child who is actively engaged in warfare
would not have the time or resources to engage in the process of composing a memoir,
but more than this: the child soldier memoir presumes a writer who has learned that war
has damaged him and who is working to overcome that damage. Child soldier
memoirists (and authors of fictional child soldier narratives) also face the same pressures
as African writers more generally. Larson describes the "brain drain" (148) of African
writers who "left their countries of origin because of better working conditions in the
West" (138) or because they "feel the need to be closer to where their readers are and,
increasingly, this meant not Africa but Europe or America" (148). Escape, and to the
West specifically, is all but required in order to publish a child soldier memoir, not only
to access functioning publishing houses, but also, as I will argue later, an audience
interested in their stories
The problem with African child soldier narratives being invariably published with
Western companies, with a Western audience in mind, is that this can have an effect on
how the stories are told. In terms of life writing in general, Schaffer and Smith note, “At
this historical moment, telling life stories in print or through the media by and large
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depends upon a Western-based publishing industry, media, and readership. This
dependence affects the kind of stories published and circulated, the forms those stories
take, and the appeals they make to audiences” (24). In her New York Times piece,
Nwaubani attempts to speak for African writers, saying, "we are telling only the stories
that foreigners allow us to tell. Publishers in New York and London decide which of us
to offer contracts, which of our stories to present to the world. American and British
judges decide which of us to award accolades, and subsequent sales and fame" (n.p.).
Although Huggan is leery of simplistic metaphors that view postcolonial literature as raw
materials being turned into finished products by Western publication and critical
industries, he allows that “All the same, it seems worth questioning the neo-imperialist
implications of a postcolonial literary/critical industry centred on, and largely catering to,
the West” (4). His suspicions are not unfounded. According to Davis, "Recent research
into the publishing of African literature has examined the ways that the publisher
modified the authors' texts in the creation of literary products that supported dominant
discourses on Africa" (124). However, she is mainly referring to earlier texts, such as
Tutuola's Palm-Wine Drinkard. Larson insists that contemporary African writers face the
same problem, warning, "If they publish overseas, editors with no understanding of their
culture may try to influence what they are saying (let alone the way they say it) " (90).
This is arguably the case with child soldier narratives, although the influence of editors
and ghostwriters is more difficult to prove. We do not have access to correspondence (if
any exists) between former child soldier/writer and amanuensis/editor of the type that
allowed scholars such as Jean Fagan Yellin to make her case about the influence of white
abolitionist editors on slave narratives, or Adele King to question Camara Laye's
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authorship of his novels. However, African writers back up Larson's claims indirectly.
Nwaubani expresses doubt as to "how well even the most conscientious editor in New
York can oversee an African story, and ensure that its authenticity shines forth."37
African writers may or may not embrace such interventions. However, Mastey argues
that "[t]he contents of these works, paratextual materials and publicly available epitexts
suggest that most authors accept the conventions that are deemed necessary in order to
bring child soldier stories to US audiences" (156). Interestingly, Larson compares the
kind of pressure that comes from foreign presses publishing the work of African writers
to a form of censorship. After discussing censorship by African governments, he goes on
to say "Publishers outside the continent exert a different form of pre-publication
censorship when they try to fit African writing into acceptable and anticipated patterns"
(Larson 126).
These "accepted and anticipated patterns" include those discussed by Joseph
Slaughter in his influential book Human Rights Inc. He argues that "the Bildungsroman
is the novelistic genre that most fully corresponds to—and, indeed, is implicitly invoked
by—the norms and narrative assumptions that underwrite the vision of free and full
human personality development projected in international human rights law” (40).
Moynagh argues that readers come to child soldier narratives expecting the kind of plot
favoured by both the Bildungsroman and human rights discourse: "a plot of innocence
37 Of course, this notion of "authenticity" is highly problematic. Nwaubani's use of the term without scare
quotes seems to assume a fixed, absolute African identity that is in complete opposition to the West. The
problem with such assumptions, useful as they might be in a political context, is that they can easily slip
into stereotypes. For instance, Adichie often tells an anecdote about the professor who once told her that
her characters were not "authentically African" because they were educated and middle-class, not starving
("African" 48, "Danger").
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corrupted and then restored, or at least one of reintegration into a social world" (40).
Child soldier narratives such as Beasts of No Nation and A Long Way Gone conform to
these expectations, presenting an innocent victim who is forced to fight, given drugs, and
commits atrocities, but is ultimately rehabilitated and rejoins society. Of course,
publishers have a vested interest in fulfilling reader expectations. Slaughter notes "the
role of the reader in a global commodity society, who, as a consumer, makes generic
demands that affect the modes of literary production and that are given effect through the
editorial offices of the publishing industry" (310-11). The desires of the reader become
the desires of the publisher in order to reach said reader. For example, the typically
redemptive endings of child soldier narratives are likely market-driven, at least in part.
As Mackey observes, “It is important to ask to what extent such (relatively) happy
endings are encouraged by publishing houses who realize that redemptive narratives sell
much better than stories of children whose lives have been physically, psychically and
socially crushed” ("Apparitions" 177). The readers demanding such endings tend to
based in the West. Slaughter notes that "The largest audience for postcolonial
Bildungsromane from the global South still resides largely in the literary industrial
centers of the North, where the novels are typically published, distributed, taught, and
consumed, and whose readers seem to have an insatiable appetite for the stories of Third
Worlders coming of age" (38). The same could be said of child soldier narratives.
At the very least, it seems safe to assume that child soldier narratives do not enjoy
the same wide popularity in Africa as they do in the West. As a case study, I will focus
on A Long Way Gone, arguably the best-known child soldier narrative, and its reception
in Ishmael Beah's home country of Sierra Leone. The African Book Publishing Record, a
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comprehensive bibliography of books published by African publishing houses or the
African subsidiaries of multinational publishers, shows no record of A Long Way Gone
from 2007 (the date of its original publication) to 2016. According to World Cat, of the
3477 libraries that have copies of A Long Way Gone, only six are in Africa.38
Sallieu
Turay, chief librarian of the Sierra Leone Library Board, confirms that only a single copy
is available in the country, at the Central Library in Freetown, and that as far as he
knows, the book is not otherwise for sale in Sierra Leone (personal communication). Neil
ten Kortenaar reports that in Uganda, another country with a history of child soldiers
being used in contemporary conflicts, A Long Way Gone can be found in the Entebbe
airport bookstore and in Aristoc Books in Garden City mall in Kampala, among a few
other child soldier narratives, but notes "that doesn't mean Africans read it" (personal
communication). According to Griswold, Felix Onyeacholam, manager of the Bestseller
bookstore in Lagos, claims "It's the expatriates who buy the African literature! In fact,
Onyeacholam estimated that foreigners buy an astonishing 80 percent of the Nigerian and
other African literature that the store sells" (81). Given that the availability of A Long
Way Gone in Africa is largely limited to places patronized by expatriates, one suspects a
similar audience for child soldier narratives.
In a 2010 interview with his former editor Sarah Crichton, Beah spoke about his
memoir’s reception in his birthplace: “It was really strange because it was the first time I
had done a reading in Sierra Leone, and I wasn’t sure how it would be received. When I
38 Moreover, these six are all university libraries, overwhelmingly in South Africa: University of South
Africa (Muckleneck), University of Cape Town, University of KwaZulu-Natal, University of the Free State
and University of the Witswatersrand, as well as the American University of Nigeria.
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walked on the stage, everyone stood up and clapped (this is a room full of people). And I
was really shocked; I didn’t think Sierra Leoneans knew my writing as much as it turns
out they do" (Work in Progress). However, just because Beah is celebrated in the land of
his birth does not necessarily mean that Sierra Leoneons have read his book. In an essay
in the New York Times Book Review, Lila Azam Zanganeh relates a conversation with the
Congolese writer and diplomat Henri Lopes about attending a literary conference back
home in Brazzaville: “The audience greeted him warmly as a long-lost brother, but only
a handful there had read his latest book, which was published in France. ‘The people I
believe I'm writing for are not really interested in what I do,’ Lopes lamented. In his own
country, he said, he is a writer ‘only by hearsay.’” Beah's audience may not be as familiar
with his book as he assumes.
Perhaps child soldier narratives are not read in Africa simply because very few
books at all are. As Attree notes, "Even among anglophone publishers, there are
significant challenges in selling literature to populations without money to spare for
books" (37). The practical realities of life and publishing on the continent make it
extremely difficult to cultivate a literature embraced by a solely or primarily African
audience. First of all, access is an issue. Larson points out that "Books are expensive,
almost in the domain of luxury items, and therefore out of the reach of many Africans"
(44). In a 1996 article in the Washington Post, Eniwoke Ibagere elaborates that Soyinka's
most recent book at the time "costs about 4,000 naira -- more than the monthly salary of
most civil servants" (A14). Griswold gives a specific time for when books became out of
reach in Nigeria: in the late '80s with the end of oil boom, the Structural Adjustment
Program, and the devaluation of the naira (69-70). Consequently, publishers could not
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afford to import books or the materials needed to print them themselves, and people (or
libraries or booksellers) could not afford to buy them anyway. These economic concerns
trickle down. People do not have the money or the leisure time (because they are too
busy just trying to get by) to read books, so publishing houses cannot afford to publish
them. Editor/bookseller Francis O. Bada of Church and School Supplies (formerly
known as the CMS Bookstore) tells Griswold there is a lack of quality literature,
admitting that it is not worth it for publishers to take risks and publish quality literature
when so few people can afford to buy books anyways (83-4). It is a vicious cycle.
