This photo is the "Pulitzer Prize" winning photo taken in 1994 during the Sudan famine. The picture depicts a famine stricken child crawling towards a United Nations food camp, located a kilometer away.
The vulture is waiting for the child to die so it can eat it. This picture shocked the whole world. No one knows what happened to the child, not even the photographer Kevin Carter who left the place as soon as the photograph was taken.
Three months later he commited suicide due to depression.
[This photo from Sudan Watch archives has been viewed 4,554 times. I am leaving it at the top of this page while I take a short break to catch up on resting, reading and emails. Please forgive me if I owe you an email or reply. I receive so many requests for help and information that it is impossible for me to keep up with it all. I regret not having composed a standard reply that I could have sent out as an acknowledgement and thanks. I fear that people think badly of me for not replying to their emails. Meanwhile, I hope that this photo will remind readers of Sudan Watch to think of all the children in Sudan and Chad and pray that the UN Security Council takes advice from Djibril Bassole, the joint African Union and United Nations Chief Mediator for Darfur, to take heed of the African Union's concerns and use the council's power to suspend the ICC's proceedings against Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir]
P.S. Former Sudanese child soldier Emmanuel Jal was a young teenager in southern Sudan when the above photo was taken. He was taken from his family home in 1987 when he was six or seven years old, and sent to fight with the rebel army in Sudan’s bloody civil war. For nearly five years, he was a “child warrior,” put into battle carrying an AK-47 that was taller than he was. Click here to read his incredible true story and view short video clips.
It's a must-read. The African Union needs all the help it can get. UN Security Council members UK, France and the US must be persuaded to give a chance for peace in Sudan. The future of Sudan and the lives of millions of people are at stake. If any Sudan watcher reading this is a British, French or US citizen please find a way to make your voice heard and request that ICC proceedings against Sudan's President Al-Bashir are halted for at least twelve months. War begets war. Peace begets peace. Think of all the young children growing up in Sudan and Chad. Their futures depend on what happens this week.
Please Sudan. No more war. No more bloodshed. No more child soldiers. Don't give up on peace. Here is a two minute video featuring former child solder, Emmanuel Jal who fought in Sudan's bloody civil war that cost more than two million lives.
YouTube: Emmanuel Jal WARCHILD - official video - taken from the album WARCHILD (Courtesy of www.emmanueljalonline.net)
As a child soldier, he learned how to kill. Now, thanks to a British aid worker, Emmanuel Jal is an internationally acclaimed musician. This is his remarkable story
'War Child: A Boy Soldier's Story' by Emmanuel Jal is published by Little, Brown on March 5. To order your copy for £11.99 + £1.25 p&p, call Telegraph Books (0844 871 1515) or go to books.telegraph.co.uk For information on Gua Africa, go to www.gua-africa.org
As a child soldier, he learned how to kill. Now, thanks to a British aid worker, Emmanuel Jal is an internationally acclaimed musician. This is his remarkable story
Photo: Emmanuel Jal: 'I know how it feels to pull that trigger'. Photograph: GEOFF PUGH
For much of his childhood, Emmanuel Jal's best friend was his AK47. He looked up to the gun, literally, because it was taller than him. "When I hear my sisters talk about what happened to them, it makes me want to pick up that gun again and kill," he says. "Hatred and revenge are feelings that I constantly have to fight, but now I fight them through my music; that's my weapon of choice."
Today Jal, 29, is an internationally acclaimed musician whose songs preaching against war and violence have been lauded by Nelson Mandela and formed soundtracks to Hollywood films, but his success follows a less than stellar childhood.
At the age of eight, as a bloody civil war raged in his homeland of Sudan, Jal was taken from his family home by the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) rebel movement, and sent to Ethiopia where he was told he would go to "school".
But instead of learning his ABC, he found himself enrolled at an SPLA training camp for child soldiers, where he became one of Sudan's thousands of "lost boys", brainwashed, beaten and starved by the SPLA until he had learned how to throw a grenade and wield a machete.
Jal had seen his mother killed in the fighting, his village burned and his sisters and aunt raped by Arab militia men, so fighting for the SPLA against the Arab-dominated government seemed his only option for survival.
"I'd seen Arabs hit my mother so my desire, when I was taken to train, was to kill as many of them as possible. You are told when you have an AK47 that you are equal to someone really big, even if the gun is bigger than you. I wanted to be big and get revenge for my family and for my village."
