Emmanuel Jal was around seven years old when he was recruited as a soldier for the Sudanese Liberation Army. He’s now become a hit musician. But how did he get from one to the other? He explained his story to The Punch.
Can you describe for us how you were recruited to the Sudanese Liberation Army, and how you felt at the time?
I was 7 years old and I had been sent to a refugee camp in Ethiopia by my father to receive schooling and to leave the war behind. Whilst I was at the camp, under the UN’s nose SPLA commanders were rallying the children and young people together.
They told us ‘your families are not here anymore, your family and mother are the Ak47s’. As a result it was easy to indoctrinate us with their ideologies and take revenge on the Arabs from the North.
I wanted to kill as many as possible at the time, I was angry by what had happened to me, I was young, alone and didn’t know otherwise.
When they wanted to pick us as soldiers I didn’t think about my age, there were no other opportunities and I was determined to fight for what I’d lost.
What made you feel bitter, and as though killing Muslims was the right thing to do?
Since I was born I saw cruelty to my family and community from what we called ‘jalabas’ from the north. The hatred grew inside me as the war ruled my childhood. My first sights were of war, bombs dropping, the ground shaking, people running.
Some of my clearest earliest memories were of people being attacked: I remember my mum’s guard motionless on the ground as she tried to push his intestines back into his dying body, fleeing on a boat which turned upside down and people drowning and worst of all losing my mum as bombs dropped and having to leave for Ethiopia alone at 7 years old.
By the time I arrived, I was vulnerable and bitter. Killing Muslims was a solution to me, a way of releasing my anger and to fight for what had happened to us.
What would you like the world to know about child soldiers?
Child soldiers are not different to any child in the world. Children in war and without education are vulnerable and are easily indoctrinated by people who want to use them.
The situation forces them to do other things, they are not evil or bad, but they have no one and the army is their family. The way out of this is to ensure that children are safe and educated.
Safety will protect them and education will give them confidence and knowledge to seek another way and learn that conflict is never the solution. There are always 2 sides to a story, but you won’t learn about this unless there’s education.
How did you turn your life around?
Through education. Education allowed me to see things in a different way and also how to forgive. I learnt about other conflicts in the world and about great leaders who promoted peace, like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King.
This gave me a different perspective on how to deal with things and also I learnt most importantly that it wasn’t necessarily the Muslims killing us but the economics behind the issues in South Sudan.
The North had the power and wealth, so through religion they brought people together in order to discriminate the ‘Christians’ in the South and the tribes they saw as inferior.
People always try to divide and conquer, even amongst the South Sudanese there are still issues of tribalism amongst the Dinka and Nuer. We have to learn we are one people and in order to move forward and develop we have to resolve things peacefully in order to prosper.
Education helps this immensely as it gives young people the opportunity to learn and appreciate our differences in the world, be emotionally intelligent and not to discriminate. From this I learnt how to forgive, and through forgiving myself and the people who hurt me I found a way of moving on.
Tell us about the role of hip hop in protest and social justice?
Hip Hop is like the CNN of the ghetto. It’s the voice of the people and highlights social injustices. I turned to hip hop because it was a form of expression which I could identify with.
I liked the way it called out against social injustice without having to be politically correct. It’s a passionate and exciting way to voice your message. I’ve also learnt how to have fun with it, and now my songs are also about things I can celebrate in life too.
Emmanuel Jal appears at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Sydney Opera House in: War: Keep Out of Reach of Children, with journalist Kate Adie on Sunday October 2, 2.30pm, Opera Theatre.
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