Griswold points out that, because Nigerians do most of their shopping with specialized
traders in markets etc., booksellers miss out on the opportunities of impulse buying
offered by drugstores, airports, etc. in the West: "In Europe and North America, the sales
of books are kept high, and the price of books kept down, by their ubiquity" (85-6).
Larson's assessment is particularly dire: "The economies of many African countries have
been so broken that, with a few notable exceptions, the publishing of imaginative works
by their writers has ceased" (62). Yet, it is not simply economics that has precipitated this
change. Overall, books have lost the symbolic value of upward mobility and cultural
capital that they once had, having been replaced by technological devices such as cell
phones and tablets. Not even the introduction of e-books has altered this trend.
However, the lack of interest in child soldier narratives on the continent that
produced the vast majority of them cannot be entirely explained by a lack of reading
culture in general. Stories about child soldiers in any medium -- TV, radio, newspapers,
etc. -- seem to lack the type of fascination they garner in the West. In a personal
interview, Emmanuel Jal talked about the lack of interest in his back-story when he is in
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Africa on tour as a musician: “In Africa, people don’t really bother me about my story.
Everybody has the same story, they tell me just to play my music. In the West, they want
to know my story.” He implies that his personal history is considered uninteresting in
Africa because it is too common: "Everybody has the same story." Jal's observation may
play into inaccurate stereotypes of child soldiers as endemic on the African continent, but
it also recalls an anecdote Nuruddin Farah shared with Larson. Farah says his mother was
unimpressed with his first novel, because the events that he describes are too mundane:
"The remark taught him a lesson: the novel's magic for readers outside his country was
not there for his mother. Perhaps he was writing for an international audience" (139).
Larson recounted a similar story with Amos Tutuola: "even at his death, too many
Nigerians were not quite certain who Amos Tutuola was or what he had written. Few had
read his books and, even among those who had, there was still the lingering feeling that
all Tutuola had done was write down tales that everybody, or at least his fellow Yorubas,
already knew" (Larson 24-5). Again, there is a sense that there is nothing special about
these stories. Griswold interviews Lagos bookseller and editor Francis O. Bada, who is
unimpressed with the type of African literature that tends to garner attention in the West.
She writes, "What outsiders see as attractively exotic is familiar stuff to Nigerians. He
dismisses Okri's Famished Road -- 'Abiku [the spirit-child constantly reborn] is well
known to us, nothing new'" (84). Child soldiers, like Yoruba folk-tales and stories of the
abiku, may be exotic and novel in the West, but it seems many Africans find them too
ordinary to be of interest.39
39 Of course, the opposite argument could also be made. Esther de Brujin's thesis, "Sensational Aesthetics:
Ghanaian Market Fiction," argues that Ghanaian market literature demonstrates considerable engagement
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Indeed, Larson quotes a Nigerian who sniffs that Tutuola's books "will just suit
the temper of his European readers as they seem to confirm their concepts of Africa"
(qtd. Larson 7). The other reason child soldier narratives are so popular in the West (and
why they are almost exclusively about African child soldiers) is that they fit Western
readers' preconceptions. Maureen Moynagh notes that these preconceptions owe
something to "Africa’s locus in the Western imagination as 'a place of violence'" (41).
She continues:
War machines operate around the globe, and child soldiers have been found
serving in Colombia, in Sri Lanka, in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in several
countries in Africa. The figure that features most commonly in documentaries,
films, on talk shows, and in published memoirs and works of fiction, however, is
the African child soldier. There is, it seems, a place already prepared in the
Western imagination for the African child soldier as a subject of violence in need
of human rights intervention and rehabilitation—intervention that threatens to
mimic colonial infantilising of Africans as needing the 'protection' of European
powers. (Moynagh 41)
Despite the well-documented existence of child soldiers in all corners of the world, the
popular image of the African child soldier stubbornly persists. A place is "already
prepared in the Western imagination" for this figure to the extent that Western reviewers
with folk-tales, which, given that these books are clearly aimed at a local audience, suggests that Africans
are indeed interested in folk-tales.
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see African child soldiers where there are none. Numerous reviewers (Gurnah, White),
and scholars (Coundouriotis, Kearney, Munro) refer to the character of Ugwu in
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun as a "child soldier," but his age at
conscription is never made explicitly clear. It is eventually established that he is thirteen
when he first comes to live with Odenigbo and Olanna, before their daughter, known as
Baby, is born. However, the novel takes place over a number of years. When Ugwu starts
teaching during the war, Baby is not yet six (Adichie 367), so he must be at least
eighteen when he is conscripted and therefore, not a child soldier.
This association of "Africa" with war and violence helps to explain Western
readers' predilection for African child soldiers. As Denov points out, "Such depictions
also act as fodder for those who seek to present warfare in the developing world as
inexplicable, brutal and disconnected from the ‘civilised’ world order" (282). Macmillan
further notes:
The coupling of child soldiers almost exclusively to an African geography lends
the discourse a racial dimension. This racial element is compounded by lingering
colonial discourses that infantilized non-Europeans by concentrating largely on
their physical traits. Fears of child soldiers’ socialization to violence are
exacerbated by yet more colonial notions of the barbarity and irrationality of non-
European peoples. (37)
The discourse of "civilization" and "barbarity" also recalls the parallels Moynagh points
to in the paternalistic instinct to save African child soldiers. What is interesting about this
instinct is that it exists in tandem with a reluctance to recognize that Western children
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can be soldiers too. Beier says, “It is worth noting too that confining our gaze to the
global South may constitute an act of inscription, marking some places and the people
there as somehow more prone to the militarization of childhood whilst absolving others
(those of the global North)” (3). Macmillan points out:
So tenacious is the link between race, geography, new wars and child soldiers that
it becomes inconceivable for Anglophone publics to imagine that child soldiers
might exist in other places, let alone under their own noses. Yet thousands of
Western children serve in their state militaries albeit mostly without experiencing
combat (Amnesty International 2001). (46-7)
Her observation about Western children serving in militaries cites a 2001 report by
Amnesty International that names the United Kingdom as the only European country
who still recruits soldiers as young as sixteen. Rosen notes that the United States military
also allows seventeen-year-olds to enlist with parental permission (Child Soldiers 135).
Both these examples make an interesting point about Western hypocrisy: condemning the
use of child soldiers as a particularly African problem, while failing to recognize that,
according to their own definition, they are technically users of child soldiers themselves.
As well, Rosen points to the irony of the increasing tendency in the West to treat children
as adults "fully responsible for the consequences of their actions" in criminal law
contexts while simultaneously "immunizing [child soldiers] from prosecution and
absolving them from criminal liability for war crimes" (Armies 136).
David Mastey notes that the success of child soldier narratives such as A Long
Way Gone initially seems like an anomaly, given that "US readers have not demonstrated
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any particular affinity for African writing" (144). However, like Mengestu, he attributes
the attraction to this genre to a kind of Afro-pessimism: "the continent, and by
association the lives of African children, are indelibly marked by misery in the minds of
most Americans" (149). He argues that the public reaction to the controversy around the
accuracy of Beah's memoir was much more sympathetic than that experienced by
disgraced memoirists such as James Frey or JT Leroy. He attributes a faith in the
memoir's "emotional truth" to the "certainty among many readers that the military
recruitment of children is widespread throughout Africa, despite evidence to the
contrary" (153). Indeed, he analyzes statistics from the Child Soldiers International
Global Report and the UN Secretary-General’s annual report Children and Armed
Conflict to show that" the military recruitment of children is a marginal practice in
Africa" (151) and actually declining, despite the media's tendency to use outdated figures
out of context. He concludes that "child soldier stories are treated as evidence of a
continent-wide epidemic that largely exists in the imaginations of its US audience" (143)
and thus, "every child soldier story contributes to Africanist discourse" (146).
Huggan's notion of the "post-colonial exotic," or "the global commodification of
cultural difference" (vii) is also helpful when we consider why this hunger for African
child soldier narratives exists. He says, “exoticism may be understood conventionally as
an aestheticising process through which the cultural other is translated, relayed back
through the familiar" (ix). The figure of the African child soldier in literary
representations is positioned as one that is utterly "other," yet recognizable at the same
time. To return for a moment to the idea of child soldier narratives being too "ordinary"
to interest African readers, Griswold profiles three Nigerian readers and asks their
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opinions on novels about village life: two find them interesting because they are
unfamiliar/exotic (one reader is a life-long city-dweller; the other is a cosmopolitan who
has lived abroad for much of her life), while one likes them for the opposite reason:
"because he comes from such a village" (91). This admittedly small sample raises the
question of whether readers read for novelty or to recognize themselves. Arguably, child
soldier narratives perform both functions for their largely Western audiences, by
presenting an "exotic" image of Africa and the life of a child soldier that most North
Americans can barely conceive of, while still offering a recognizable model of what
childhood should be.