Rolling his sleeves up to show me the scars on his arms from crawling for miles on stony ground in training drills, Jal recalls his training that replaced school. "If you stood up, they would kick you in the head, if you tried to crack a joke they would beat you, and they would wake us every hour in the night by blowing a whistle, to train us for night attacks. Even now, I still sleep with one eye open."
At 11, Jal was sent to attack his first town. He speaks slowly and carefully when I ask if he knows whether he killed people. "Yes, I participated in mob justice," he says, looking down at his hands. "I don't know how many, but I was told I killed people. When you're a kid, you don't aim and shoot like an adult, you just shoot like this," he says, closing his eyes and waving an imaginary gun above his head.
In 1993, after five years of fighting for the SPLA, Jal began to question his motivation for staying with the rebel movement. "The commanders used to tell me that this war was not about hatred and revenge, but about freedom," he says. "But I began to see I had the wrong reasons for fighting. When I had seen my mother beaten by Arabs, it sowed the seed of hatred in me and I wanted revenge, but I realised this was not a reason for fighting a war."
Knowing that desertion would mean certain death if he was discovered, Jal and 300 other lost boys took a chance, escaping from their camp in the night and setting off for eastern Sudan, where aid workers were based. A journey that should have taken one month to walk, took three, as they dodged army helicopters and minefields. One of Jal's friends had his leg blown off by a mine. Fewer than 20 survived the trek.
"We were so weak, we had no water and no food," says Jal, who watched some of his friends turn to cannibalism to survive. "That was the darkest part of my life," he continues, recalling how one night, he nearly succumbed to temptation. "I was so hungry, I was about to eat my own friend who was weak. I was holding his hand and thinking: 'I'm going to eat you tomorrow.' But I remembered my mother always telling me to be patient and wait for food because God would make it all right, and the next morning, a bird came which we shot and ate. That bird was a miracle bird. It saved my life."
When he finally reached the town of Waat in eastern Sudan, another miracle happened. He met Emma McCune, a British aid worker who noticed the 13-year-old Jal dragging his gun along the ground, too weak to carry it. McCune, who was working for Street Kids International, a Unicef-funded Canadian charity which built and renovated schools in southern Sudan, smuggled him on to an aid flight to Kenya. "She put on make-up and made herself pretty to distract the men on the plane, and then I crawled on board without them seeing."
Jal smiles for the first time during our interview when he talks of the woman he describes as his "guardian angel" who effectively adopted him, treating him as her own son when they reached Nairobi. "She put me in a good boarding school, paid for my fees, gave me her clothes. I had never had attention like that, I didn't understand what love means until then. She never shouted at me, she always corrected me softly. It is only now that she is gone that I appreciate the impact that she had on my life."
But six months after they settled in Nairobi, McCune was killed in a car crash. Homeless and wandering the slums of Nairobi, Jal sought shelter as an altar boy in a Catholic church. "I didn't do such a good job because my hands were always shaking," he says. "The priest knew I had been a soldier and would tell me: 'You're full of sin, that's why you can't serve properly.' When people know you've been a soldier, they judge you: you are a thief, a lost boy. But I liked the music and I went to concerts at church. I found myself writing music and it made me happy. So I started to perform it and kids liked it. I didn't write about my struggle, I wrote about peace."
Despite not having a record deal, in 2004 he recorded his first single, Gua, (which means "peace" in Nuer, a tribal language of southern Sudan), burning copies of the CDs himself when fans asked him. Word of mouth and radio play alone propelled the song to number one in Kenya for more than two months. "It made me really famous," he says, still sounding surprised, even though his three albums, Gua, Ceasefire and War Child, have gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies around the world.
Jal's songs have been used in the film Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and the television series ER. In 2005, he performed at the Live8: Africa Calling gig in Cornwall's Eden Project, a sister concert to the Hyde Park awareness-raising event that was prompted by accusations that the main event's line-up contained no world musicians. More recently, Jal became the first hip-hop artist to perform at the United Nations in New York, where he received three standing ovations. Last year, he played at the V Festival and at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday concert in London, performing his song Emma, a tribute to McCune. Her life story, including her relationship with Jal, is being made into a film directed by British director Tony Scott (brother of Ridley), whose films include Top Gun and True Romance. There is even talk that Nicole Kidman has been lined up to play McCune.
Since 2005, Jal has made London his home because he "liked the vibe here". Sitting in his publisher's London office, with his plaited hair, parka jacket, baggy blue jeans and trendy green suede trainers, he explains how writing his autobiography has been cathartic.
