Features > The Sound of SURVIVAL
The Sound of SURVIVAL
Speaking recently about the fifth anniversary of the ongoing crisis in Darfur, Emmanuel Jal produced a sweeping condemnation of the world's failure to act, which had more gravitas to it than many a politician could muster. There is good reason for this: Jal is a former Sudanese child soldier who spent much of his adolescence fighting for the Sudan's People Liberation Army (SPLA). He was lucky to come away with his life, and is now intent on affecting change for his country.
"Genocide is happening before our very eyes, and all other nations are just watching it happen," he said recently. "The time for excuses and platitudes has passed... We will insist that our political leaders exert whatever pressure is necessary to secure the admission of an effective peacekeeping force... Failure is not an option."
Jal's story is an astonishing one of thrumphing over adversity. He has just released his debut album and was also the subject of a documentary film of the same name. Early next year, he publishes his autobiography; his aim, "to tell my story in order that others can learn from it, and so that no one else has to suffer the way I did, the way so many of my people did".
Jal's father was a respected police officer, but at the onset of the country's second civil war, he fled his post and his family, fearing execution. By the time the government's army arrived at his village of Tonj, any semblance of normal life for Jal was comprehensively eviscerated.
"My mum and my grandmother were beaten by the government troops, my auntie was raped in front of me," he recalls with unflinching clarity. "We were running out of food, we were desperate. Many people turned to cannibalism."
"The SPLA were the only hope we had," he says. By the time he was sent into battle, at the age of 13, he "just wanted to kill as many of them [government troops] as possible".
In what turned out to be his final battle for the SPLA a year later, Jal and his fellow soldiers trekked hundreds of miles for a major assault to weaken government defences by running through minefields. "Because we were lighter and could run fast, we had a better chance of surviving."
When Jal finally arrived, with just 11 fellow soldiers remaining, he was spotted by a Canadian aid worker called Emma McCune, who helped him escape — hidden in a box of aircraft parts on an aid flight — to Kenya. Here, he was promptly enrolled into a local school and thrived.
Jal found solace in the church, the teachings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and the emboldening messages of modern-day hip-hop. "In many ways, music saved me; it showed me another way."
He started to make his own music, some of which found its way to a local radio station whose airplay made him famous locally. In 2005, he released a mini-album Gua ("Peace") in Kenya, and later managed to get onto the bill at Live 8 in London.
"A lot of opportunities came my way... and so I stayed in the city. I like London... I feel safe here."
He became intent on following up Gua with something that would bring him more international recognition. Warchild is that album, raising issues of death and cannibalism, and the way in which he believes the world views Africa. The film War Child is a harrowing celluloid accompaniment to the album, and even features him returning to his home and reuniting with the father he hasn't seen since childhood.
Instead of working on his personal relationships (he confesses to finding it difficult to find a girlfriend, "let alone keep one"), he is pouring all his efforts right now into ridding himself of the dark shadow of his past by becoming a spokesman for Sudan.
His really is a remarkable story, then, but then Emmanuel Jal is clearly a remarkable young man.
"I am hopeful," he says. "Because if you don't have hope, what do you have?"
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