Despite the fact that much of what we call "African literature" is not widely read
in Africa itself, both Larson and Griswold argue that African writers still think of
themselves as addressing their countrymen to a certain extent. Griswold talks about the
Nigerian writer's self-perception as a reformer of Nigerian society, "bearing witness" to
its problems (39). By contrast, most child soldier narrators, especially the memoirists, do
not seem to be speaking to their fellow Africans at all. Paratextual elements suggest that
these books are aimed at an audience that would be largely unfamiliar with the conflicts
these texts describe, and even the countries in which they are set. For instance, Beah,
Mehari, Missamou and Akallo's memoirs all contain maps. China Keitetsi helpfully
explains in her Foreword that the place she comes from, Uganda, is "in East Africa . . .
bordering Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo"
(ix). Beah's book gives a brief chronology of events in Sierra Leone, starting in 1462 and
ending with Charles Taylor's arrest in 2006. Mehari's book features an uncredited
(though ghostwriter Lukas Lessing has confirmed in an interview that he is the author)
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informative section titled "Child Soldiers" which gives various statistics, a brief history
of "Eritrea: a war-torn land" (258), and a somewhat off-topic rant against female
circumcision. We see similar explanations within the narratives themselves, as Mehari
identifies Mengistu Haile Mariam as "the Communist leader of Ethiopia" (3) and Beah
explains that Sierra Leone is a former British colony (14). Akallo's entire memoir is
structured as alternating between her personal experiences and historical background
about Uganda (as well as "spiritual insights") provided by co-writer Faith McDonnell. Of
all the child soldier narratives, the highly polemical Girl Soldier is perhaps the one most
obviously oriented towards an international audience. In the final chapter, “Making a
Difference,” McDonnell offers various tips for helping child soldiers and others affected
by the conflict in Northern Uganda, including donating money, doing aid/mission work
in the country, and writing to various politicians and ambassadors (she actually includes
the contact information for the U.S. president and the Ugandan embassy in D.C.,
suggesting a specifically American audience). Although Keitetsi does directly address
Ugandan president Y.K. Museveni at the end of Child Soldier, for the most part these
child soldier narratives clearly seem to be speaking to a Western audience in terms of
raising awareness and pushing for intervention.
Fictional child soldier narratives are somewhat less invested in imparting facts
and figures, but still seem directed squarely at a Western audience. Beasts of No Nation
may be set in an unspecified West African country, thus rendering maps and detailed
historical information irrelevant, but it still includes supplementary material at the back
where the author situates himself as Nigerian-American, describes "the Nigerian Igbo
language" (4) he spoke growing up (seemingly assuming his reader would be unfamiliar
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with it), and expressing his concern that he might "give the impression that Nigeria is a
land of violence and destruction" (12), presumably to people who would have little other
knowledge of the country. By contrast, Kourouma's Birahima explicitly says, "I want all
sorts of different people to read my bullshit: colonial toubabs [white people], Black
Nigger African Natives and anyone that can understand French" (Kourouma 3).
However, the ordering of these desired readers gives a sense of their priority. Moreover,
the lengthy explanations he provides on the history of Sierra Leone, Liberia and the
various warlords involved in the conflict suggest a foreign reader with only a hazy notion
of African history. Akin Adesokan suggests that all these "gory details of a series of
complicated wars . . . makes it all the easier to think of the novel as a deliberate attempt
to reproduce cultural prejudices for the titillation of foreign readers all too familiar with
negative images of life at the heart of 'African darkness'" (13).
Certain rhetorical features in the texts also suggest the influence of Western
publishers trying to appeal to a Western audience. For instance, Beah's tone in A Long
Way Gone is strangely detached, as he piles details about his experiences on each other
as if he were merely presenting a catalogue of salacious horrors of the kind his New York
friend might consider “cool.” The prologue of Beah's text suggests his audience:
My high school friends have begun to suspect I haven't told them the full story of
my life.
"Why did you leave Sierra Leone?"
"Because there is a war."
"Did you witness some of the fighting?"
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"Everyone in the country did."
"You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting each
other?"
"Yes, all the time,"
"Cool."
I smile a little.
"You should tell us about it sometime."
"Yes, sometime."
This prologue, titled "New York City, 1998," clearly takes place after Beah's
demobilization and escape to the United States. His high school friends are presumably
sheltered Americans whose daily life is far enough removed from the horrors of war that
they can think "people running around with guns and shooting each other" is "cool."
Beah's smile in response suggests he is amused by their naiveté. His promise to tell them
his story "sometime" is immediately followed by chapter one of his memoir proper. This
framing narrative sets up Beah's innocent, ignorant American classmates as his memoir's
implicit reader. The emphasis Beah gives to rap music in his narrative also perhaps
suggests an attempt to relate to a Western audience.
Both fiction and memoir translate African languages and cultural practices, which
suggests a Western audience. As Larson says in his discussion of Things Fall Apart,
anthropological explanations would be unnecessary for Igbo readers, "but Achebe must
have anticipated a certain amount of confusion among Western readers" (38). While none
of the African child soldier narratives feature glossaries like the one found in Things Fall
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Apart, they are sprinkled liberally with local cultural references and words in the child
soldier's native language as a kind of "validating strategy" (Skinner, "Modern" 130). In
the first paragraph of War Child after the Prologue, Jal says "I wanted a taste of the
tahnia hidden in a box beside me. The sugary paste made of sesame was my favorite to
eat with kisra bread" (3). The "unfamiliar" words are italicized, highlighting their
foreignness to the intended reader. When Ishmael Beah uses Mende words such as kamor
(8), nya nje (12), and nya keke (12), they are explained in the text as meaning "teacher,"
"my father" and "my mother" respectively. Again, attention is drawn to these words with
italics. In her discussion of modern slave narratives, one by a Haitian and one by a
Togolese woman, Sadie Skinner suggests that "By interweaving words from their
respective native languages, the testimonies are made to appear more 'authentic' thus
rendering them more appealing and 'palatable' to a predominantly Western market"
("Modern" 130). Going on to explain these words then avoids alienating this market. The
use of African languages thus becomes "ornamental" (Julien 677), a way to add "local
African color" (673) to texts that are not speaking to Africans themselves.
Of course, it is possible that some things are simply not translatable. Moreover,
translation need not only suggest a Western audience; readers in other parts of Africa
might also need Mende phrases or Sudanese customs explained. But as we have seen,
child soldier narratives are not particularly popular with African readers. Moreover,
many of the child soldier narrators are given to making broad claims about "Africa" more
generally. For example, Mehari claims "Above all, what matters in Africa is basic
survival -- where the next meal or drink of water is coming from, trying not to fall ill
because a visit to the doctor cannot be paid for" (230). This may be true to her own
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experiences in Eritrea, but it also fits neatly with "the trope of postcolonial Africa as a
site of humanitarian emergency, itself a residue of racist images of the 'dark continent'"
(Adesokan 13). As well, Skinner argues that this repetition of the phrase "in Africa" is
"indicative of the homogenising effects of publication in the West" as it ignores the
particularities of nation, region, ethnicity and culture and presents certain experiences or
cultural practices "as though common to all African nations" ("Modern" 128). The
attempt to appeal to a Western audience fosters a reliance on such stereotypes and
generalizations of Africa. Mastey argues that "works that are explicitly designed for
western readers are necessarily limited" and points out that "[c]hild soldier stories do not
contest, challenge or subvert dominant Africanist discourses in any meaningful way"
(156).
Of course, much of this could be said about African literature more generally, and
has. In her new book, The People's Right to the Novel, Coundouriotis argues that the
lesser-known African war novel is an introverted genre, addressing a domestic national
audience, as opposed to the canonical "extroverted" African novel described by Eileen
Julien, the authors of which are forever "glancing over their shoulders at their Western
readers" (Coundouriotis, People 16). Julien sees this extroversion as correlated with the
place of publication, the specific publishing house, and an "engagement with what is
assumed to be European or global discourses" (685). This seems to describe child soldier
narratives rather well, with their foreign pedigrees and engagement with human rights
discourse. Yet they would also seem to have an obvious kinship with the introverted
novel of war. Coundouriotis admits that recent African war fiction, including the child
soldier narrative, fits rather uneasily into these categories of extroverted and introverted.
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She acknowledges that it "addresses an international audience shaped by a humanitarian
ethos that sees Africa through the lens of 'distant suffering'" (People 220). Yet she still
sees the new war novel as drawing upon the introverted older war fiction, even though
especially the child soldier narratives "are often read as if they represent a new literary
phenomenon with no antecedent" (People 221).
We do see some discontinuities between the actual texts and how they are
packaged, which suggests certain liberties taken by publishers that perhaps ignore the
introverted tendencies of the child soldier narratives. For instance, the front cover of
Allah is not obliged starkly claims “Birahima is ten years old. He is a soldier…” even
though it is made quite clear in the text that Birahima does not know his real age: "I'm
maybe ten, maybe twelve (two years ago, grandmother said I was eight, maman said I
was ten)" (Kourouma 3). By choosing to represent Birahima as the younger of the two
possible ages, the publisher succeeds in making Birahima as child-like and vulnerable as
possible, a conception that does not really exist within the text, or as I have argued, the
broader culture. Sometimes, publishers go even further by jumping on the child soldier
bandwagon when the story does not even merit it. For instance, the paratextual material
from the publisher of In the Shadow of Freedom claims that "Born into the Congolese
wilderness, Tchicaya Missamou became a child soldier at age 11." Aside from the
problematic characterization of Brazzaville, the capital city of Republic of Congo and
Missamou's birthplace, as the "Congolese wilderness," the text itself reveals that what
happens when he is eleven is that he "began carrying a pistol to school" (48). This does
not make him a child soldier. The UNICEF definition of "child soldier" specifically
states that it does not only apply to children who carry arms, and Missamou is not part of
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any “regular or irregular armed force in any capacity” at this point. A gun does not
necessarily make a child into a soldier. A North American child who brings a firearm to
school is not automatically a child soldier by virtue of carrying this weapon. It is at age
fourteen that Missamou is recruited into a militia to operate checkpoints (although he
continues to attend school during the day); he enters military school at age sixteen. This
oversight points to either lazy reading on the part of the publisher, or an attempt to
"hierarchize vulnerability" (Härting 72) by making Missamou indisputably a child rather
than a young teenager, even though he is under 18 and qualifies as a child soldier
regardless. However, Missamou gives a lengthy description of his initiation as a man and
a warrior at age eleven, so from his perspective, he is no longer a child when he first
enters the militia. The term "child soldier" actually only appears once in the narrative
proper, only indirectly applying to Missamou himself. He says, “We were feared, even
by our own people. Some of the child soldiers had been taken from their parents and fed
a constant diet of alcohol and marijuana, until they were nearly unrecognizable” (84).
The use of the first person plural in the first sentence grammatically implies that he is
included among them. However, Missamou himself had not been forcibly taken from his
parents (his father was away at his hotel at the time he was approached by the militia, and
probably would have approved anyways, being a military man himself). He also makes it
clear that he does not drink alcohol, so he is clearly not among these particular “child
soldiers.” These discrepancies between the texts themselves and how they are packaged
by their Western publishers speaks to what Huggan calls “the gap between exoticist
elements in African writings and the perceived exoticism of African writing as it is
marketed and distributed for Western audiences” (x-xi).
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These discontinuities are only part of the problematic packaging of child soldier
narratives. Jessica Roberts notes that the cover of Beah's A Long Way Gone is drawn
from documentary photography, representing an unidentified African child soldier
wearing battered flip-flops and shorts rather than a uniform, looking downcast and
burdened by his weapon rather than threatening. The back cover, by contrast, features a
photo of the author smiling and looking confident, rendering the Other sympathetic and
less radically different. Ultimately, this accurately represents the text between the covers,
where the child soldier Ishmael is presented as an innocent victim who is rehabilitated
and becomes a successful advocate for other children affected by war. However, it
becomes a variation of the "acacia tree sunset treatment" that Simon Stern identifies in
his striking collage of covers for wildly varying African novels. As Elliot Ross points out
in his cleverly-titled post, "The Dangers of a Single Book Cover," for the blog Africa is a
country, "the covers of most novels 'about Africa' seem to have been designed by
someone whose principal idea of the continent comes from The Lion King." Similarly,
Huggan notes, "the blatantly exoticist packaging of AWS [African Writers Series] titles,
particularly their covers . . . arguably betray a preoccupation with the iconic
representation of an 'authentic Africa' for a largely foreign readership" (53).40
Likewise,
the covers of most child soldier narratives rely on tired stereotypes and clichés meant to
40 Huggan is primarily referring to early titles in the series, "several of which feature emblematic images
and designs and, in black and white on the back cover, a crudely amateurish photograph of the author for
what appears to be ethnic identification purposes" (53). By the 1970s, James Currey was looking for "a
more contemporary style using photographs" (xxviii) for the covers and hired George Hallett to create
striking images, such as the hand-cuffed man hung upside down for D.M. Zwelonke's novel Robben Island
or the female corpse with a silver coin over her eye being watched over by a viper for I.N.C. Aniebo's short
story collection Wives, Talismans and the Dead. Hallett also reveals that, like Huggan, he was "invariably
disappointed with the passport photographs that authors sent to put on the back covers of their books"
(Currey xxix) and so began taking proper author portraits for later books in the series.
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appeal to readers predominantly based in the global North. As such, their publishers
"participate in the marketing, sale and consumption of an ‘Africa’ that in truth does not
exist" (Mastey 157).
However, writing about child soldiers is not only a cynical attempt to cash in on a
popular mode: it can also be true to an author's experience. In her discussion of criticism
of the Caine Prize as trafficking in "the familiar genre of Africa-poverty-pornography"
(Bady), prize administrator Lizzy Attree quotes Beatrice Lamwaka, whose story about a
returned child soldier, "Butterfly Dreams," was nominated for the 2011 Caine Prize,
saying "I am from Northern Uganda, child soldiers are a reality there. That is what I
know" (Attree 44). The danger, of course, is of child soldiers becoming the "single story"
of Africa, to use Adichie's famous formulation. As she says in her TED talk, "The single
story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but
that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story." Thus, while Jal's
observation that Africans are not interested in his story because they all have the same
story may be true on one level, it is still important to contest the generalization that
Africa is overrun with child soldiers.
It is equally important to clarify that African writers are hardly the helpless pawns
of Western publishers insistent on portraying a certain image of child soldiers and/or
Africa. According to Huggan, “it would be unwise to conclude . . . that African literature
and the Western literary/critical industry are necessarily at loggerheads; that Western
publishers and critics inevitably misrepresent Africa, and that Western readers are
automatically complicit in such misrepresentations” (55). Rather than asking how
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African writers are manipulated by their Western publishers, a better question might be
"in what ways do both writers and their represented selves negotiate the constraints and
demands of writing for a Western publishing house?" (Skinner, "Modern" 126). It is
important to remember that African writers, including writers of child soldier narratives,
"are not only subject to, but also actively manipulate, exoticist codes of cultural
representation in their work" (Huggan 19-20). Mackey argues that “despite their
collusion with humanitarian rights regimes and patterns of literary consumption, these
texts exhibit narrative strategies that challenge complacent readings in indirect ways”
("Apparitions" 193). As an example, she cites the way the child soldier narratives present
less than ideal visions of life in the West after demobilizing and the way they critique
"the false promise of universality in discourses of human rights and development"
("Apparitions" 177). Coundouriotis singles out Johnny Mad Dog and Allah is not obliged
as "refus[ing] the pedagogic and didactic agenda of human rights fiction" ("Child" 194).
She points to the texts' cynicism about humanitarianism and avoidance of a recovery
narrative.
Laura T. Murphy has argued that narratives such as Girl Soldier refuse the
voyeurism of humanitarian reading practices by turning allusive at moments of bodily
violence, such as rape. She cites Akallo's description of being "distributed" to a much
older commander after her kidnapping by the LRA: "He seized me and forced me to bed.
I felt like a thorn was in my skin as my innocence was destroyed" (Akallo 110). Murphy
says the use of such euphemism and omission allows narrators to control how they are
seen and read, renouncing the spectacularization of the survivor body demanded by
human rights discourse as an authenticating device. Instead, she argues, the
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writer/narrators turn to paratextual authority such as maps, introductions, etc, which she
reads as a strategy of displacement rather than a concession to Western audiences. We
can also see this dynamic in other child soldier narratives, especially the ones by girls.
China Keitetsi only refers elliptically to her “abuse” (190) by Kashilingi, her superior in
the National Resistance Army and the Minister of Records: “Whenever I cried and told
him that it was painful, he would say: ‘I will do it slowly’” (190). The sexual nature of
this abuse seems clear; however, she only refers to “it.” Keitetsi is even more oblique
and cryptic when she says “It became worse, when Kashilingi started taking me to a
nearby clinic called ‘Kicement’. There is so many things which happened to me, and
what I saw that I cannot really tell about” (190). She does not elaborate on what
happened to her in the clinic, leaving the reader to imagine abortions or treatment for
sexually transmitted infections. She is also conscious of her struggle and ultimate
inability to articulate these particular experiences. As Senait Mehari says, “It was taboo
to talk about sex or rape. Girls fell pregnant all the time, but everyone behaved as if the
pregnancies were not happening” (124). Mehari herself struggles with the memories of
her own sexual abuse, which she says, “I cannot speak of neutrally or think about
objectively to this day” (244). These memories "hover about the edges of the text,
obliquely haunting her narrative" (Mackey, "Apparitions" 218). She describes one attack
where another boy in her unit "grabbed me one day, half-strangled me, tore at my
clothing and thrust himself inside me” (125); however, she later refers to "the rapes I had
had to endure before" (193), plural, suggesting there were others that she could not bring
herself to represent. Rather than interpreting such veiled references and silences as a
response to trauma, Murphy makes a persuasive case that we should read them as
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moment of resistance and even empowerment, saying these narrators "reserve the right
not to write their bodies into the narrative. They remove the captor’s power over their
bodies by not showing what was done to them" ("New" 398).
Even if we read such moments as resistance to the hegemony practiced by
Western publishing companies, that does not change the fact that child soldier narratives
remain almost exclusively an African genre. Scholars have pointed to a few non-African
examples. Barbara Harlow compares Ishmael Beah to Mansur, the 17-year-old
protagonist in a number of stories in Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani's 1973 collection Of
Men and Guns (198). Sonja Stojanovic discussed the protagonist of Israeli writer David
Grossman's Holocaust novel See Under: Love (1989) as a child soldier and compared
him to Dongala's titular Johnny Mad Dog. David Rosen points out that a number of
classic texts, including Johnny Tremain and Les Misérables are technically child soldier
narratives ("Literature"). He also treats Jewish child fighters in World War II, including
Havka Folman Raban and Haim Galeen, as child soldiers, and their memoirs (They Are
Still With Me and An Eye Looks to Zion: The Story of a Jewish Partisan, respectively) as
child soldier narratives (Armies 21). However, if we exclude texts that have only
retroactively been treated as child soldier narratives, then the pool narrows considerably,
to only a single text by my count: Tamil Tigress (2011) by Niromi de Soyza, a memoir of
the author's experiences fighting for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a
teenager. Crucially (and unlike the previous examples), this memoir is actually marketed
as a child soldier narrative: it is subtitled “My story as a child soldier in Sri Lanka’s
bloody civil war." Similar to most of the African child soldier narratives, the front cover
of the 2012 paperback edition features a picture of a child in a military uniform with a
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gun (although the face is out-of-focus and age is difficult to determine). Interestingly,
this edition is now out-of-print and the new 2013 cover is much more generic, of the type
seen on innumerable books by South Asian writers, as pointed out by Sinthujan
Varatharajah in his collage of "South Asia Book Cover Themes in Europe" (itself
inspired by Simon Stevens' collage featured on Africa is a country): the legs of a barefoot
girl in a colourful sari wearing several anklets and toe rings against a vibrant turquoise
background. This change could perhaps suggest a certain reluctance to conceive of the
child soldier figure as non-African, despite the long history of child soldiers being used
in Sri Lanka's civil war.