"While I was writing the book, my chest was always tight and I had nosebleeds and nightmares," he says, recalling one episode in the book where he describes being whipped and imprisoned in an underground pit with no food or water, as punishment for visiting his aunt without the permission of an SPLA commander. "I would sweat, because the demons came back. But when the book was done, I felt better."
Jal, who describes his music as "gospel rap", has short shrift for many of the mainstream rap artists, such as 50 Cent, who have been criticised for glamorising violence.
"Most hip-hop artists are fake, all that gangster talk is not real. It's fiction, but children don't see that, they think everything is real and people like bad guys. Young people's minds are influenced so easily, their conscience is easily corrupted.
"How can someone who hasn't actually killed anyone think it's fun to kill? It's not. I know how it feels to pull that trigger. If I talked about being a bad guy, death and killing, I would have gone platinum.
"When I wrote my song 50 Cent, I wanted to tell him that he is a role model to young people so he needs to come up with a different style, he needs to tell children it is not cool to be a gangster and kill. Otherwise he is creating a genocidal society."
With the money he has made from his music, Jal sponsors 40 children in primary and secondary schools in Nairobi, and has founded Gua Africa, a charity that works to rehabilitate child soldiers and help communities in Sudan and Kenya overcome the effects of war and poverty. Gua's latest project is in Leer, the village in southern Sudan from where he was taken and where McCune is buried.
"We want to build a school in Leer called Emma's Academy. It will also have a vocational centre where we can train teachers. When I see kids back in Sudan who have been fighting, kids like I used to be, it haunts me. The only way I will feel better is if I build that school to give them a childhood."
'War Child: A Boy Soldier's Story' by Emmanuel Jal is published by Little, Brown on March 5. To order your copy for £11.99 + £1.25 p&p, call Telegraph Books (0844 871 1515) or go to books.telegraph.co.uk For information on Gua Africa, go to www.gua-africa.org
Emmanuel Jal has intimated that an arrest warrant issued against President Omar al-Bashir could even cause further division in Sudan.
Jal is seeking a mediated settlement between the warring parties and offers a solution in which students can choose to engage on the ground by rebuilding schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure in the Darfur region of the Sudan. Spring break service trips can be organized and students could join these trips. This would be a direct and effective way for students to serve to resolve the crisis in Darfur.
More than any indirect social, economic or political action in reference to Sudan, the friendships and goodwill developed on these trips will go all that much further to repair the breeches of human discord in Sudan.
Before Darfur, civil war raged in Southern Sudan leaving two million people dead. Ten thousand children were forced to fight.
Emmanuel Jal was one of them.
Here is his incredible story.
Photo: Emmanuel Jal (by Christian Karim Chrobog)
Emmanuel is a spokesman for the Make Poverty History campaign, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers and the Control Arms campaign.
He has set up the Gua Africa charity and is planning to build a school in Leer, his village in southern Sudan.
Through his music, Emmanuel Jal counts on the unity of the citizens to overcome ethnic and religious division and motivate the youth in Sudan.
His single “War Child,” mixes rap with soul to produce a world music vibe. He begins with telling his story through powerful lyrics; “I’m a war child / I believe I’ve survive for a reason / To tell my story, to touch lives.”
Central to the themes of his songs is the campaign for peace of opposing sides in Sudan and the clear message that children have no place in wars.
YouTube: Emmanuel Jal WARCHILD - official video - taken from the album WARCHILD (Courtesy of www.emmanueljalonline.net)
SUMMARY
Emmanuel Jal was born in war-torn Sudan, and while he doesn’t know exactly when, he believes it was in the early 1980s. He was taken from his family home in 1987 when he was six or seven years old, and sent to fight with the rebel army in Sudan’s bloody civil war. For nearly five years, he was a “child warrior,” put into battle carrying an AK-47 that was taller than he was.
By the time he was 13, he was a veteran of two civil wars and had seen hundreds of his fellow child soldiers reduced to taking unspeakable measures as they struggled to survive on the killing fields of Southern Sudan.
After a series of harrowing events, he was rescued by a British aid worker (Emma McCune) who smuggled him into Nairobi to raise him as her own.
To help ease the pain of what he had experienced, Emmanuel started singing. In 2005, he released his first album, Gua (”peace” in his native Nuer tongue), with the title track broadcast across Africa over the BBC and becoming a number one hit in Kenya. Gua also earned him a spot on Bob Geldof’s “Live 8″ concert in the UK.
