Abstract
This article concerns the portrayal of childhood innocence — both moral and legal — in the child soldier narrative, a predominantly African genre of writing. I begin with an analysis of how these stories establish the moral innocence of their young characters through prevailing narratological structures that culminate in the loss of this innocence, usually by means of scenes in which child soldiers kill or sexually assault other characters. The purpose of these scenes and subsequent reflections on them by some child soldier characters is not to disabuse readers of their notions of childhood innocence, but rather to heighten awareness of it by drawing explicit attention to it during moments of duress. The narratives do not present innocence prosaically as an abstraction or a plainly-stated character trait (Shklovsky, 2015). Instead, they invite readers to viscerally perceive it (and its inevitable loss) through disturbing portrayals of violence. Scenes of lost innocence also serve an integral plot function in the genre as prerequisites for the rehabilitation of former child soldiers after their decommission. This narrative trajectory emphasizes the essential innocence of the characters in their roles as victimized children. However, in the process it also downplays concerns about their possible culpability as soldiers.
Introduction: The moral and legal dimensions of innocence
Much of the dramatic tension in the literary genre known as child soldier narratives relies upon the incongruity between wartime brutality and the young characters who experience it. This violence includes looting, destruction of property, rape, lawful and unlawful killings, and other violations of human dignity, which are both endured and perpetrated by characters between the ages of five and 17. These offences are intrinsically significant to the genre regardless of who is involved in them, but they are especially compelling when committed by children, who are typically characterized in the Western world as innocents even when they participate as combatants in armed conflict. Most works associated with the genre are written by African authors, feature African protagonists, and largely take place in war-torn African settings. Yet they are produced by the Western publishing industry mainly for Western readers, who necessarily draw upon Western conceptual frameworks like childhood innocence in order to interpret them (Mastey, 2016). In this essay I demonstrate how narratives invite readers to judge child characters and their actions from this perspective by examining ten of the most commercially and/or critically successful works in the genre: memoirs by Grace Akallo (2007), Ishmael Beah (2007), Michael Chikwanine (2015), Emmanuel Jal (2009), and China Keitetsi (2004), as well as fiction by Chris Abani (2007), Emmanuel Dongala (2005), Uzodinma Iweala (2006), Delia Jarrett-Macauley (2005), and Ahmadou Kourouma (2007). Some texts invite a more sustained examination of their portrayals of childhood innocence than others. However, I maintain that the centrality of this concept of innocence to the genre as a whole is best understood when they are considered together, as I do in this article.
I intentionally bring together fictional and nonfictional works for similar reasons. I do not mean to suggest that these two narrative domains are identical, but rather that the differences typically observed between them are largely irrelevant for the purpose of this study. 1 One reason, which I have examined elsewhere in considerable detail (Mastey, 2016), is that the conflation between fiction and nonfiction is engrained within the marketing, reception, and even the production of child soldier narratives. Moreover, various foundational linguistic and literary theorists, from Philippe Lejeune and Gérard Genette to John Searle and Käte Hamburger, maintain that there are no inherent, internal textual properties that distinguish a work as necessarily autobiographical (see Genette, 1990: 757, n. 5). Perhaps a more useful contrast between fictional and nonfictional works “can be based on the different relationships they prompt us to postulate between the author implied by a given text and the persona of the narrator emerging from it. In an important sense, the narrator of every work of fiction is, as part of the work, fictional” (Hernadi, 1976: 252). However, this referential association is not germane to an analysis of child soldier narratives at the levels of their stories and discourses, specifically in relation to portrayals of childhood innocence. 2 My approach is rooted in literary analysis, rather than historiography. And my main concern here is the ways in which these discourses are narrated throughout a genre — including both novels and memoirs — that revels in the disruption of these ideals.
My analysis of the genre pivots around two interconnected meanings of the term “innocence” as it relates to childhood. The first is an ontological claim of predominantly religious origins in which innocence denotes naivety. According to this ideal, children embody prelapsarian ignorance; they do not possess moral maturity and are therefore provisionally incapable of good or evil behaviour. For example, Biblical passages assert that children “[have] no knowledge of good or evil” (Deuteronomy 1:39) and describe a period in the life cycle “before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good” (Isaiah 7:16). This vision of the innocent child is a vital facet of the complicated (and frequently contested) discourse on childhood in the Western world and evident in many of its foundational cultural developments such as Lockean and Rousseauian theories concerning maturation; celebratory depictions by Romantic poets; Victorian education and labour reform movements; twentieth-century psychosocial models by Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, and Jean Piaget; and more recent anxieties about the decline of childhood.