This theory is strengthened by the many important ways in which Tamil Tigress
differs from most African child soldier narratives. For one thing, Niromi is immediately
attracted to the Tamil cause, longing to join the Tigers and fight injustice from a young
age. She describes herself as "infatuated" (de Soyza 48) with the Tigers, and even after
they arrest, beat and eventually kill her uncle, who belongs to a rival organization, she
convinces herself that "for the greater good of a unified fight for Tamil Eelam, some
sacrifices had to be made and some mistakes overlooked" (59). She continues to
demonstrate political awareness and devotion to the cause, calling a friend who is
emigrating to Canada a "deserter" (47) and even publishing some of her poetry in pro-
LTTE magazines. When she chooses to join the Tigers with her friend Ajanthi, it is very
emphatically an informed decision based on commitment to their ideology rather than
self-preservation, prestige, or any of the myriad reasons discussed (and dismissed) as
reasons for child soldiers choosing to join armed groups. The following passage
illustrates how she comes to her decision:
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I decided that I did not want to live in fear any longer. Being helpless and
vulnerable was the worst feeling of all. The only way to take control of the
situation was to fight this government. I would rather be brave, even if it meant
living only one day. In the morning, I would go over to the SOLT [Students
Organisation of Liberation Tigers] office and ask [SOLT head] Muralie to enlist
me for military training, improper or not. If anyone was to be blamed for my
decision, it should be the government. They were only creating more militants
out of the innocent by their random violence against all of us in Jaffna. (65)
In the note she leaves for her mother, she speaks of her "duty" and says "Amma, please
don't pursue me because I choose to leave" (de Soyza 72, emphasis mine). This type of
political motivation is not really seen in any of the African child soldier narratives. China
Keitetsi is one of the few child soldiers who chooses to join, to get away from her
abusive family situation, but one could argue (and many critics have) that this is no real
choice at all. The choices of children to join because of poverty, security, etc. are also
dismissed, but as we have seen in earlier chapters, these motivating factors are not really
specific to children: adults join armed groups for similar reasons. Jal's reasons for joining
come closest to Niromi's because he is invested in self-determination for South Sudan,
but as discussed in chapter 3, his motivation is primarily personal revenge and racism,
perhaps because of his young age. Niromi's idealism is probably closest to the Soweto
students, and maybe even more so the Zimbabwean soldiers (given their almost
unanimous disillusionment). Yet in an interview, de Soyza presents a somewhat different
story:
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During her interview the author, when asked why she joined the Tigers – a
terrorist group –said she had no alternative as she would have been killed anyway
by the bombardment and shelling that went on around her. The only option she
had was to take up arms and fight. She hastened to add that the Tigers did not
conscript her and had, in fact, discouraged her from joining, telling her to go back
to school. (Abeyratne, italics mine).
This language -- "no alternative" and "only option" -- echoes that used by Beah and
Kourouma when describing how children become soldiers, and contradicts Niromi's own
self-portrayal in her memoir. This discrepancy illuminates an interesting tension between
the former child soldier as character/narrator versus writer/public figure. However, she
does offers as a caveat the fact that the Tigers actively discouraged her from joining,
which is represented in the text. Moreover, this language is not a direct quote, but a
paraphrase of what was said in the interview and thus its accuracy in terms of the
representation of her word choice is debatable.
The Tigers are very careful to test Niromi's devotion and make her face her
family so they know she is not being held against her will. To Niromi and Ajanthi's great
embarrassment, their fathers complain to the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) that
their daughters were kidnapped by the Tigers. Tiger leader Prabhakaran says, "'The
visiting international media got hold of the story and went public with it. It's unfairly
given us a bad name. You know that none of you are held here against your will?'" (126).
Indeed, the Tamil Tigers were often accused of kidnapping underage recruits. Wessells
uses the example of a girl forcibly taken by the LTTE as an example of child soldiers as
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victims of abduction. He also says, "The LTTE has developed the exploitation of
children into an art. The LTTE took children from orphanages at an early age,
indoctrinated and trained them, and subsequently used them to make some of the most
dangerous assaults" (37). He says the LTTE have enforced quotas, demanding each
family hand over a child (42). These types of policies are not portrayed in the memoir,
where not even the boys Niromi encountered at the watch-posts seem to have been
kidnapped, despite their disillusionment with the Tigers (96-97). While she is home,
Niromi is frustrated by relatives who think she has been "brainwashed" (170). She says,
"This was exasperating. Why did everyone think that we had to be brainwashed in order
to be members of a movement? Why wouldn't they give us credit for our actions? We
were not stupid; we understood exactly what the issues were" (170).
This lack of respect for her motives can be at least partially attributed to her sex.
De Soyza is very aware of gender in this text and critiques the treatment of women in her
culture. As a young girl, Niromi chafes against gender expectations. She is "incensed"
(24) when her relatives accuse of her of inappropriate relations with a boy simply
because she smiled at him. She explains that "Jaffna Tamil culture did not tolerate
romantic relationships . . . and the whole town kept a close eye on our everyday
behaviour in public. Even a split-second sideways glance at a boy passing on a bicycle
was enough to have us reported to our school or family" (23). She notes, "The same
social codes applied to boys as well, but it did little to stop them from pursuing the girls
relentlessly. It was our responsibility as girls to uphold our virtues" (23-24). Such double
standards echo some of the concerns in the African girl soldier narratives. Senait Mehari
notes:
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Only men were allowed to slaughter animals in Eritrea. Women were considered
impure – and no one would have eaten meat from an animal slaughtered by a
woman. But women were allowed to do everything else after the slaughter:
plucking, washing, gutting, skinning, butchering and cooking. I sometimes
thought that men had apportioned things this way to suit themselves: they spent
thirty seconds slaughtering the chicken while the women spent three hours doing
everything else. (27)
The rationale for this custom is the reverse of the dynamic of purity/impurity that puts
the onus on the Tamil woman to maintain her chastity, but the effect is the same. Again,
the woman has all the responsibility, while the social code conveniently benefits the man.
Like Niromi, Senait does not meekly conform to these conventions. As she says, "giving
in was not one of my strengths" (Mehari 49).
Although Niromi is immediately attracted to the Tamil Tigers' cause, she knows
that there is no place (yet) for a female in their military wing. She notes, "Female
university students were becoming part of the political movement, but they were not
enlisted to be combatants" (36). Part of the rationale is the fear that the presence of
women in their ranks would tempt and distract the men. As one of her friends who has a
relative in the LTTE explains, "'The Tigers don't believe that women can fight alongside
the men because it will be like placing a spark of fire next to cotton wool'" (51). Some of
the other Tamil militant groups do admit female combatants, but these women are seen
as "loose" (51) and Niromi cannot bring herself to join them and "become the laughing
stock of my friends" (51-52), who will not even join the student wing, citing family and
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reputation as their reasons. According to one of these friends, "'It's not proper for middle-
class girls like us to join militant movements . . . Why do you want to ruin your
reputation, Niromi?'" (63). So Niromi has to content herself with joining anti-government
marches, writing poetry for pro-Tiger publications, and watching the young men who
have joined the Tigers "with envy" (36). But she chafes at this inequality, observing that
"men in our society had all the advantages and far less accountability" (35). Not only did
they have more freedom of movement, fewer restrictions on their behaviour, and fewer
responsibilities when it comes to housework, but "they could simply run away from
home and become militants, saviours of the Tamils" (36). She complains, "It didn't seem
fair to me that, once again, women were denied equality when they were just as capable"
(36). However, she remains hopeful that the Tigers will eventually see the light: "The
militants had already introduced much social reform among the Tamils in the north and
east -- they were doing away with caste, religion and other social hierarchies. In time
surely they'd recognise that the role of women in combat was inevitable" (61). So she is
excited when a picture of "a female Tiger in full combat gear" (62) appears in an official
Tiger publication, taking it as a sign that the LTTE is now recruiting women.
Niromi initially sees the Tigers' willingness to let women join their military wing
as progressive change. Indeed, according to Singer, the Tigers did attempt to frame their
decision in that light: "The LTTE makes the startling claim that recruiting Tamil girls is
its way of 'assisting women's liberation and counteracting the oppressive traditionalism
of the present system'" (32-33). This claim is "startling" because activists don't typically
expect to find themselves on the same side of a human rights issues as the Tamil Tigers.
Maguire notes that girl soldiers in the LTTE who return to their families are often
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married off in short order, "mainly to ensure re-entry into the social role ascribed for
young women in order to ensure control over girls who in the military had learned
different and less subservient attitudes" (246). Indeed, Niromi says her male comrades
"treated us with respect and courtesy and never once crossed the line, either verbally or
physically," and even "willingly took on the traditional female roles of cooking and
cleaning," although she notes, "now and then one of them would make a remark that
would betray their attitude" (188). China Keitetsi also observes a certain sense of pride
on the part of the older female soldiers for having achieved equality as combatants: "for
the first time on Ugandan soil, women were armed, and walked proudly as any man"
(Keitetsi 138). Equality between the genders is also the official doctrine in the Eritrean
Liberation Front, unlike in the rest of the country: "Boy or girl, we were all treated as
equals in the unit, and we had the same rights" (Mehari 123). However, over time, the
girl soldiers all come to realize that such claims are just lip service. Mehari notes,
"despite what we were taught, it was constantly made clear to me that girls were worth
less than boys" (123). De Soyza recalls the LTTE leader Prabhakaran saying "women
were the future of the organisation," but it is because he sees them as "more dedicated
and willing to please," traditionally feminine attributes (de Soyza 188). The claim that
the Tigers are encouraging women's liberation is an illusion. De Soyza says,
We had begun a social change by breaking out of the self-limiting attitude of, and
towards, females, and removing the stigma associated with women in combat,
hoping to elevate the status of women in the conservative Tamil society and
empower them. Little had I realised then that following the lead of a totalitarian
male and volunteering to become suicide bombers was not women's liberation.