Photo: Emmanuel Jal with Nelson Mandela
Jal performed at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday celebrations in Hyde Park, London, June 08, he shared a stage with Alicia Keys, Annie Lennox, Damien Marley and Stephen Marley at the Black Ball in London in July 08 and also addressed delegates at the UN in New York in the same month. Jal has also performed with Razorlight, Supergrass, and Faithless in Europe.
Photo: Emmanuel Jal at the UN
In October 2008 Emmanuel toured the United States as part of the National Geographic All Roads Film Festival, in which he performed in New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles and New Orleans. Jal also performed with Moby and Five for Fighting in the 2007 live concert film, The Concert To End Slavery (www.concerttoendslavery.com/trailer).
Photo: Emmanuel Jal outside the UN
Photo: Emmanual Jal at Harvard
Photo: Emmanuel Jal in Sudan
EMMANUEL JAL BIOGRAPHY
Emmanuel Jal (born c. 1980) is a Sudanese musician and former child soldier.
Childhood
Born in the village of Tonj in Southern Sudan, he was a little boy when the civil war broke out. Emmanuel’s father joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and when he was about seven years old his mother was killed by soldiers loyal to the government. Emmanuel then decided to join the thousands of children traveling to Ethiopia who had been told that they could be educated there.
However, many of the children, Emmanuel included, were recruited by the SPLA and taken to military training camps in the bush in Ethiopia. The camp was disguised as a school in front of international aid agencies and UN representatives, but behind closed doors the children were training to fight. “I didn’t have a life as a child. In five years as a fighting boy, what was in my heart was to kill as many Muslims as possible.”
Emmanuel spent several years fighting with the SPLA in Ethiopia, until war broke out there too and the child soldiers were forced back into Sudan by the fighting and joined the SPLA's efforts to fight the government in the town of Juba. "Many kids there were so bitter, they wanted to know what happened to them. And we all wanted revenge."
When the fighting became unbearable Emmanuel and some other children decided to run away. They were on the move for three months, with many dying on the way, until they reached the town of Waat, which was the headquarter on a small group that had separated themselves from the main SPLA.
In Waat Emmanuel met Emma McCune, a British aid worker married to senior SPLA commandant Riek Machar. Emmanuel was only 11 years old then and McCune insisted he should not be a soldier. She adopted him and smuggled him to Kenya. There Emmanuel attended school in Nairobi. McCune died in a road accident a few months later, but her friends helped Emmanuel to continue his studies.
Music
While studying in Kenya, Emmanuel started singing to ease the pain of what he has experienced. He also became very active in the community, raising money for local street children and refugees. With the encouragement of those around him, Emmanuel became increasingly involved in music and formed several groups. His first single, "All We Need Is Jesus," was a hit in Kenya and received airplay in the UK.
Through his music, Emmanuel Jal counts on the unity of the citizens to overcome ethnic and religious division and motivate the youth in Sudan. After escaping to Kenya, he fell in love with hip hop in the way that it identified issues being faced by the neighborhood, which he was able to identify with in a unique manner. Although he lacked any music background or knowledge of its history, he felt that hip-hop could provide the easiest and most effective path to publicize across his story and lobby for political change.
He went on to produce his first album, Gua, a mix of rap in Arabic, English, Kiswahili, Dinka and Nuer. The symbolism of unity is expressed in the title, meaning both "good" in Nuer and "power" in (Sudanese) Arabic. His lyrics illustrate the desires of the Sudanese people to return to a peaceful, independent homeland. Although the only hip hop Jal had ever listened to was American, while he was in Kenya, the beat to “Gua” is not the usual American hip hop, but rather is strongly African. The title track, also called "Gua", was a number one hit in Kenya and featured on The Rough Guide To The Music Of Sudan and Help: A Day In The Life, bringing together some of Britain’s best known on a CD in aid of children in conflict zones (produced by War Child).
His next single, “War Child,” mixes rap with soul to produce a world music vibe. He begins with telling his story through powerful lyrics; “I’m a war child / I believe I’ve survive for a reason / To tell my story, to touch lives.” He continues the song with the narrative of his life and the pain inflicted upon him. “Written in English, Jal's second language, the new album [War-Child] may lack the poetic gymnastics of hip-hop's more fluent stars, but the plainness of the words - half-spoken, half-chanted over a mix of hip-hop and African-flavored choruses - keeps the focus on the story.” His powerful words spread the message of what he has been through, and what many are still living with now.
His unique brand of hip hop, layered with African beats, has led him to be considered one of the rising stars in the world music scene. Prior to Jal, rapping in Southern Sudan was primarily in the local language of Nuer and artists used sticks and clapping hands in place of instruments.
