A Sudanese 'Lost Boy' Hopes to Sing Away the Pain
By Nora Boustany
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Short dreadlocks, stylishly askew, frame Emmanuel Jal's face, aglow with a sheen as brown and smooth as coffee beans.
His story as a Sudanese child warrior turned rapper is a tapestry of tragedy and sheer luck. Jal's narrative flows between darkness and light, the terror that befell his family and kinsmen, the horrors he went on to inflict upon others, and a deep-seated desire to set things right.
Kind strangers rescued him, and now at 27 he wants to protect the childhood of others.
The singer got his peak moment in 2005 with a song called "Gua," which means "peace" in his Nuer dialect. Jal had confronted Bob Geldof, the organizer of the Live 8 concert in London's Hyde Park, for putting together a performance benefiting Africa that did not feature African entertainers. Eventually Jal got to perform at the Live 8 show in Cornwall, England. Good looks and stage presence, raw pluck and a message of pain have shaped his nascent career and cause.
A documentary on Jal, "War Child," will have its premiere in Washington next month. An album with the same title will be released in April. In September, he performed before adoring crowds at Georgetown University and Ibiza, a local club, to raise money for a school he plans to build in his native Bentiu in southern Sudan.
His art was never an end in itself. He fell into it as his Plan B after he had to abandon engineering studies in England because of visa problems.
Still, his songs enhanced the movie "Blood Diamond," and his haunting soundtracks accompanied scenes set in Africa on the TV series "ER."
* * *
Unable to sit still in his chair during a fall interview at the Four Seasons, Jal keeps rearranging his gangly frame as he recounts his adventures, lived out in the killing fields of southern Sudan.
At 6, he was sent with other South Sudanese children to a school in Ethiopia, where President Mengistu Haile Mariam supported the separatist movement in neighboring Sudan. The war in Sudan between the mainly Muslim North and the Christian South was raging. Jal's father was a commander in the southern rebel movement, the Sudan People's Liberation Army, and the children attended training camp along with their studies.
Jal's mother was "claimed by the war when we all fled in different directions," he says. "I saw her get beaten by strangers when I was 6. My auntie was raped in front of me. My home was burned." His father gave him up to the rebels to set an example for others.
But Mengistu was toppled in 1991, and the children fled their school on foot to reach rebel-held territories. Jal was barely 11. Once they reached SPLA territory, older fighters armed them and ordered them to raid government troops in the regional capital, Juba.
Killing came easily. "If you are sitting in your own home and the thief comes to attack, the dog, the baby, they will all fight back. We had experienced it, we had seen the terror. Most of Sudan's lost boys were bitter and wanted revenge. Just a bit of an ignition could set us off," he recalls in a telephone interview from London. "You are hate-driven. I was hate-driven."
When the rebel-led child soldiers would capture Arab soldiers, "we would beat them with machetes," Jal says. They had heard tales of torture from southerners who had been taken captive in the North. They told of hands dipped in boiling oil, the severing of arms, other abuses.
"I'd rather die on my feet," says Jal.
I lived with an AK-47
By my side
Slept with one eye open wide
Run
Duck
Play dead
Hide
I've seen my people die like flies
-- Emmanuel Jal, "Forced to Sin"
"We did not have the proper artillery or weapons to shoot down helicopter gunships. This was terrifying," says Jal. He has a recurring nightmare of being in a helicopter crash. "I get shot in the head. The others return fire. Then I wake up and I am still alive. That is my trauma. When I don't talk about my story, I don't have dreams, and when I do, it all comes back," he says.
* * *
Scared and exhausted from running between exploding bombs, the children deserted the rebel lines. The "lost boys," as they came to be called, trekked across Sudan's cracked, barren badlands, its crocodile-infested rivers and snake-laced mud patches, to flee the war and be with their own tribe, the Nuer. Four hundred began the trek; only 16 survived. The others fell victim to ambushes, disease, hunger and suicide.
As they approached the entrance to a refugee camp in Waat, Jal says he saw a vulture begin to peck at the back of a starving infant, so weak he couldn't move. "I cannot forget this image," Jal says. "His mother tried, but was too emaciated and limp to save her child. He died later."
The lost boys joined a swelling camp of refugees. Naked survivors crouched on the edge of flatlands shrouded by ribbons of smoke from bonfires of excrement. Emaciated, they waited for airdrops of food.
But Jal's time in the camp was brief. Emma McCune, a flamboyant British aid worker of grand impulses who had wed a warlord from Jal's tribe, was taken by the boy's compelling story and the twinkle of mischief in his eyes. When she boarded a U.N. plane to be evacuated to Nairobi, she took him with her, pressing her expat friends and foundations in Kenya to pay for his education.
This bewitching activist treated him as her own. She read him stories, let him snuggle in bed with her and sent him to the most prestigious school in Kenya. She coaxed him to play soccer and basketball like other children his age to overcome his traumas. She gave him her clothes to wear. But then, eight months after he had found safe haven, fate struck again. McCune was killed in a car accident in Nairobi. She had devoted much of her energy to trying to save southern Sudanese children from the kind of life Jal had. In the short time he was with her, Jal says, "she planted a good seed in my life."
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."
When his songs played, "people would sit down around their radios and listen," he says. "Relatives looked for one another, then for my father and sisters to share the news. My music connected them. This took away some of my pain." He found his family -- his father, his grandmother, his sisters.
"But to discover that one of my sisters . . . is a sex slave to a warlord who beats her until she starts bleeding . . . I saw her but I could not help her. She is trapped there with five children. That really hurt," he says.
His younger sister, 18, who was raped three times, got to know of her brother over the BBC. She was finally rescued when friends smuggled her out to Kenya. All these stories Jal incorporated in his music.
Now I cry myself to sleep
In my dreams I often weep
My children are hungry
And my back in pain
And yet they come to rape again
-- Emmanuel Jal, "Vagina"
"I didn't enjoy my childhood, I lost it," says Jal. "I don't ever want a child to go through this. I feel I owe them something."
He founded a nonprofit, Gua Africa, in London, dedicated to educating children affected by war and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, mainly former child soldiers. "We have 16 registered in schools," he says. "I am supporting six and some friends in the U.S. are helping. People log on to my Web site, Gua [ http://www.guaafricaonline.com], and ask, 'What can we do?'
"My music is for the children of slaves, who sang the music of pain. People heard their cry and listened. I have put my struggle in the music so the music will reach you."
Pimps and thieves in Italian-cut suits
Stop raping Africa like she's your prostitute
To mister oil, diamond and gold miner
Stop treating mama Africa like a vagina
She's not your whore, anymore
You take the riches, and you leave her people poor
-- Emmanuel Jal, "Vagina"
A dispute with Jal's first recording company led to a bitter falling out with Moszynski, who had helped promote Jal and introduced him to people in the music industry. Moszynski, more than any of McCune's other friends, had taken Jal into his home and treated him like a son. But Jal, who was dissatisfied with the record deal, hired lawyers to get him out of the contract. They wrote letters to Moszynski accusing him of exploitation and "slavery." The tactic worked -- the record company released Jal -- but left Moszynski seething with hurt and rage, according to friends.
"He never informed me of what I was entering to, but I care about this man," Jal says. "He stood with me when Emma died. He is always in my heart. I hope we can reconcile, but now I am on my feet and I want to help others.
"I have 40 acres of land; my desire is to build a school in Ler for child soldiers. We need schools to be opened everywhere, to open eyes and widen their brains. Most of them just know how to shoot."
I'm a war child
I'm a war child . . .
I believe I've survived for a reason
To tell my story, to touch lives
-- Emmanuel Jal, "War Child"
View all comments that have been posted about this article.