Emmanuel Jal

Tales of triumph over hardship are as old as the art of storytelling itself. They inspire us, give us hope—each story a piece of evidence that our world might make sense somehow. But even our sensationalized Hollywood renditions of this formula often fall short of those set in reality.

Imagine fighting in two civil wars by the age of 13, with your AK-47 measuring longer than you in length. Imagine your childhood robbed of all its innocence by guns and bloodshed. For Emmanuel Jal, this is his reality.

When Emmanuel was a young boy in Sudan, civil war erupted across the land, bringing with it all the horrors and atrocities that wars tend to dictate. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) was engaged in a conflict with the Sudanese government. Like many other children around him, Emmanuel joined the SPLA when he was 7 years old in the hopes of finding a better life.

At age 8 he was brought to a training facility in Ethiopia that had been disguised as a school—a facade created to avoid attention from the U.N. and other international organizations.

“You’ve got thousands of kids and no buildings, so we had to build for ourselves,” he said. “When we arrived there was not enough food… Kids started dying, because we didn’t know how to cook. So when we were trained as soldiers, we learned how to build… we learned how to cook, we learned how to survive, we became even more hardcore…. All my life I’ve seen people die, but a moment was coming, I was waiting to actually participate in battle.”

That day inevitably came for Emmanuel. For the next few years he was a soldier at war, fighting on the front lines and burying countless childhood friends.

“Somebody dies 7 years old, 8 years old, you have to bury your fellow kid, because there are no adults with us to help us bury,” he said. 

“...On the battlefield, the worst thing you could ever think of was to be wounded, or being left there. There’s the adrenaline when you go to war, you either win or lose it. When you win the area, there’s the stench, there’s the injured, there’s that dark part where you don’t want to stay in the city after you’ve captured it, because it’s horrible.

“They are different things between when you are in action and when the action is over. The real drama is when the action is over. There’s joy for you to celebrate. You won, you’re happy. But… the destruction that it’s caused can blow your head out. The stench of dead people can blow your brain out. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

After fighting in Ethiopia for several years, the SPLA was beaten back into Sudan, where Emmanuel and many others joined the war effort in the town of Juba. After years of blood and suffering, he and a number of other child soldiers fled from Juba to Waat, to escape from the SPLA. Once again they were in search of a better life, hopefully finding better results this time around.

They spent three months traveling to Waat, and very few of these children made it. There was no food to be had on this journey, and many died of suicide or starvation, or had been reduced to cannibalism. Out of roughly 400 young soldiers, only 16 survived.

“We had no food, so we had gone many days, there was no water to drink,” he said. “People were drinking their own urine, soldiers were forced to tell their fellow soldiers to fill a cup with their urine. People committed suicide. Personally, I felt the pressure. I sat next to my friend, and I told him, ‘I’m going to eat you tomorrow,’ because there is nothing for us to eat.

“We were depending on roaches and snails but they were not there anymore. And so, my senses changed. You look at your fellow human being and they smell like food. ...[The dead] got eaten. Boys were roasting them. And this is the lowest point in my life, apart from seeing people die. This kind of death, seeing somebody starve to death, seeing somebody reduced to eating [another person], Starving is a slow death.”

Emmanuel did eventually make it to Waat, where he was rescued by a British aid-worker named Emma McCune. She adopted him and smuggled him into Kenya where she lived and put him through school. A few month later McCune died in a tragic car accident, leaving Emmanuel once again without hope.

“It was hard for me,” he said, “because here my world is beginning again, and then it’s crushed in my face. She’s gone. How am I going to live? All my life the people I loved, the people that were closest to me were gone… everyone was killed.”

Fortunately, a couple of McCune’s friends (Madeliene Bunting and Anna Ledgard) stepped forth to take care of Emmanuel in her absence. In Nairobi he was able to continue his studies, and began taking an interest in music. In the years that followed, he became a hip hop artist of great acclaim, letting his story flow through his music to help raise awareness and funds for suffering youth in Sudan.

Songs like “Warchild” (also the name of his autobiography) tell his tale with passion, and frankly, it’s simply good music. One cannot help but question the nature of his track, “Vagina,” at first glance, but upon closer inspection you realize that he uses the vagina as a metaphor for Africa and how it’s perpetually being violated by war and suffering.

“To be honest, music is not what I wanted to do,” he said. “I wanted to be an electronic engineer, I wanted to do different things. But I was forced to do music by my situation, by my circumstances, because I was able to be happy…. Music is my pain killer. This is where I run to. This is where I get to see heaven again, this is where I become a child again. So that’s how I started doing music, and because I was also doing it to raise funds for kids and putting them in school.”

Music also brought the war-torn remains of his family back together. His brothers and sisters, upon hearing Emmanuel on BBC, were able to locate him and meet him once again.

Emmanuel has also been fasting for the last year to help raise funds for his charity, Gua Africa (gua-africa.org). Having met Emmanuel in person, you can physically see the toll his fasting has taken on his body. His bones protrude form his malnourished body, and his speech is slow and slightly scattered, which he attributes directly to this year-long fast.

Right now you can download a free single from his website (emmanueljal.com), also in an attempt to promote fundraising for Gua Africa. Emmanuel Jal is one of many speakers that have so far participated in the North Dakota Museum of Art’s “The Disappeared” exhibition. For more information on the exhibition, visit http://www.ndmoa.com.

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His message, his charity, his fast, skinny and talks slow because of fast, $1 from a million better than $1 million from one man