Emmanuel Jal: A Child Of War, a Voice of Peace

Devastated by her loss, Jal walked up to Peter Moszynski, one of McCune's closest friends. "What happens to me now?" Jal asked. "Who will take care of me?" Moszynski promised Jal he would not be alone.

All my life I've been hiding in the jungle
The pain I carry
Is too much to handle
Who's there please to light my candle
Is there anyone to hear my cry
Here I am pale and dry

-- Emmanuel Jal, "War Child"

"My whole world crashed around me. I took to living in slums," Jal says. Grieving, he became a street kid for a while. But to memorialize her, McCune's close circle of friends set up a fund to continue the boy's education. They took him into their homes and assisted him financially. "Emma helped him from beyond the grave," says John Ryle, an anthropologist, speaking by telephone from England.

Jal graduated from high school and went on to University of Westminster in England to study engineering but dropped out when his visa was not renewed. "I turned to my music. It was my backup plan." Emma's friends helped him again, and he released a single, "Gua." It became an international hit. His first album was produced with singer Abdel Gadir Salim, an Arab from northern Sudan, though the two never met.

Jal now is boxed in by a boyhood he missed out on and a mission of salvation: tending to a motherland weighted down by layers of bloody history, of greed over oil, and the South's refusal to live under Islamic law.

Jal's music was broadcast on the BBC and disseminated across Africa. "Musicians are emotional leaders," he says. "When the south danced to their music, northern youths danced to our music. When Mohammed Wardi [a famous North Sudanese singer] came and sang to the soldiers in the Muslim-Christian war, he was persecuted and beaten. His ear was slashed off," Jal says.

"Now it is different. I have come to realize that not all Arabs are terrible. What is killing us is the oil," he adds.

Even those delicate musical bonds seem in jeopardy now as a South-North agreement sealed with American diplomatic will and vast economic assistance is on the verge of unraveling.

* * *

Jal traveled home last January with the documentary film crew to track down long-lost family members.

He yearned to go home but was also tormented about it, he says. Everyone's expectations were so high. "They used to hear me on the radio. I was the voice that carried our misery to the outside world. It depressed me that I had gone empty-handed with nothing to give."