Jal ‘Raps’ Up Unity Days
Emmanuel Jal says that the African way of writing history is to tell stories. “I’m just doing it in a musical way,” explained the international hip-hop star, who was at Rider’s Bart Luedeke Center Theater on Monday, October 20, to talk about his experiences as a child soldier in Sudan. Jal’s keynote address was the stirring culmination of the University’s Unity Days 2009 celebration.
Jal, now in his late 20s and living in London, riveted the capacity audience with his harrowing personal tale of heartbreak, survival, salvation and forgiveness that extended across eastern Africa. His life is the subject of War Child, a documentary chronicling the story of Jal from his days as an automatic-weapon-toting 7-year-old fighting in Sudan’s brutal civil war. War Child captured the Audience Choice Award at the 2008 Tribeca International Film Festival,
“People ask me, ‘isn’t it painful to travel everywhere to tell your story?’” said Jal, who is unsure of his actual birthdate, but figures he was born in or about 1980. “I answer yes, it is, but I’m doing it for those many, many children who are in the same situation I was.”
Rounded up by the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA) as a young boy of about 7, Jal and the other youths were taken to Ethiopia for what they were told would be schooling. His father was a member of the SPLA, and so young Jal believed he would be taught to avenge the destruction he witnessed in his grandmother’s village in Bantiu.
“Helicopters, food; they told us that everything was made by people who went to school,” he said.
What Jal and the others found in Ethiopia, however, was much different than what had been promised them. Thousands of children from many tribes were thrown together. There was prepared food, but only for so long. Children as young as Jal did the best they could with raw maize and beans, but it was a losing battle against malnutrition.
“When children died, we took them out and buried them,” he recalled.
Soon, an SPLA commander came to speak to the boys. “He asked us, ‘How many of you can testify that you haven’t seen your village burned down, or your mother raped?’” Jal said. “Not many of us could say we had not. What I saw as a kid was like a seed planted. It poisoned me to hate a race of people.”
From that point, Jal and the others were armed with automatic weapons and trained to fight in the bloody conflict. They started slowly, conducting nighttime raids on a neighboring village to steal sheep and goats for food, but over time Jal saw his life sink to unimaginable depths. After Ethiopia was overthrown, and the band of young soldiers had to retreat into southern Sudan, where they faced long stretches with virtually no food or water.
One day, after three months, Jal carried a good friend, near death from starvation, to a place beneath a tree to die. Desperately hungry at the same time, Jal prayed to God for food. In the absence of sustenance, he explained, he would be forced to relinquish his belief in God and do the unthinkable. “You get to a situation where people – the person next to you – smells like food, like dry meat,” Jal explained.
Hours passed, and Jal softly explained to his friend, by this time in an unconscious slumber, that “tomorrow, I am going to eat you,” he recalled. “It was the lowest point in my life.
“He died that night, and the battle began in my mind,” Jal continued. “To eat him was the only way to survive, but it would be a sin to do.”
As morning broke, however, Jal was spared of his awful decision when another young soldier shot a large bird. “We ate every part of it, even the beak, because we didn’t know when we’d have food again.”
That bird – the first edible life they had encountered in months – marked the first of two events that saved Jal’s life. From that point, he and his fellow soldiers found food in abundance, and he was also soon to meet Emma McCune, a British aid worker who smuggled him out of the SPLA and into her home in Kenya. Jal credits McCune with transforming his life through education, and helping him to view the war through a larger perspective.
“Through education, I learned what was killing my people,” he said, citing the many corporate influences that often dictate national policies for countries around the world. “I only knew what was happening in Sudan.”
Jal’s troubles were not finished, however. McCune was killed in a 1993 car accident when he was about 12 years old, and her husband, SPLA commandant Riek Machar, did not welcome Jal in his home after her death. “After Emma died, life was bad,” Jal said. “So I turned to music.”
Through music, Jal has immortalized McCune in a song, which he performed at the conclusion of his address. Since he began performing, Jal has since become a successful hip-hop artist fighting a new battle: bringing peace to his beloved Sudan and building schools in Africa. He was the winner of the 2005 American Gospel Music Award for Best International Artist, and has performed at the Live 8 concert in Cornwall, England, and at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday concert in London in 2008.
Jal urged the students in the audience to do what they can to touch the lives of others. “Emma was not rich, but she helped save 150 child soldiers,” he explained. “Nothing is bigger than investing in a human being.”
