War Child

A Child Soldier's Story

By: Emmanuel Jal

Narrated by: Ademola Adeyemo

Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

In the mid-1980s, Emmanuel Jal was a seven-year-old Sudanese boy, living in a small village with his parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. But as Sudan's civil war moved closer - with the Islamic government seizing tribal lands for water, oil, and other resources - Jal's family moved again and again, seeking peace. Then, on one terrible day, Jal was separated from his mother, and later learned she had been killed; his father Simon rose to become a powerful commander in the Christian Sudanese Liberation Army, fighting for the freedom of Sudan.

Soon, Jal was conscripted into that army, one of 10,000 child soldiers, and fought through two separate civil wars over nearly a decade. But, remarkably, Jal survived, and his life began to change when he was adopted by a British aid worker. He began the journey that would lead him to change his name and to music: recording and releasing his own album, which produced the number one hip-hop single in Kenya, and from there going on to perform with Moby, Bono, Peter Gabriel, and other international music stars.

Shocking, inspiring, and finally hopeful, War Child is a memoir by a unique young man, who is determined to tell his story and in so doing bring peace to his homeland.

©2009 Emmanuel Jal and Megan Lloyd Davies (P)2009 Macmillan Audio

War Chilc

This was an informative, inspiring and excellent book to listen to, kept my interest the entire time and was very well written, i highly recommend it

Picked this book for a school assignment...don’t regret it at all

This book will pull you in and you will be shocked and happy with the story.

I picked this book off a reading list for a class I’m taking. I picked it as it was the shortest book, only 9 hours long, and I knew nothing of the topic. I had seen Blood Diamond and knew of child soldiers from Invisible Children but this book shows a different story of a child soldier. He was kidnapped and given a gun. This is a story of a boy who became a believer in the reason to fight before he was trained.
The first chapter tells how he learned of hate and used the hate when it came time to fight.

I could not recommended this book enough

Great!!!!!

Great!!!! Worth every credit.
You’ll find that you are living in the moment the story.

Excellent

I looooove this book. I felt his emotion as I read it. Such Hope and courage it took to survive. Thank God for his life being spared so that his Light can shine on

Extraordinary Almost Hallucinogenic Memoir of Child Soldier

Few people go from being starving child soldiers to international music stars, and few find redemption as does Jal. So, this is first and foremost a story of redemption that should inspire anyone who cares to listen. But given the brightness of Jal’s smile, it is also an incredible dark, almost hallucinogenic tale.

Most stories from Darfur and South Sudan, like Dave Eggers masterful What is the What, and Halima Bashir’s Tears of the Desert, begin with a clear sense of home. But Jal starts out in the run, and the story of the attack on his home feels like a pastiche. After it, he becomes a lost boy, wandering across Sudan. And while most stories from Darfur and South Sudan focus on children being impressed into the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, Jal embraces it.

The story he tells rivals that of any for sheer adventure. Traumatized and starving, he wanders the deserts in search of food and water and victims, seeking revenge for the initial attack on his family.

The Sudanese regime of Omar Bashir was Islamist and genocidal. It was also racially Arab, and it’s initial attacks were on black Africans. So, there is a religious and racial dimension to the violence Jal embraces, and later he will tell of overcoming it. In fact, the final hours of this book are a story of finding his footing, becoming educated, and launching a career in music.

It is an extraordinary story, but I found other stories of the lost boys and victims of the Bashir regime to be better crafter. Eggers novel, which is really a memoir of his subject is perhaps the most extraordinary. They Poured Fire On Us from the Sky is also well worth reading.

All in all, a treasure trove of stories have come out of Sudan making it hard to recommend the best, and this is certainly one of their number.

~ Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny