War Child

by Emmanuel Jal

Jal was a child soldier, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, basically the children of South Sudanese who were killed, and their villages destroyed, in the 1990s by North Sudanese militias. His autobiography is extraordinarily well-told – he gives mercilessly detailed accounts of brutal hand-to-hand fighting as the child soldiers of the South, went into combat against North Sudanese forces. And these were 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds doing the most horrendous things. It’s an incredible document of just how nasty and savage this all was, and it was all going on just ten years ago.