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There is no doubting that these women were brave and heroic, but they served a
master, never achieved equal status to or the recognition of their male
counterparts, and had marriages arranged by Prabhakaran himself." (300)
Her epiphany parallels Mehari's realization. Although Mehari is initially impressed by
the female leaders she observes in the ELF, “It was only later that I realised that the
women were only middle-ranking leaders and that men were in ultimate command, just
as they were in the village. Among the top commanders there was only one woman”
(Mehari 55). Moreover, "if women were given positions of responsibility it was mostly to
do with looking after the children" (79). In both cases, the women were allowed to serve,
but are still subordinate to men.
Niromi assumes that gender is the main obstacle to her joining the struggle. Yet
when she tries to enlist, her sex is barely mentioned. Muli Shankar says, "'You are a
child!" even though he is barely five years older (62). Muralie tells Niromi and her friend
Ajanthi that they are too young, saying, "'Look, children, this is a serious matter. You
need to finish school . . ." (68). Thileepan also asks how old they are and says they are
too young (69). Gender only comes up when Thileepan says he doubts their abilities to
cope with the hardships of life as a militant because they are "middle-class girls" (70).
Even here, the emphasis is more on their class than their sex, as Thileepan continues,
"You'll have to do regular chores, like cooking and cleaning . . . There'll be none of the
comforts you're used to" (70). Such chores are already generally associated with women,
but because of her class, Niromi is presumed to have been exempt. Yet Niromi notes that
some of the boys recruited by the Tigers are far younger than her, being "merely
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children, no older than fifteen or sixteen, and some as young as nine or ten" (95). She
writes, "I wondered why Muli Shankar, Muralie and then Thileepan had been calling us
young -- these boys were far younger than us. Perhaps our age was not the real issue and
they actually thought us 'sheltered' or naive" (95). We also see how age becomes a
convenient cover for other motives when Niromi meets with Prabhakaran. She wants to
talk to him about Roshan, the young Tiger who has been flirting with her, but he cuts her
off: "'You're too young to think about boys,' interrupted Prabhakaran. 'At your age, your
only focus should be fighting for Tamil Eelam and that's all you should think about'"
(115). Unlike Muralie and Thileepan, he does not think she is too young to fight, but that
she is too young for any romantic relationships. Of course, as leader of the Tigers,
Prabhakaran has a vested interest in keeping all of his followers focused solely on the
LTTE cause, regardless of age or gender. He "did not tolerate secrets and, in particular,
romantic relationships among his followers. He reserved the ultimate decision on who
married who" (115). However, given the double standards of the culture when it comes
to relationships between boys and girls that she has already described, it seems fair to
assume that as a woman, Niromi's sexuality is going to be policed more stringently than a
man's would be. When reports come that some young soldiers have not been behaving
"in an appropriate manner" (276) with the opposite sex, Prabhakaran's deputy Mahathaya
names and shames the three girls involved. Niromi "wondered if the boys involved had
received the same lecture" (276). One might wonder the same about Prabhakaran's
advice to Niromi. However, while the girls who behaved inappropriately are discharged
or given dangerous missions as punishment, one of the boys is sentenced to death. For
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the crime of falling in love with Nora, eighteen year-old Shanthan is shot point blank to
make a statement about the discipline of the organization (278).
Age is a rather flexible concept throughout the text. As in the Soweto novels,
Niromi and her unit are often referred to as "children" even though they are mostly older
teenagers and young adults. Niromi and Ajanthi are seventeen when they join (75). Their
comrades are roughly the same age: Kaanchana at nineteen (120) is older than Akila,
who seems to be about sixteen based on the fact that she is twenty-four when she dies in
1995 (300). Student leader Muralie is eight years old than his 18-year-old assistant
(141), making him approximately twenty-six, the same age as Thileepan, head of the
political wing (117, 143). Niromi's love interest Roshan is probably twenty-three based
on the fact that he's twenty-seven in 1991 (301). Yet they are consistently referred to as
children by Prabhakaran (160, 167, 168), deputy commander Mahathaya (172, 254) and
villagers (201, 215, 238, 240). Of course, all of these people would be older than them
regardless, so perhaps it is not really remarkable. As in many African communities, age
is a relative social concept rather than an absolute biological category. As de Soyza
notes, "The conservative Tamil and Sinhala cultures demanded that the young respect
and obey the old, even if the 'old' was older only by a year " (38). Moreover, there do
seem to be some younger children among them at various times: ten-year-old Anton is
"the youngest boy in our company" (105).
As for Niromi herself, she does not seem to think of herself or her fellow soldiers
as children. She quotes speech from others who refer to them as children, but does not
typically use this terminology to refer to her comrades. For example, she calls Ananthan,
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who is just a teenager (265) a man, albeit a "baby-faced" one (264). However, when
Niromi sees a fourteen-year-old girl among the other Freedom Birds, she is scandalized,
asking, "What's that child doing here?" The girl is the same age as her young sister.
However, she does express some impatience with the way young people are treated in Sri
Lanka. As a young girl, her grandmother censored all her letters, "as dictated by our
culture, where children had no identity of their own and were a commodity of their carer"
(18). When she leaves training to visit her family during a ceasefire, her parents cut the
young soldier's hair against her wishes, and she notes, "As far as my family and society
in general were concerned, I was still a child, at seventeen, with little control over even
personal choices" (138). As previously discussed, she is also exasperated by relatives
who deny their agency in their involvement with the Tigers: "'You children have been
thoroughly brainwashed,' sighed Uncle Jerome. 'They've also taught you to speak
disrespectfully to elders'" (170). While she does not specifically spell out that their
motives are dismissed because of their age, it is implied by Uncle Jerome's use of the
term "You children." This infantilization comes from her own community rather than
from outsiders as it does in many of the African child soldier narratives. Again, Niromi's
narrative is closer to the Soweto novels, where the soldiers are chronologically older, but
often called "children" by their community.
Niromi's exact age, however, has been the source of some controversy. In a piece
for the newspaper Sri Lankan Guardian, Judy Mariampillai accuses de Soyza of making
the "[f]alse claim" of being child soldier as part of the "deceptive marketing" of her
memoir. At the beginning of the book, de Soyza states "It was two days before Christmas
1987 and I was seventeen years old" (1). This would suggest she was born in 1970. Her
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birthday is in mid-June (103). Yet she elsewhere says she is eight years old (6) in
December 1977 (9) when she moves to Jaffna, and that she and Ajanthi are sixteen (47)
when they write their O-levels, late in 1985, which would seem to make them born in
1969. They join the Tigers in May 1987 (65), at which time she says they are seventeen
(75). If she actually was born in 1969, as she states in a 2009 autobiographical piece in
the Telegraph and as Mariampillai claims she has acknowledged in "many interviews",
then in fact she would have been eighteen and a half in December 1987. However, when
she joined in May 1987, she would have still been seventeen and therefore technically a
child soldier for the next month or so -- "technically" being the key word here. The
attempt to frame the story of a young woman's experiences fighting with the LTTE as a
child soldier narrative strikes some as a cynical attempt to capitalize on a newly popular
form. In a piece in the Sunday Times, Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan cites critics who think
the "the book was 'manufactured' with an eye to the commercial profit that
sensationalism (title: Tamil Tigress; subtitle: “child soldier”, “Sri Lanka’s bloody civil
war”) garners." As reviewer Anthony Smith notes, seventeen-year-old middle-class
Niromi is perhaps "not the 'child' one conjures up from the title" (25).
Niromi's age is not the only source of controversy in Tamil Tigress. Like Ishmael
Beah and Senait Mehari, de Soyza has faced multiple accusations of lying in her memoir.
In another piece in the Guardian, Arun Ambalavanar, a Tamil poet and reviewer now
based in Australia, catalogues all of her alleged errors and lies: she mentions an
engineering faculty at the University of Jaffna that does not exist, describes the scent of
palmyrah in December when this fruit is only in season in the summer months, and
includes a picture of her family in front of their brick house in Jaffna when Ambalavanar
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claims that building material is virtually unknown in the area. From these and similar
errors, he concludes that "the author is a foreigner to the subject the Tamil Tigers [sic]
and the landscape." He is also skeptical of her representation of Prabhakaran and certain
events that deviate from known LTTE policy. Michael Roberts, a Sri Lankan-Australian
academic and anthropologist, refutes her representation of Sri Lankan government forces
as the enemy in December 1987 when it would have been the Indian Peace Keeping
Force at this time and place. He says, "Such profound ignorance suggests that she was
not in Sri Lanka then and that her tale is a fabrication fashioned without adequate
homework." He also suggests this error signifies a particular political agenda that aligns
her with Tiger apologists and a Western media that he sees as being overly sympathetic
to their cause. He says, "The alleged autobiography was finalized in 2010/11 in a context
where the Western media has targeted Sri Lanka as an Ogre guilty of war crimes. To
place Indian troops behind the guns that threatened her platoon would tarnish her goals."
