Born Into War: The Urgent Mission of Emmanuel Jal

Jal wears a crisp-looking shirt underneath a striped sweater that bears the image of Kung Fu icon Bruce Lee. His left hand is bandaged and backed with a plastic splint. The injury was sustained not in battle but while dancing to a playback. His palm smashed down on a glass, opening up a gash that required several stitches and three months of convalescence. The irony is not lost on him.

Emmanuel Jal’s story is extraordinary. It’s the subject of his album and a documentary that premiered at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. And later this year it will be told in more detail in his autobiography. It’s the story of how a hate-filled boy became an apostle of peace; of how an illiterate child who now speaks eight languages can confidently debate in front of university audiences. It’s a story of redemption.

Jal doesn’t really know when he was born, but he estimates that it must have been around 1980. He’s chosen January 1 as his birthday. He does know where he was born, though. It was a small village called Tonj in Southern Sudan. He had three brothers and a sister. A new sibling was on its way when his mother died in 1987.

His earliest memories are of the Sudanese civil war between government-organized militias and the rebel army. The fault line ran between the Northern Muslim population and the predominantly Christian and animist South. At the age of seven, Jal was recruited by the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, and was route marched to safety in Ethiopia with thousands of other children.

He was ideal material. He was ignorant of politics or military strategies, but he knew how to hate and to squeeze a trigger. “We young people had bitterness,” he explains, as if this was their sole asset. “We wanted to avenge for our families. I was bitter because I had seen what happened. My aunt was raped in front of my face. I saw my mother beaten in front of me. I saw my grandmother put in jail and beaten and raped. I saw houses exploding, villages burning and people being shot down. I knew what an enemy looked like.”

The sojourn in Ethiopia promised respite from war. They were told they would get an education, but when they arrived there was nothing. “It was just a wilderness,” he remembers. “We had to start from scratch. We had to build houses for ourselves. We had to learn to cook. The most disturbing thing was we saw people dying of starvation.”

Basic training was with dummy guns and after six months the children were considered battle ready. They were quartered in the camp and made forays into Sudan to defend territory. Food and shelter were supplied, but no wages or uniforms. His ambition, he says, was simply to “kill as many Muslims as possible,” referring to the militias from the North. This natural bitterness grew stronger in the loveless environment cultivated by rebel leaders. He now realizes it was a deliberate strategy to destroy all vestiges of conscience. “What good is conscience to a soldier?” he asks.

Jal avoids the blood-soaked details, but it’s clear that he killed a lot of people during his five years of service. There were SPLA rules about not harming women, babies and prisoners, but the kids were so pumped that it was unrealistic to expect them to abide such niceties. “When you find a prisoner who you are still bitter towards, you want to cut them,” he says, shedding some light on the cruelty of captors toward their captives. “You want them to feel the pain. You scream, jump, hit them with a sword or whatever.” He admits to having participated in what he now calls “mob justice.”

Although these things happened a long time ago, they still trouble him. When I ask if he was homesick as a boy soldier, he tells me that he cried at first but stopped missing his family after a while. Then he appears to be struck by the callousness of the comment and says, “Could we please focus on the music, because my story, really—really stresses me. I just want to promote my music.”

But Jal’s music is about just such things. The title track, “Warchild,” is pure autobiography. “Forced to Sin” is about killing and stealing. “Emma” is about Emma McCune, the British aid worker who rescued him and smuggled him into Kenya. Songs such as “Shadow of Death,” “Stronger” and “Hai” allude to the ghosts that still haunt him.

Despite his momentary hesitation, Jal is remarkably well-balanced for someone who has spent much of his life in a danger zone. The only visible sign of stress is a habit of wriggling his shoulders when he speaks, as though relieving tension. But the real damage is obviously within. “The effect I’m left with,” he says during a candid moment, “is that my heart is cold. When I meet my family, my heart doesn’t move me like it would move a normal person. That’s what’s depressing.”

Jal’s return to normality began in 1992 when—following a rift in the leadership of the SPLA—around 400 boys left camp, intending to head home. With only the sun and stars as navigation points, they got lost in the barren landscape and wandered for three months, sleeping in the open and surviving on a diet of rats, lizards, snakes, snails and vultures. When their comrades died they would booby trap the bodies to kill preying hyenas for food. More than 370 of the boys died from starvation.

In “Forced to Sin” he refers to the loss of his friend Lual, whose body he actually considered consuming, so great was his hunger. “Cannibalism happened,” he says matter-of-factly. “I was tempted to eat my best friend because I was starving. Human beings smell like food. They smell delicious. You want to bite them.”

The journey ended at Waat, headquarters of the breakaway rebel faction, where he met Emma McCune, a spirited British aid worker who’d married its commander, Riek Machar. (McCune is the subject of the book Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins.) She took pity on Jal and smuggled him aboard a flight out of Ethiopia and into Kenya. Once in Nairobi, he shared her home and was sent to one of the city’s best schools where he learned English.

It was a difficult transition. Stability, warmth and affection were foreign to him. Having had no formal education, he suffered the indignity of being schooled alongside five- and six-year-old children. “It takes time to transform into someone better,” he says. “Any child soldier has to go through a lot of love, care and understanding to become normal. When I first went to school, I was fighting all the time. The soldier mentality was still in me. I kept getting expelled. I found it hard to take instructions from anyone who wasn’t a military commander.”

