Slave, Hero, Victim: the Child Soldier Narrative in Context

Slave, Hero, Victim: The Child Soldier Narrative in Context

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

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.

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.

iii

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.

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.

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

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. 3 However, 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

(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).

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).

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

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

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.

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

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

58 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.

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"

(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

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.

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

66 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.

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.

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.

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.

70 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

71 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

72 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

73 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

74 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.

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

76 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”

(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

78 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

79 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).

80 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.

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).

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

83 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

84 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).

85 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,

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.

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.

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

89 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.

90 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

91 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

“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.

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

94 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

95 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

96 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.

97 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.

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

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

99 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).

100 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

101 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

102 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

103 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

104 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)

105 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

106 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

107 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

108 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,

109

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.

110

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)

111

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

112 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.

114 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.

115 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.

118 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

121 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

122 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

125 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

126 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

127 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,

128 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

129 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

130 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

131 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.

132

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

133 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

134 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

135 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

136 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,

137 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

138 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

139 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,

140

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,

141 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

142 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

143 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

144 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

145 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

146 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

147 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

148 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

149 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',

150 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

151 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).

152 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

154 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

156 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).

159 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

160 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

161 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

162 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).

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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

165 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

166 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

167 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").

168 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

169 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.

170 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

171 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.

174 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

175 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

176 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

177 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)

178 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

179 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

182 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

184 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.

186 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

188 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

189 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

190 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:

191

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:

192

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

193 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:

194

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

195 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

196 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.

197

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

198 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

199 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,

200 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

201 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

202 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

203 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

204 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

205 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.

206

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

207 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

208

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.

209

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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