He continues, "These goals include an explicit desire to show Australians that the boat
people who had begun to arrive off the coast of their continent were not economic
refugees, but worthy asylum seekers fleeing persecution . . . To complicate this
propaganda pitch by placing the IPKF in the first chapter would spoil her intent."
Both Roberts and Ambalavanar have called for de Soyza to reveal her true
identity (Niromi de Soyza being a pseudonym adopted, as she tells interviewer Shanika
Sriyananda, to honour murdered journalist Richard de Soyza), so that her story can be
fact-checked and corroborated. It is important to note, however, that many of these
attacks on de Soyza's narrative and character have a certain partisan flavour. Accusations
that de Soyza is an apologist for the LTTE also seem to contradict Sarvan's argument that
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she presents herself as a child soldier to appeal to Western readers, as suggesting that the
Tigers use child soldiers connotes exploitation. As for de Soyza's response, when asked
about the allegations in an interview, she responds, "Many have dispelled these myths. I
trust in the intelligence of the readers - to read the book with an open mind without
agendas and to listen to my many interviews and make up their own mind" (Sriyananda).
I have already discussed how the LTTE actively discouraged Niromi from
joining, unlike any of the organizations that use child soldiers in African narratives. Also
interesting is how she leaves the Tigers. While most of the child soldiers in these
narratives escape or are rescued, Niromi is permitted to resign, the Tigers always making
it very clear that she is free to go whenever she wants. However, Niromi does not tell her
commander the real reason she is resigning. Her memoir details her growing
disillusionment with Tiger tactics and she eventually has a crisis of conscience about the
Tigers' reliance on violence and blind loyalty, and makes the decision to leave. However,
she "lacked the courage" (287) to discuss her concerns with deputy Tiger leader
Mahathaya and instead asks him in a roundabout manner how he justifies the torture and
killing of Vellai, a boy in their unit suspected of being an informer, whose murder greatly
disturbed her. When she tells Sengamalam that she wants to leave, all she says is "I can't
cope any more, physically and emotionally. I am so tired. I just need to get away from
here" (290). She casts her decision in terms of the hardships she has had to endure as a
militant rather than disagreement with their fundamental values. While she earlier spoke
of her exhaustion and depression after losing so many friends (252), she makes clear her
real reasons for leaving in the sections immediately leading up to her conversation with
Sengamalam. Sengamalam confirms that he believes her excuse when he says, "I always
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knew you weren't really cut out for this way of life, and the deaths of Ajanthi and
Muralie have been hard on you. I'm surprised you lasted this long" (290). Her reluctance
to confess the real reasons for her resignation suggest that the Tigers are perhaps not as
willing to release their recruits as they proclaim to be. It would take a lot of courage to
criticize her superiors to their faces, though, and perhaps get her branded as a traitor.
Another caveat is that Niromi seems to be getting special treatment. When other girls try
to resign too, Sengamalam "wouldn't take them seriously" (292). Niromi writes, "I
realised that my timing was absolutely fortuitous. The fact that Sengamalam had fought
alongside me since the war resumed, and had witnessed the death of my friends, worked
in my favour" (292). These are two different issues. Her timing is good probably because
she asked him first. Her relationship with Sengamalam, who knows her and what she has
been through, also makes him more sympathetic to her desire to leave. Unspoken here,
but hinted elsewhere is also her status as a middle-class girl that nobody expected to
withstand the life of a militant. The other Tigresses are mostly rural girls who are
presumed to be used this kind of hardship. Regardless, unlike the child soldier narratives,
there is no rescue narrative here. Niromi finds a way to extricate herself from the armed
group that does not involve desertion or rehabilitation.
Niromi's ideological commitment to the LTTE cause, the individual agency that
she exercises to join and then leave the Tigers, and the infantilization that seems to
originate in her own community rather than with outsiders imposing their own foreign
notions of childhood all suggest that, despite its marketing as such, Tamil Tigress does
not really fit into the genre of child soldier narratives with their recovery narratives and
representation of innocent, victimized children forced or brainwashed into fighting. Its
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outlier status can be at least partially attributed to the assumption that child soldier
narratives are an African genre and many of their tropes -- the representation of war as
savage and meaningless, the treatment of young people considered adults in their own
community as children, the necessity of humanitarian intervention and rehabilitation --
are associated specifically with Africa. Child soldier narratives are thus an African genre
as a result of being a Western genre; that is to say, the demand for stories of African
children fighting wars -- a demand that is mainly located in the global North, stories of
child soldiers generally being of little interest in African contexts -- means the child
soldier narrative is an African genre as imagined by Western readers.
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Conclusion
In the years since I started this project, the child soldier narrative has solidified as a term
and a (sub)genre, as more and more critical work has been done on the topic. Recent
interventions include David M. Rosen's latest book Child Soldiers in the Western
Imagination (2015), David Mastey's 2015 article in interventions, and Brenna Munro's
essay on the child soldier as a queer figure in the summer 2016 issue of Research in
African Literatures. Maureen Moynagh and Joya Uraizee also have forthcoming books
on child soldier narratives. However, scholars such as Joseph McLaren suggest that the
heyday of the child soldier narrative as primary text may be past. Aaron Bady goes so far
as to say, "We are probably done with the child-soldier novel" and "those who follow
African literature seriously have moved on" ("The Last Child Soldier"). The latter claim
is belied by the critical works listed above, but the former is more persuasive. Following
the flurry of memoirs and novels that appeared in the first decade of the twenty-first
century, there have been few texts since that have caught the public's imagination. Some
have suggested that this is due to the end of many of the African wars that made use of
child soldiers: the Sierra Leone Civil War ended in 2002, the Second Liberian Civil War
in 2003, and the Second Sudanese Civil War officially in 2005, although civil war
continues in South Sudan since it gained independence in 2011. Yet a number of long-
gestating film projects have recently seen the light of day, suggesting that there is
continuing interest in this subject.
Canadian director and screenwriter Kim Nguyen spent ten years working on the
script for his 2012 movie Rebelle, or War Witch (Nguyen, Loranger), which went on to
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win numerous honours at the 2013 Canadian Screen Awards and Jutra Awards including
Best Picture, an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012,
and Best Actress Awards for his lead Rachel Mwanza at the Berlin and Tribeca Film
Festivals (Fontaine & McIntosh). American filmmaker Cary Joji Fukunaga also spent a
decade working on a script about child soldiers, even travelling to Sierra Leone in 2003
for research, before deciding to adapt Iweala's Beasts of No Nation (Collin, Swinson).
The film, which premiered at the 2015 Venice Film Festival and was the first feature-
length film produced by Netflix (McLaren), received "rapturous praise" (Tsika) from
critics and a SAG award for supporting actor Idris Elba. Yet Bady predicts that
Fukunaga's film "will be the last version of this story we will see . . . For better or for
worse, the political moment has passed" ("The Last Child Soldier). He continues:
Fukunaga’s Beasts is ultimately a story of disillusionment and depression,
because the ending has come to seem inevitable. The genre has shown us how
these stories always end, and this one does as well: after the escape from trauma,
recovery begins with narration, with telling the story. But the story is already
told. ("The Last Child Soldier")
Indeed, both of these films present the fairly standard image of the child soldier, one
which I have already detailed over the course of this dissertation. Julie MacArthur notes
how "predictably" Fukunaga's film begins, and Noah Tsika calls its take on the child
soldier issue "[f]ar from fresh" and "a familiar Western fantasy." Both criticize the film
for contributing to stereotypes of a monolithic "Africa" as a place of violence and
savagery. However, Fukunaga is perhaps unfairly blamed for some issues that actually
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originated with his source material: for instance, the unspecified41
West African setting
and redemptive Hollywood ending that the authors critique actually come straight from
Iweala's novel. That being said, Fukunaga really only uses the novel as a jumping-off
point rather than adapting it for the screen, as the film differs drastically from the book.
Some of the changes he makes -- such as representing Agu's parents as desperate to send
him away to safety rather than his father insisting he stay behind as one of the "men of
this village" (Iweala 67), or an added cathartic scene at the end, where Agu eventually
joins other boys in frolicking in the water, symbolically reclaiming his childhood -- seem
to be pandering to the Western expectations for such narratives that I discussed in detail
in chapter 4. Other choices complicate certain problematic elements in Iweala's text. For
instance, Fukunaga chooses to make the character of Amy, the counsellor Agu meets in
the rehabilitation camp, a black African woman instead of the explicitly white American
of the book, thereby undercutting the white saviour narrative. As David Fear notes in
Rolling Stone, "there's no character a la Kevin Kline from Cry Freedom to hijack the
story from a white-man's perspective; the one moment you do see a white face appear,
it's passing in a van, shooting snapshots and driving in the opposite direction."
Despite this apparent attempt to privilege African perspectives, both Bady and
MacArthur raise the spectre of Kony 2012 in their critiques of Fukunaga's Beasts of No
41 While there is a long tradition of African writers, including Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Sembène, and
others, setting their works in fictive African countries, neither Fukunaga nor Nguyen are African writers.
As for Uzodinma Iweala, Catarina Martins includes Beasts of No Nation among "northern" representations
of child soldiers due to his education in the U.S. and engagement with Western humanitarian discourse
(445, ftn 6). Moreover, by portraying the child soldier, a figure that is already stereotypically associated
with Africa, in a generalized African setting, they seem to suggest that child soldiers are a problem
throughout the continent, rather than associated with specific conflicts in specific countries.