McCune helped many child soldiers, settling most of them in refugee camps, so why did Jal receive such special treatment? “I don’t know,” he answers. “I may never know. That’s why, in the song, I call her my ‘angel.’ I used to dress in her clothes. She let me sleep in her bed. I was like her little brother or her son. She saw me as a little kid, whereas in my mind I was a man and a soldier. She used to worry about me finding my way on the streets, and I would be thinking, ‘Why do you think I’d get lost? I know my way.’”

A year after arriving in Kenya, tragedy struck. McCune was killed in a car accident and Jal was again left to fend for himself. He disappeared into the slums of Nairobi and tried to put his life back together. It was here that he met Josephine Mumo who ran a home for street kids.

Mumo was hugely influential. She not only fed and housed him but introduced him to a church where he discovered love, prayer and music. She told him about Moses and Joseph and explained how they had wandered through deserts and suffered oppression but had found favor with God. She also introduced him to the stories of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He learned the concept of forgiveness. Not only could he forgive others, she taught him, but also he could be forgiven.

“I got into reading the Bible,” he says. “I got into the Prayer of the Lord: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…’ Then I heard someone preach that, when we forgive, it’s actually better for us. Those were the things I took in. Gospel music hammered positivity into my heart.”

Remarkably, Jal had no concept of a world beyond the Africa he’d lived in. He didn’t know there were black-skinned people in other countries. When he saw Biggie Smalls, Bob Marley and Tupac Shakur on TV in Nairobi he assumed they were Kenyans. He began to discover that people were enduring hard times in other places. He became politicized. Music became his tutor and his therapist.

“Music moves my emotions because music loosens me up,” he explains. “That’s where everything starts. Music is the only thing that can speak to your mind and heart without your permission. I don’t know what you can compare to music. If there was no music, this world would be mad.”

He started singing at church, taking inspiration from the words of the songs as well as from the passion and joy with which they were performed. At home he listened to hip-hop, which provided him with a window onto an obviously troubled world. “I would listen to them singing about drugs, prostitution and brutality,” he says. “I would think, ‘Wow, these guys are going through a lot of stuff.’ When someone talks about a problem, I listen to it because nothing can beat someone’s testimony. When I listen to someone’s testimony, it helps me.”

That, in essence, is what Emmanuel Jal does. He testifies, to his past and his present, confident that it will help people. As he says on Warchild’s title track, “I believe I’ve survived for a reason / To tell my story to touch lives.” How will he touch lives? “My music comes out of the pain,” he says. “It’s from what I have experienced because my country’s at war and my people are refugees. At the moment, I feel I am a voice for the voiceless, speaking for my people.”

The only music Jal knew growing up was the songs people sang as they worked, celebrated, mourned or worshiped—music woven into the fabric of daily life. Musicianship wasn’t the preserve of specialists. “In Africa, music is for everything,” he says. “Music was originally used for community. That was what music was for.”

When he came to London after cutting two albums in Kenya (Ceasefire and Gua), the major record companies were nonplussed by this hybrid music that could have fit into World Music, Gospel or Contemporary Urban. It dealt with violence, but it wasn’t gangsta. It dealt with sex, but it wasn’t dirty. It dealt with Africa, but it wasn’t African.

“They thought I was too gospel-y,” he recalls. “They said it wouldn’t sell. They said, look, you’re a soldier. You’re a hard guy. You need to develop a tougher image. I refused. I told them that I was doing this music to help me and to help my country, which was at war. I don’t need to act tougher.”

His riposte to them comes in “No Bling”: “No ho’s no bitches no bling / I don’t need none of these things / To sell a lot of records like Sting.” In another track, “50 Cent,” he gently chides the rap star for turning violence into a game. 50 Cent is playing with the kids, he argues, but in turn is being played by those who benefit from fear, violence and arms sales.

“Shooting people is not funny,” he says. “Once you do it, you need special help because a human being is not an animal. It’s somebody who has a spirit and a soul. You may think you’re hard enough, but when you grow older you realize how terrible it is. I know war veterans who can’t talk about killing. They can’t share it. They can’t talk about what fun it is to kill people. It’s not fun.”

Jal is unyielding in the face of record-industry pressure and unimpressed by celebrity. He recorded a song with Moby for the forthcoming documentary film Call + Response: A Concert to End Slavery but clearly Moby could be Dopey, Sleepy or Happy as far as he’s concerned. He confronted Bob Geldof in person about the lack of African performers in Live 8 and was unsatisfied by the Irish campaigner’s explanation. When I ask him if he was thrilled to have a track included on the soundtrack of the movie Blood Diamond, he answers, “I don’t know. I’m just doing things, and when something big comes along I just say, ‘Fine, cool,’ because I have no idea what is big or what is small. I’m not into being famous and getting glory for myself.”

His goal is to draw attention to Sudan. He doesn’t want to get sidetracked into becoming a Western celebrity. “I’m on a mission,” he says. “I’m representing my people. That’s what I stand for. Whether I’m famous or unknown, my attitude and lifestyle shouldn’t change, because my people are suffering. What have I got to be proud of when what makes me ‘me’ is being destroyed back home?”

With the broader perspective provided by education and travel, he sees that Africa has been a victim of power games played by developed nations. In “Vagina” he likens the continent to a repeatedly raped woman. The natural resources—gold, diamonds and oil—have made it a killing ground rather than the paradise it could be.

“Africa is rich, yet it’s poor. My question is, ‘why?’” he asks. “My music challenges the African leaders as much as those from the rest of the world. If I get a platform, I will tell them that they’re failing us because their interest is their stomachs. We don’t need leaders like that. There is more suffering in Africa than in any other part of the world. We need leaders who are willing to die so that their people may live.”