His second album, Ceasefire, was released in September 2005 and includes a re-recording of "Gua". This album is a collaboration with the well known Sudanese Muslim musician Abdel Gadir Salim and brings together opposing sides of the conflict, and different music traditions, to a common ground of the wish for peace in Sudan. The collaboration represents a vision for the future, as two Sudanese men, a Christian and a Muslim, unify and pave the way to overcome differences peacefully. Both musicians endured unimaginable adversity to become important figures, not only in music, but in the future of a country. They accentuate the differences between them and their musical styles, as a symbol of co-existence. The album preaches in four languages, encompasses every type of music in one, in an effort to transform the sound of hope into musical form. “Ceasefire” is not only the sound of two men collaborating on a musical project, but more symbolically, two halves of a divided nation learning to trust each other. This album's version of Gua was played on the American television series ER at the very end of the Season 12 episode "There Are No Angels Here" (aired on May 4, 2006).
Among other places he performed at the Live 8 Concert in Cornwall this summer. He was awarded a 2005 American Gospel Music Award for best international artist.
Emmanuel's third album, "Warchild", is released by Sonic360 Records in the UK on May 12th, 2008. Emmanuel, along with an all-star line-up, will perform songs at Nelson Mandela's 90th Birthday concert at London's Hyde Park on June 27th, 2008.
Activism
Jal, whose own childhood was robbed from him, aims to protect the childhood of others through music. "Music is powerful. It is the only thing that can speak into your mind, your heart and your soul without your permission." According to Jal, in times of war, starvation, hunger and injustice, the only way to survive the daily tragedy in Sudan is to allow the inner-soul to be uplifted through music, which is like soul food to heal pain. Through his heartfelt lyrics, he opens the world up to the corruption and greed of the Sudanese government; central to the themes of his songs is the campaign for peace of opposing sides in Sudan and the clear message that children have no place in wars.
He has also passionately criticized the current state of hip hop culture in the United States. He sees hip hop as a vehicle to communicate an authentic message, rather than a space to pursue street credibility. “As well as simply being great songs, people are really getting into the lyrics, really understanding his message, and he is a great role model.”
He has expressed concern about the message being sent by American hip-hop artists, saying “American hip hop is still entwined with gang culture, drugs, sexual violence, and greed. It’s a battleground.”
His song, “50 Cent,” speaks to the successful American rapper to change his violent messages, which have a destructive influence on children, as exemplified through his “Bulletproof” videogame. "You have done enough damage selling crack cocaine/now you got a kill a black man video game/We have lost a whole generation through this lifestyle/now you want to put it in the game for a little child to play..."
Emmanuel is a spokesman for the Make Poverty History campaign, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers and the Control Arms campaign. He has set up the Gua Africa charity and is planning to build a school in Leer, his village in southern Sudan.
A documentary about Emmanuel Jal called War Child was made in 2008 by C. Karim Chrobog. It made its international debut at the Berlin Film Festival and its North American debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Cadillac Audience Award.
Emmanuel Jal's story ought to be compulsory reading for all school children. If anyone reading this article is able to translate it into French, Arabic and/or Swahili, I would be most grateful to receive a copy for publishing at Sudan Watch, Uganda Watch, Congo Watch, along with several other sites that are part of this network of blogs.
Emmanuel Jal has won worldwide acclaim for his unique style of hip hop with its message of peace and reconciliation born out of his experiences as a child soldier in Sudan.
His music can be heard alongside Coldplay, Gorillaz, and Radiohead on the fundraising ‘Warchild - Help a Day in the Life’ album, as well as in three ER episodes, the National Geographic documentary God Grew Tired of Us, and more recently in the feature film Blood Diamond starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
He also featured on John Lennons ‘Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur’ amongst the likes of U2, REM and Lenny Kravitz.
His new album ‘Warchild’ was released on 12th May 2008 on the Sonic360 label (distribution by ADA Global) with additional production and mix by Neal Pogue, (Outkast, Talib Kweli, Pharohae Monch).
Click here to listen to previews of Emmanuel Jal’s album War Child.
YouTube: Emmanuel Jal WARCHILD - official video - taken from the album WARCHILD (Courtesy of www.emmanueljalonline.net)
Photo: Inspiration for the 'Ceasefire' CD title came when Emmanuel Jal sang at the signing of Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement 9 Jan 2005. (Source: Sudan Watch archive Nov. 2005)
From the Washington Post The Fight of His Life By Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com February 6, 2009
WAR CHILD A Child Soldier's Story By Emmanuel Jal with Megan Lloyd Davies St. Martin's. 262 pp. $24.95
Inevitably, "War Child" will invite comparison to Ishmael Beah's "A Long Way Gone," another memoir by an African boy-soldier.
Set in Sierra Leone, Beah's madly popular volume was crammed with narrow escapes, daring adventures, drugs, rock-and-roll, and a stunning set piece in which, after boys from both sides of the civil war are rescued by an NGO, they're put in the same dorm room, and the war starts up all over again. Parts of Beah's memoir were later questioned, but who's going to be the fact-checker who goes out into the jungle, finds a war-crazed fighter with bloodshot eyes and a sack of grenades and asks, "Excuse me, sir, but could you verify the existence of six or eight boys who traveled together, all high on drugs, slaughtering everything that crossed their path? And could you give me a year, please, and a date for that? Ballpark figures, of course." It's not going to happen. You take these stories on faith, or you don't take them at all.
"War Child" is very different, very much worth reading, and when you think about it, much more believable. Emmanuel Jal is not sure how old he is, but he sets his tentative birthday in 1980, dating the rest of his life from there. He was born in southern Sudan, where the population is mostly black. His father, a clandestine official in the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), is a policeman and a member of the Nuer tribe. His mother is half-Nuer, half-Dinka and a practicing Christian. The first three years of his life are peaceful, and then war breaks out. Sudan's Arab population, Muslims from the northern part of the country, hate the blacks from the south, who are often Christian. The conflict, then, is regional, religious, racial. To thicken the plot, many of the southern tribes are at odds with one another. But the war is really about oil.
Jal's earliest memories are of Arabs beating his mother. When the war comes to their village, the family moves to other villages, finding different sets of relatives, looking for peace, but the war follows them. Jal gets used to bombings, shootings, fire, rape.
Then his father leads an SPLA movement to send hundreds of village boys to school in Ethiopia to be educated. "Ethiopia is a good place," he tells parents who have gathered on a river bank to say goodbye to their children. "There is food, no war, and your sons will have shoes and education." They board a ship, supervised by soldiers; soon the ship sinks. They make their way back to the village, tormented by hippos, crocodiles and snakes. "Only about forty children had lived," Jal writes. Parents come searching for their children, but Jal's father never shows up. His mother is already dead, he's been abandoned by his family, and he begins his life as a "lost boy." After another harrowing boat trip, he and another large band of children walk for days without food and water. Many of them die of thirst and starvation. The SPLA doesn't give a fig about education; they have taken these boys to use as cannon fodder in battles yet to come.
When the boys reach Ethiopia, it turns out to be an enormous refugee camp called Pinyudu, where the food has run out and hundreds of people are starving to death. "Boys died day after day. . . . Terrible diarrhea made us bleed and grow thin; measles, whooping cough, and chicken pox were also common. Even our skin crawled with lice." Jal sickens enough to make it into the hospital, where he gets some tea and biscuits and kindness; then it's back out into the camp with its polio and cholera and protein-deficiency disease. Remember, this is a little kid, not even 10 years old, all alone. Hatred, by now, is the only thing that sustains him, hatred for his father, who so brutally double-crossed him, hatred for the Arabs, who he presumes are responsible for this war. There's no glamour here, no pitched battles, only unimaginable misery.
Finally, after about two years in the camp, he's recruited into the SPLA, and his real troubles begin. He's beaten and tortured in every possible fashion. His first real battle comes when the Ethiopians turn on the refugees and kick them out. Then the Nuer and Dinka tribes turn against each other. He goes on more forced marches, suffers terrible privations, is repeatedly betrayed by his friends. When he finally does get to kill a few Arabs, he feels no sense of triumph, just sadness. They're human, too, it seems.
A couple of miracles happen. Jal sees a vision of Jesus, who advises him against cannibalism. His best friend has died during the night, and lies, still warm, beside him. Jal is perishing with hunger. How bad could it be to take a few bites out of his friend just to stay alive? Jesus talks him out of it. But can the vision be real? What does turn out to be real is that he's singled out by a prominent English aid worker who takes him into her own home. He ends up in Nairobi. But the aid worker dies, and once again Jal must live by his wits. He pursues his education in fits and starts. He's ashamed of his appearance and his bad grades. Humans have invented so many different ways to be awful to one another!
Still, we know there is a happy ending; otherwise, there wouldn't be this book. Jal becomes a believing Christian and gospel singer. He sets up an organization to help lost boys, but he's broke a lot of the time -- a star in Kenya, maybe, but unknown on the larger stage. He's often tired and sad and lonely, but in "War Child" he succeeds in making this crazy war and all its ramifications utterly grounded, specific and real. Recently, he has been the subject of a documentary film, and his music has been featured in movies and TV shows, even though he reports he still has spent more than a few nights sleeping on London park benches. You'll come away from this book loving Emmanuel Jal. He might even prod you into a good deed or two. - - -
Despite the flood of benefit concerts and newspaper headlines that have illuminated human rights violations in northeastern Africa this past decade, humanitarian movements have lacked a human appeal to link the faceless statistics of genocide to the sympathizing human psyche. Emmanuel Jal, an international hip-hop MC and former child fighter in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, aims to fill that void as the new ambassador of these atrocities in the documentary War Child.
Jal straddles the rare line between post-traumatic war victim and pacifist heart throb: while lecturing a college class, he bashfully asks the female students for the phone numbers of single friends after explaining how he ate raw vultures while fleeing the resistance army in brilliant detail. This disarming irony creates an introspective question that runs through the heart of the film: How can one man who’s passed through the horrors of war come out the other end smiling and optimistic to change it? If this philanthropic, charming 20-something could be implicated in such depravity, then anyone can be—not just members of post-colonial third worlds. It’s a frightening dichotomy for every closet racist who assumes that war, rape and genocide are indigenous to savage cultures and mentalities isolated thousands of miles away.
Director Christian Karim Chrobog does an admirable job of playing historian and biographer, using the conflict of the SPLA and the invading Arabs as a backdrop for Jal’s journey from Sudan to London. Even more interesting are the reactions that greet Jal’s music afterward; watching American girls hesitantly grind to the lyrics “Children of Darfur / Your empty bellies on the telly / It’s you I’m fighting for” illustrates Jal’s burden of presenting a very unsexy subject in a music genre oftentimes defined by pleasure and hedonism. By the end of the film, though, it’s clear that Jal possesses a singular quality that allows him to touch the soul of anyone who will listen: unadultured hope.
View the War Child trailer:
Release Date: Currently showing in select cities Director: Christian Karim Chrobog Cinematographer: S.J. Staniski Studio/Run Time: Reelu Films, 92 mins. - - -
Article from Sudan Tribune November 20, 2008 (NEW YORK) —
Sudanese child soldier turned global hip hop star Emmanuel Jal has both embraced rap as a way to reach a global audience and distanced himself from what he says is a tendency to glorify violence.
Jal, who fought with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army for five years as a child and guesses he is 28 years old, tells his story in detail in the documentary "War Child," released on DVD this month, and in a memoir and an album of the same name.
The documentary won the Audience Choice Award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Jal’s memoir will be published in February by St. Martin’s Press.
In a recent interview with Reuters, Jal said that hip hop should be about demanding positive change.
"When somebody comes and says that they enjoy killing people, they don’t know what they’re talking about. The real killers, they don’t talk about killing," Jal said.
Jal’s "War Child" album includes both biographical songs where he confesses doing "inhuman and barbaric" things and playful songs advising women not to wear their "skirts too short" and scolding U.S. rappers for using bad language.
In the song "50 Cent" he takes the U.S. rapper to task for producing a violent video game called "Bulletproof."
For Jal, who now lives in London, music is a form of therapy that allows him to sort through feelings of guilt while serving as a role model for child victims of war.
He has set up the Gua Africa charity and is planning to build a school in Leer, his village in southern Sudan.
"I believe I have survived for a reason, to tell my story to touch lives," Jal says in the song "War Child."
VILLAGE ATTACKED
In about 1987, his village in southern Sudan was attacked by soldiers loyal to the government and his mother was killed. He was brought into the SPLA and taught to fire an AK-47 rifle that Jal said he was barely strong enough to hold.
"I lost my childhood completely, you know, and I’ll never recover that," said Jal, who raps in Arabic, English, Swahili, and his native Nuer language. "But through music I feel like a child again. I can sing and dance again."
When he was about 13, Jal was discovered by Emma McCune, a British aid worker who was married to Riek Machar, a military commander who is now vice president of the semi-autonomous Southern Sudan.
McCune smuggled him into Kenya and enrolled him in school in Nairobi. Jal says McCune rescued 150 child soldiers from the fighting in southern Sudan before she died in a car crash.
In 2005, Jal released the song "Gua," which means "peace" in Nuer, and the song became a hit in Kenya.
