War Child is the tale of someone whose world came crashing down at a young age, who survived several seasons in hell, inflicted some violence in return for that inflicted on his people (the Nuer of southern Sudan), was lifted (smuggled) into Kenya and has redeemed all that suffering as a Christian rap singer.
"Jal" and "Emmanuel" are both given names. His memoir does not mention his patronym. He refers to his father, a policeman who joined the struggle against the genocidal government based in Khartoum, only as "Babba."
After witnessing the rape of an aunt and losing his mother, Jal was sent by his father to go to school in Ethiopia at the age of about 6 or 7 (he is not sure about his age). Many of those who set out with him did not make it and when Jal got there on a second attempt, he found himself in a refugee camp. Speaking some English, he was the "lost boy of Sudan" to whom journalists spoke. Rather than rot in the camp, he enlisted in the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), toting an AK-47 that was taller than he was. He was very eager to kill Arabs.
He exacted some revenge on Arabs and black Muslims. When the Ethiopian hosts of the SPLA were overthrown, Jal made a trek even more hellacious than the one into Ethiopia. Most of his companions died of starvation. (Many of those with him drowned on his first exodus.)
Confused by the shifting alliances of "rebels" seeking to rule Sudan or to attain autonomy for the non-Muslim south, Jal (aged about eleven) went with English aid worker Emma McCune to Kenya, adjusted after a fashion to school, and began working for reconciliation of Sudanese through rap music.
Jal's memoir recollects the development the child who was eager to kill and the young man who feels an enormous debt to those who helped him that he seeks to pay by helping other "lost boys" (through GuaAfrica).
The tale is harrowing though not without humor of various sorts. As a redemption tale it is remarkably unsaccharine. His struggle to stop hating those who killed and raped many of his family and to reverse the substitution of gun for family feelings. ("Your rifle is your father and mother now" was a slogan of his military training as a seven-year-old already very familiar with mutilation and violent death.)
A documentary about Jal, also titled "War Child" premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. For information about the organization to which he dedicates his talents, see GuaAfricaOnline.com. In his international rap hit "Gua" and other songs, he mixes Arabic, English, Nuer, and Swahili. The book is in flawless English.
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Also see Narratives From the Abducted and Displaced People of Sudan, compiled and edited by Craig Walzer. The documentary "Lost Boys of Sudan" shows the confusions and humiliations of two Dinka orphans who came to the US for education, were plopped down in Houston, and not allowed to enroll in school there. The movie begins in a refugee camp in Kenya but is about culture shock in America rather than the horrors Peter and Sandino experienced in the Sudan.
And for those interested in children caught up in fighting African civil wars without the Christian preachiness that sometimes appears in Jal's book, there is Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs Of A Boy Soldier (from Sierra Leone, which is also a locale for by Ahmadou Kourouma's award-winning novel Allah Is Not Obliged, the style of which I found more annoying than the occasional preachiness of Jal's memoir.
In the mid-1980s, Emmanuel Jal was a seven year old Sudanese boy, living in a small village with his parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. But as Suda...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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