The second meaning of childhood innocence is that children are generally absolved of guilt (or sin in the theological context) when they behave inappropriately. Children do not enjoy complete impunity due to their status as innocents, but they are judged differently as a consequence of it. Concurrently, children are said to deserve special consideration in relation to a wide range of adult experiences and responsibilities, especially in the case of violence directed against them. Child abuse is prohibited by specific statutes in Western legal systems and encompasses not only physical force and maltreatment, but also psychological and emotional harm, sexual abuse, and other forms of exploitation. In this respect, innocence is a precarious condition of childhood that is analogous to purity; even brief exposure to these adult experiences could result in the premature loss of innocence. The crucial problem with this discourse is that it does not accurately represent the lived experiences of children, which means that young people and adults rarely conform to the expectations inherent in the concept as codified by domestic and international laws, as well as conventional wisdom. Therefore, when children deviate from this ideal they are considered aberrant, while adults are socially and/or criminally sanctioned if they do not enforce it. Childhood innocence is a socially constructed notion and not an axiomatic condition, but no less influential for being so.
Of course, innocence is not an innately Western concept, but international laws that relate to children are premised on Western notions about childhood that influence legal norms in non-Western countries and ostensibly serve as evidence of a universal standard. 3 Generally speaking, these legal standards share some of the same premises as moral conceptions of childhood innocence. They distinguish the cluster of activities that constitutes modern armed warfare as antithetical to childhood, which is why young people are forbidden from participating in war. They place the ultimate responsibility for child soldiering on adults, which according to the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a serious violation on a par with torture or summary execution. And they specify those assumed to innately possess legal innocence, namely all children under the ages of 15, 16, or 18, depending on the treaty, the date when it came into force, and the circumstances of enlistment. Differences between these minimum ages of recruitment reveal how the ideal of childhood innocence is not always compatible with observable reality. International labour standards that inaugurated the “straight 18” doctrine are no less relevant to child soldiers than international humanitarian or human rights standards that continue to allow voluntary child recruitment. Western conceptions of childhood were not substantially different in 1977, when 15-year-old combatants were officially sanctioned in international conflicts, and 2002, when they were prohibited. 4 There is no essential difference between the 17-year-old soldier in a state army and a rebel fighter of the same age. 5 These legalized contradictions demonstrate that the practical realities of armed conflict frequently infringe upon theoretical considerations of what it means to be a child in Western discourse on the subject.
Prewar innocence as self-evident
Most child soldier narratives feature linear plot structures in which the young protagonists describe their transformations from victimized civilians to desensitized perpetrators before they leave military service and begin a rehabilitation process in which some elements of their childhoods might be restored. Eleni Coundouriotis (2010) characterizes these stories as “recovery narratives” that emphasize the narrators as victims and their recuperation, rather than their identities as perpetrators of violence or the historical conditions that engender their use. Thus she distinguishes between the Western form of the recovery narrative and the African war novel, which is instead usually written for African audiences. I have more specifically associated child soldier narratives with the Western marketing category known as misery literature, a popular Western genre that gratuitously depicts the victimization of children and concludes with “the eventual triumph of the protagonists over their tragic circumstances or a hopeful implication that this outcome is, at the very least, possible” (Mastey, 2016: 7). Both plot typologies rely upon the sensationalized depiction of lost innocence with rehabilitation as the ideal outcome. A less obvious, but equally important, premise is that prior to enlistment these characters are moral and legal innocents. Childhood innocence is a precondition in child soldier narratives regardless of how they are generically categorized.
Consequently, textual references to the prewar innocence of the protagonists are uncommon and usually referential rather than explicit. For example, Birahima in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah Is Not Obliged indirectly asserts his innocence prior to enlistment when he explains that before he became a soldier he “was a fearless, blameless kid” 2007: 5), insofar as fearlessness and blamelessness are conditions that plausibly connote innocence. Yet he is also characterized in the novel as an unreliable narrator, as evidenced in part by the fact that he continues to describe himself as “the blameless, fearless street kid” after perpetrating violent acts that are incompatible with this self-image. To further complicate matters, Birahima effectively suggests that his innocence was forfeited before military service when he falsely accused his mother of witchcraft. Later he expresses regret, but while “[s]he never said anything to me about it […] she died with all the hurt in her heart, and now I was cursed and damned and I’d never do any good here on earth” (2007: 21). These examples from Allah Is Not Obliged point to the obvious distinction between the young protagonists of the genre and those who encode or decode meaning in their experiences, such as authors and readers, adult characters in the stories, and child soldiers who prematurely attain wisdom at the expense of their innocence. Postwar reminiscences about childhood prior to enlistment and what has been lost are, in contrast, prevalent throughout the genre.
Innocence is occasionally signalled in the genre indirectly through the often-inarticulate confusion of the protagonists at this disruption of normalcy caused by wartime violence. For example, Jal demonstrates in his memoir War Child that although he is aware that girls sometimes disappear from communities affected by war in Sudan, he is ignorant of the specific reasons why:
Again and again I heard a phrase I never had before — kun ke bom or “sex by force.” I wanted to understand what it was, but no one would tell me more than I knew from hearing them talk — that girl after girl was taken and never seen again. (Jal and Davies, 2009: 17)
Beah’s first visceral experience of war is depicted in his memoir A Long Way Gone when he encounters a family who ostensibly escapes a raid on their community by the Revolutionary United Front. He observes the father weeping and recalls, “It was the first time I had seen a grown man cry like a child, and I felt a sting in my heart” (2007: 12). Beah is not mature enough to fully comprehend the significance of the moment. On the one hand, the father discovers that his wife and children have been shot dead during their escape in the family vehicle. On the other hand, a bystander consoles him by saying that unlike many other victimized families, he can at least bury his loved ones. Their bloody remains and the man’s anguish are clearly evidence that something is wrong. But only adult observers, readers, and the autobiographical author through retrospective interpretation can adequately grasp the cruel irony of the scene.
Are these first-hand experiences of wartime violence a catalyst for adulteration, in which children’s innocence is irrevocably degraded? The protagonists remain legally innocent insofar as they have done nothing wrong, but while it is reasonable to wonder whether a child can also remain morally innocent after witnessing the brutality of armed conflict or experiencing it first hand as a victim, many of the stories remain ambiguous on the matter. Most invite readers to make this determination for themselves, which is especially problematic when a significant portion of a narrative concerns the protagonist’s initial experiences as a civilian, as in the case of memoirs by Beah, Jal, and Keitetsi, all of whom experience violent events long before their respective enlistments. In the most extreme instance, many readers would agree that Keitetsi has lost her moral innocence well before military service due to repeated physical and sexual abuse by her father, stepfamily, and community members, though she does not explicitly draw this same conclusion. My Luck, the protagonist of Chris Abani’s Song For Night, violently kills a man in self-defence while fleeing sectarian conflict before he becomes a soldier, but again the mitigating circumstances of this event render it ambiguous. Most young protagonists manage to avoid the complete loss of innocence as civilians; once they become soldiers that moral condition seems unsustainable.
Killing as a signifier of lost innocence
Participation in armed conflict as a soldier is a narrative event that jeopardizes innocence both in moral and legal terms. The specific form of violence that epitomizes this rupture is when child soldier characters kill in combat. Beah does not attribute his lost innocence to the mere sight of dead bodies and grieving civilians, nor to his general awareness of wartime conditions, or even his tendency to violence prior to the war itself. Rather, he implies that it is lost after he kills others in his role as a combatant. These acts distinguish him from “city boys [who] don’t know anything about the war except the news of it” (2007: 187) and innocent schoolchildren in the US who express naive excitement about his involvement in war (2007: 3). Even continuously severe experiences in wartime will not necessarily ensure this outcome, as Jal’s memoir demonstrates. Jal flees his childhood home due to conflict, survives a march across the Sudanese desert in which his best friend dies, lives for several years in dire conditions at Pinyudu in Ethiopia (among other refugee camps), learns that his mother has been killed by state-sponsored militias, and participates in several pitched battles in which he witnesses many gruesome deaths. Nevertheless, only after he is directly responsible for killing others in successive, lurid scenes does the narrative indicate that he is no longer simply a misguided youth subsumed into a culture of violence who still remains an inherently moral agent. 6 Rather, in these scenes he achieves tranquillity by revenging his mother, but necessarily at the expense of his childhood innocence.
Some characters are given justification for killing others by their leaders and others have their own personal motivations for doing so, but regardless of the reason almost all of the child protagonists in the genre commit homicide, to say nothing of other immoral offences such as theft, destruction of property, and so on. One common circumstance, especially among non-state armed groups, involves the killing of enemy soldiers as an initiation rite for prospective child soldiers. Some of these rites incorporate ritual elements while others are informal (due to the exigencies of the battlefield) but their shared function is to signal the transition from civilian to soldier in a manner consistent with the brutality of this newly adopted social role. For characters whose communities have been disrupted by war, this initiation may replace traditional rites that mark periods of maturation and the end of innocence, but unlike the latter this event is not limited to age classes or persons of a particular age, nor do initiates necessarily want to participate, especially when forcibly recruited.
