Issue 4 – Wednesday 2 August
Focus on Child Exploitation
Hundreds of people crammed into the Child Exploitation Centre yesterday to hear a powerful story of a former child soldier from Sudan. Emmanuel Jal held the audience spellbound as he spoke of his life, walking thousands of miles across countries ravaged by civil war, and how he became a successful hip-hop star with an international career.
Civil war broke out in Sudan in 1983. Like all conflicts it's a complicated web of problems: natural disasters like famine and drought are aggravated by abuse of power by those in charge.
Sudan is divided along ethnic and religious lines between the North and South: the Muslim Arab Government in the North and the Christian Africans in the South. The fighting was sparked by the government's attempt to install Islamic Sharia law across the country and by a grab for control of the oil reserves in the centre.
After walking hundreds of miles with other orphans to Ethiopia to go to school, Emmanuel was recruited as a child soldier. By the time he was eight years old he had learnt how to fire a machine gun. At 13 he was fighting on the front line.
In 1991 Ethiopia erupted into civil war as well - the thousands of child soldiers were again forced to flee. Named the 'Lost Boys', they roamed between wars, battling to survive against guns and hunger.
Eventually Emmanuel managed to escape after an American aid worker took him in and smuggled him to Kenya. He was able to use his passion and experience to write songs - drawing on the pain of a child forced to kill.
A success in Kenya led to his discovery. He's now able to perform internationally and also use his music to inspire new songwriters from around the globe. His performances have extra impact because he's now working with a producer from North Sudan. The first time such a collaboration has taken place.
He'll be running songwriting workshops here at Global Village and hopes his story, painful as it is to tell, can help others to find their voice.
"Most musicians that you see are people who have come from a painful background, and they have suffered," Emmanuel says.
Although he says it gives him pain to talk about what happened to him, he has chosen to do so at Global Village because he could not give up the chance to tell so many young people and encourage them to fight to prevent children being recruited as soldiers.