The same year, the Sudanese government in Khartoum and southern rebels ended the 21-year civil war that killed 2 million people and forced 4 million from their homes.
An independence referendum is expected to be held in 2011.
Introducing Jal this year at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday celebration in London, the musician Peter Gabriel called Jal "someone with the potential of a young Bob Marley."
Jal, who is Christian, said writing his memoir helped "deliver" him from the guilt and pain of his past. While writing the war scenes, Jal said he suffered bloody noses and violent nightmares and was tempted to give up.
He said he keeps going because he wants to make a difference, and also because he is afraid of what his mind will go through if he slows down.
"When I’m idle, that’s when my brain actually messes me up and sometimes I’m worried," he said. "I say, what about when I’m gonna be 60? Will I be hit by my history? That’s the only fear I think about every day."
Photo: Emmanuel Jal poses during a photocall for the film "War Child" at the 34th American Film Festival in Deauville, Normandy, France, Saturday September 13, 2008 (AP/ST)
On his website, Emmanuel introduces this YouTube clip with the words:
"Here’s an interesting use of my music"
The full-length documentary on Emmanuel Jal's life and times has been touring the film festival circuit. It premiered at the Berlinale festival last year, and won the Cadillac audience choice award at the Tribeca film festival.
Photo: Emmanuel Jal at Berlin Festival
Photo: Emmanuel Jal at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival - - -
War Child: A Child Soldier's Story By Emmanuel Jal 262 pages; St. Martin's Press
The Gist:
Writing a memoir based on the memories of an entire childhood filled with the savagery of war would certainly be difficult enough. Doing so after having been trained as a tiny soldier to kill Arabs and Muslims, or jallabas, before even reaching puberty, would prove to be an impossible task for some. Stories of the Lost Boys of Sudan — stolen from their homes and sometimes coaxed by the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) to fight a war the children had little understanding of — have emerged bit by bit since the end of the civil war that raged in the country for nearly two decades killing almost 2 million people and displacing millions more.
Emmanuel Jal is one of those boys; now an adult, he travels the world as a rapper explaining the War Child life he lived; he has starred in a documentary of the same name and released both an album and now this book sharing his feelings on the past and the present of a country in unending distress.
Highlight Reel:
1. War as an everyday lifestyle: With the smell of burning flesh in the air and the memories of bodies lying still on the ground, I'd run as if the devil were chasing me. I became good at war.
2. On the foundation of his desire to entertain: Another favorite was the dissing competitions, in which children threw insults at each other to make others laugh. "Your grandmother is so fat that God won't let her into heaven," one boy would shout at another as the crowd laughed ... In the beginning I'd fall silent when it was my turn. But I started improving ... As well as the insults we had to rap for the older boys—tell stories in chanting rhythms to entertain them—and I found that I enjoyed entertaining people.
3. On becoming inured to the desperation and fear of being a child soldier: As time passed, I learned that a body gets used to fear—I didn't shake so much and my stomach stayed still—but a mind doesn't. I thought about God often, and questions filled me. We were all created by God, but if God knew Satan would make so much trouble, then why hadn't He killed him? And who made God?
4. Upon being taken to Kenya for schooling and reintegrating into regular life: I knew I made mistakes in this strange place. When I was given a cup, I broke it; when I ate food at a table, I threw chicken bones over my shoulder onto the floor; and when I played with white children, I made them cry ... I knew I was different because I was a soldier, and although other children never knew my secret, I think they could sense it. I had dreams at night that made me shake and sweat in fear as the war buried inside me came alive again.
The Lowdown:
Jal's story — that of a a 7-year-old who saw every home he knew destroyed, lost his mother to murderers and his father to the SPLA — fits securely in the history of Sudan's second civil war but also stands on its own. Against a beast of a war that spiraled into battles between all those fighting to survive, Jal who struggles not to become a brutal killer of jallabas, eventually succumbs in order to survive. Unlike many of the Lost Boys, however, Jal finds salvation through the grace of two women who steer him toward education. His subsequent life as a rapper and philanthropist trying to save other children from similar pain and anguish leaves hope for the possibility of redemption.
The Verdict: Read - - -
Emmanuel Jal's autobiography has been sold to St. Martin’s Press with anticipated release of spring 2009.
WAR CHILD - The Book
War Child: A Child Soldier's Story by Emmanuel Jal (Author), US Version released February 2009 www.macmillan.com (www.amazon.com)
War Child UK Version released March 2009 (Amazon.com)