For example, Chikwanine in Child Soldier is five years old during his brief enlistment and therefore too young for most conventional rites of passage when a rebel militia forces him to kill his best friend for this purpose. In contrast, Birahima cannot join an exclusive band of child soldiers in Allah Is Not Obliged, not because he has already undergone rites of passage as a civilian, but rather because he cannot fulfil this particular group’s requirements; both of his parents are dead so he cannot kill one to demonstrate his allegiance. Another dissimilarity is that the purpose of these killings is to alienate the child soldier characters from their own societies, rather than to further integrate them. After Chikwanine kills his best friend the commandant who forced him to do so explains, “Your family will never take you back now. We are your only family” (Chikwanine and Humphreys, 2015: 14). Chikwanine’s family does forgive him, but the majority of characters in the genre discover that children who are no longer morally innocent due to their behaviour as soldiers, especially killing civilians, are not welcomed back into their communities when war ends, a consequence that I will return to below. In short, their premature loss of innocence renders them outsiders.
Despite the fact that loss of moral innocence is key to the child soldier narrative genre and killing is the most common catalyst for it, these events are almost never specifically described as having this effect. Again, the stories invite readers to infer that once characters kill they are no longer morally innocent. This vagueness can serve a thematic function in which the uncertain moral identities of these characters reflect the ambiguities of the conflicts in which they fight. More generally, it reflects the view that certain actions like killing are incompatible with innocence as a moral condition and that when child soldier characters commit these actions their innocence is sacrificed as a result — the outcome need not be explicitly stated. The primary distinction in the genre between child soldiers and civilians of any age is that the former have killed others. As such, the term “innocence” is sometimes synonymous with “civilian” in these works. Innocence is traditionally regarded as the absence of certain kinds of adult knowledge and the inability to comprehend their meaning, 7 but in the child soldier narrative it also refers to the lack of specific experiences during wartime — killing in armed combat — that distinguish the child soldier character from others who merely observe these events or are victims of such violence.
Rape as a signifier of lost innocence
Unlike her contemporaries, Akallo does not kill others or even fire her weapon in her memoir Girl Soldier; she is a camp follower and sexual captive, though according to the inclusive definition established by the Cape Town Principles (United Nations Children’s Fund, 1997), which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use to document the military use of children, she is still technically considered a child soldier. She is also the only protagonist to clearly identify the moment of her lost innocence: when her commander rapes her she declares matter-of-factly, “I felt like a thorn was in my skin as my innocence was destroyed” (McDonnell and Akallo, 2007: 110). Many other young characters are sexually assaulted and/or raped by their superior officers. 8 Keitetsi’s observation in her memoir Child Soldier that “[I]t was a crime for a child soldier to say: ‘I cannot do this, because I’m a child’” (2004: 210) refers specifically to sexual abuse. This form of violence is especially relevant to the genre due to the connection between moral innocence and the Western notion of childhood asexuality; notwithstanding Freud’s influential theory of infantile sexuality, the conventional view is that adults must shield children from sexual contact, particularly contact with adults. The implication of scenes of sexual abuse is that children are morally corrupted when they are forced to have sex, an idea that Akallo makes explicit in her memoir.
Yet, some child soldier narratives depict an even more fraught scenario that troubles conventional Western ideals concerning the moral and legal innocence of children: child soldiers who rape adults. These works invite different interpretations depending on the context and characters involved in this otherwise indefensible act of wartime violence. Of the three protagonists who rape adult civilians, two are portrayed sympathetically. Agu perfunctorily refers to raping others twice in Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation. When Agu’s older comrades become excited when they near a city with a brothel he admits,
I am too young to be knowing about these thing even if I am knowing from how the men are talking about woman that I am really wanting one to be making my soldier feel good. I am wanting one, but not like how we are getting them in battle. (2006: 101; emphasis added)
Later in the story he regrets these actions, but also denies his active role in them: “If they are ordering me KILL, I am killing, SHOOT, I am shooting, ENTER WOMAN, I am entering woman and not even saying anything even if I am not liking it” (2006: 135). In both descriptions these events are presented as evidence of the extent to which his commanders deprive him of his moral innocence and more implicitly a claim for legal innocence.