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Nation. The term refers to the viral video and campaign launched by the charitable
organization Invisible Children in March 2012. Their stated intent was to make Joseph
Kony, the elusive leader of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda who routinely
kidnapped children to use as child soldiers, "famous." Their theory, as stated on their
website, was "if people only knew what Kony had been getting away with, they would be
as outraged as we were" ("Kony 2012"). By raising awareness, they hoped to increase the
pressure to find and arrest him by the end of the year. The video was viewed 100 million
times on YouTube in six days ("Kony 2012") and apparently motivated the African
Union to send troops specifically to hunt for Kony (Rosen, Child Soldiers 121).
However, the film was also widely criticized. Mark Kersten points out that it presents an
"obfuscating, simplified and wildly erroneous narrative" of good and evil that shows one
man as the root of all problems in Uganda while presenting the deeply problematic
government of Yoweri Museveni as the "legitimate, terror-fighting, innocent partner of
the West." Rosen notes it also gives a misleading, out-of-date impression of Kony's
current significance, given that Kony's forces are greatly reduced and he fled Uganda
years ago (Child Soldiers 121-22). When the film was screened in northern Uganda,
viewers jeered and threw rocks, offended by the film's focus on director Jason Russell
and his toddler son, one complaining it was "more about whites than Ugandans" (Bariyo
and Orden). With its obvious attempt to appeal to a Western audience, its association of
Africa with violence, and the caricatured portrayal of the adult recruiter of child soldiers,
Fukunaga's Beasts of No Nation arguably becomes, as Bady claims, "African literature as
Kony 2012: a purely manipulative spectacle charged with the task of 'raising awareness'
210
about atrocities, in which affective engagement takes precedence over any other mode of
experience."
Nguyen's film has not faced the same degree of criticism. MacArthur actually
compares it favourably to Beasts, saying it is a shame that Fukunaga did not follow the
lead of "more personal and haunting studies of the subject matter" such as Rebelle.
However, as visually arresting and inventive as Nguyen's film is, it too relies on many of
the familiar tropes of child soldier narratives.42
Although filmed in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, it is also set in an unspecified African county, during an unspecified
conflict.43
One might argue that choosing a young girl as protagonist disrupts stereotypes
of child soldiers as boys (Honwana, Child Soldiers 75; Wessells 85); however, given that
fully half of the African child soldier memoirs are written by women, I would argue that
the female perspective is no longer a novelty. Other recognizable tropes include the child
soldier forced to kill their own parents, the gun that becomes their new mother and
father, and the drugs that the children are given to help them fight. All of these details are
rooted in reality, in accounts given by former child soldiers, but have been repeated so
frequently that they become a lazy shorthand for the brutality of such conflicts -- a
brutality often assumed to be somehow inherently "African." It is also interesting that the
drug given here, "magic milk," is derived from tree sap, which seems more natural and
42 Catarina Martins sees a difference between "Northern" and "Southern" representations of child soldiers,
arguing that the earlier film Ezra (2007) directed by the Nigerian Newton I. Aduaka, provides a much more
nuanced and varied perspective.
43 However, the DRC does have a history of civil war and use of child soldiers, unlike Ghana, where
Beasts of No Nation was filmed, a location which Tsika notes is underscored by the actors' use of Twi in
the early scenes.
211
mystical than the "brown-brown," cocaine mixed gunpowder, that Ishmael Beah took as
a child soldier (Beah 121). Arguably, the magic that infuses the film plays into
stereotypes about Africa as a place of mystery and irrationality. Catarina Martins makes a
similar argument that the "exaggerated attention devoted" to a purifying ritual in the
2005 documentary about child soldiers in Uganda, Lost Children, "corresponds to a kind
of sensationalist voyeurism of the exotic that represents Africa as a continent of
witchcraft" (439). Again, such purification rituals, as well as the use of grigris or amulets
by child soldiers represented in Nguyen's film, have a basis in reality (Honwana, Child
Soldiers 104; Intl. Labor Office 44). However, in the case of Rebelle, it is interesting that
the story of a child soldier with supernatural powers was actually inspired by the nine
year-old twins, Luther and Johnny Htoo, who led God's Army in Burma in the 1990s
(Fontaine & McIntosh). By transplanting the story to Africa, Nguyen is bolstering the
assumption that the continent is rife with both child soldiers and superstition.44
If neither of these recent film adaptations provide a real counterpoint to the
typical child soldier narrative with its redemptive arc and trafficking in stereotypes about
Africa, we may have to look further back, to Chris Abani's novella Song for Night,
published in 2007 -- the same year as A Long Way Gone and Girl Soldier, two much
more conventional narratives. Like Rebelle, Abani's text is surreal and hallucinogenic, as
the mute young mine-sweeper My Luck, whose vocal cords have been severed so that he
does not risk startling his comrades with his screams as they work at their delicate task,
44 While African writers such as Tutuola and Okri also portray spirits in their texts, again, Nguyen is not
an African writer. Nor is he drawing on a specific cultural heritage, as Tutuola and Okri are; rather, he has
taken a story out of its original Burmese context and transformed its setting to a generic Africa infused
with generic spirituality.
212
wanders through a nightmarish dreamscape after becoming separated from his unit. As
he sleeps and wakes, memories intertwine with horrific reality: old women roast a baby
to eat, a skeleton pilots a canoe, and he eventually reunites with his dead mother and
recovers his lost voice, it being strongly suggested that he has been dead all along.
Whereas Mene in Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy is mistaken as a ghost when he returns to his
village, My Luck discovers he is, in fact, a ghost. Yet, unlike Rebelle, this dreamlike
effect seems linked to Abani's lyricism as a poet rather than an association of magic and
superstition with Africa. While Abani's novel is often assumed to be set in Biafra during
the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70 because of its explicitly Igbo characters, references to
particular geographical features, and allusions to some of the specific events of that war,
such as the pogroms against Igbo people in the north, Hamish Dalley notes that neither
Nigeria or Biafra are named in the text (446). Anachronistic allusions to Star Wars
(Dalley 446) and Lexuses (Coundouriotis, "Arrested" 195) also trouble the temporal
setting. As such, Abani's indeterminate setting does not suggest that African countries are
interchangeable; rather, it implies that he is "less concerned with recreating the specifics
of a particular conflict or historical experience and more with the ways in which the
memory of the Nigerian Civil War grafts onto his awareness of West Africa’s more
recent wars" (Coundouriotis 195).
Where the films show children being forced into combat, Fukunaga even erasing
some of the ambiguity in Iweala's original text (as discussed in chapter 3), Abani's
depiction of My Luck's recruitment makes clear that the boy soldier made his own
choice, however much he might regret it now. My Luck states plainly, “I joined up at
twelve. We all wanted to join then: to fight. There was a clear enemy, and having lost
213
loved ones to them, we all wanted revenge” (19). Maureen Moynagh also notes that My
Luck issues "what amounts to a direct challenge to the human rights discourse of the
innocent victim" (52) when he asks rhetorically, "If we are the great innocents in this
war, then where did we learn all the evil we practice?" (Abani 143). Unlike most child
soldier narratives that present violence in a manner that invites voyeurism and demands
eventual redemption, Song for Night's ending frustrates the desire to see the child soldier
renounce violence and rejoin society. My Luck's otherworldly reunion with his dead
mother replaces the rehabilitation period in similar narratives, where the child soldier is
rescued, demobilized and usually undergoes some form of therapy to reintegrate them
into society.45
Consequently, Abani's text denies "the conventional satisfactions of
narrative sympathy or humanitarian intervention within existing power structures"
(Schultheis 38). Even though the novella ends with My Luck returning home and
recovering his voice, this conclusion is still somewhat pessimistic, as it suggests that
such restoration and reunion and the ability to articulate oneself is only attainable in the
afterlife. Alison Mackey points out that "My Luck is absolutely refused reentry into his
social community" ("Troubling" 111). Even Rebelle provides more closure as Komona
holds a symbolic funeral for her dead parents to appease their ghosts before returning --
alive -- with her baby to the home of her husband's uncle, who has said she is like a
daughter to him. In the ways that Song for Night challenges the conventions of the child
45 This therapy may even be the writing of the narrative itself, which is assumed to be cathartic for the
memoirists and is also represented at the end of Allah is not obliged when Birahima acquiesces to his
cousin's request that he tell his story.
214
soldier narrative genre, it "asks the reader to expand his or her capacity to imagine rather
than to collapse difference" (Schultheis 39).
These newest filmic iterations of the child soldier narrative do not offer much to
contest Aaron Bady's thesis that the genre has grown predictable and repetitive.
However, Abani's text, though it might be an outlier, does provide a challenge to
stereotypical representations of young combatants. Moreover, the problematic nature of
the genre's crystallizing conventions does not make it any less fascinating to study. On
the contrary, critical interest in African child soldier narratives has only grown over the
years. Yet few scholars have attempted to put these narratives in conversation with other
texts that suggest there may be alternative ways of representing young people involved in
armed conflict. Having begun thinking broadly about child soldier narratives as a genre,
my dissertation looked at specific child soldier narratives in comparison to other texts
before returning full circle to the child soldier narrative as a genre again; one that is
associated with Africa. As such, I offer a new comparative model for thinking about
child soldier narratives, laying the foundation for future inquiry. I focused on the Soweto
novels and narratives of the Zimbabwean liberation wars to highlight the differences
between past and contemporary representations of young people in armed conflict, but
there are numerous other texts and groups of texts that could potentially provide a
fascinating counterpoint to the child soldier narrative as it stands today. Other exciting
avenues of comparison yet to be explored include the representation of child soldier in
children's literature or the changing representation of the child more broadly in
postcolonial literature. These new directions speak to the continuing relevance of the
child soldier narrative to literary studies today.
215
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