My Luck describes his rape of a civilian in Song For Night in much greater detail than Agu. He is also compelled to do so by a superior officer, but the woman whom he assaults recognizes his predicament and consoles him even as she is victimized: “The woman’s eyes were tender, as if all she saw was a boy lost. She stroked my hair tenderly, whispering as I sobbed: ‘It’s all right son, it’s all right. Better the ones like you live’” (Abani, 2007: 85). Sexual gratification is irrelevant to the act itself; both texts represent rape as a means to compel obedience from subordinates and, more broadly, a “recognizable pattern of national terror and subjugation” (Brownmiller, 1975: 37). A fellow child soldier Ijeoma recognizes the danger inherent in the assault, not only for civilians but also My Luck himself. She tells him so and he acknowledges, “I knew what she meant. I was thirteen, armed and lost in a war with the taste for rape” (Abani, 2007: 86). To prevent him from raping of his own volition in the future the two child soldiers have consensual intercourse after every battle when other soldiers claim the so-called “spoils of war”. When My Luck says that he loses his virginity to Ijeoma (2007: 59), he privileges their sex act as one of choice. Moreover, he demonstrates his rejection of weaponized rape by killing the commander who ordered him to rape when the man later attempts to sexually assault an underage civilian.
As in the previous depictions of killings, neither work characterizes these rapes as actions that specifically cause Agu or My Luck to lose their moral innocence. Indeed, these scenes are preceded by ones in which both characters kill others and these incidents are represented in an equally ambivalent manner. However, given the Western conventions of childhood it would be difficult to conclude from the stories that these characters could remain morally innocent after their respective rapes, and neither Abani’s novel nor Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation invites this interpretation. In contrast, readers need not be familiar with the entire genre or other child soldier protagonists to regard the character Mad Dog in Allah Is Not Obliged as an altogether different figure. His portrayal is unsympathetic, especially in comparison to his civilian counterpart Laokolé. The two share scenes and even lines of speech, but their personas are antithetical. Like every character in the narrative, they serve as caricatures: she is as mature as any adult civilian in the narrative, yet also exhibits traits often associated with moral innocence, while he manifests the opposite. Furthermore, unlike Agu and My Luck, Mad Dog relishes the opportunity to rape.
During his first narrated encounter with civilians, Mad Dog enters a broadcast station and rapes a well-known television presenter. He characterizes the assault as what any soldier “ought to do with a beautiful chick” (Kourouma, 2007: 23; emphasis in original) and convinces himself that his victim is a willing partner. The text suggests that he rapes others as well, though this is the only incident described in detail. The scene is meant to demonstrate his immorality, and Mad Dog is distinguished from Agu and My Luck in this respect. He rapes willingly, does not regret his actions, and never shows empathy for his victims. The armed conflict in which he participates is merely a pretext for satisfying instinctual lusts, which Brownmiller (1975: 37) more broadly attributes to rape in wartime. Careful readers of the novel will recall that Mad Dog demonstrates an ignorance that might be construed as innocence in flashback scenes from before his deployment when he attempts to convince an older friend to enlist, and his irrational reasoning is juxtaposed against his friend’s sensible rebuttals. But in the unnarrated interim he is transformed into a debased figure who embodies the worst consequences of Rousseauian maldevelopment; his innocence does not metamorphose into mature virtue as hoped, but rather he becomes a degenerate in the absence of proper moral instruction.
Reading the genre as recovery narrative
As I explain in the preceding sections, none of the protagonists manage to retain their innocence for the duration of their respective stories. This loss (and the brutality inherent in the process) is a distinctive feature of the genre; violent scenes in which the young characters kill and rape others are necessary to the coherence of the conventional plot structure. The diverse field of trauma theory offers potentially useful methodologies for examining these scenes. 9 According to one view, the distress experienced by child soldiers is evident both in the characterization of these figures and at the structural level of the story. For example, Birahima’s recurring speech patterns and explicit refusal to narrate certain past events could be interpreted as physical manifestations of traumatic response to war. Moreover, the cyclical nature of Allah Is Not Obliged, in which its introductory and concluding lines are identical, invites the reader to repetitively experience this wartime trauma alongside Birahima. Allison Mackey (2013) makes similar observations about other works in the genre. Most relevant here is the argument that storytelling serves a therapeutic function that can aid in recovery. 10 In this context, the violence perpetrated by child soldiers and the loss of innocence that results is still significant, but their efforts to recuperate are paramount.
In other words, if lost innocence is the main complicating action of such a story then the rehabilitation of former child soldiers is its denouement, with the restoration of certain features of their childhoods as the ideal end. To be clear, childhood innocence itself can never be restored; again, moral innocence in particular is an ephemeral quality. Instead, many attempt to recuperate from psychological wounds inflicted during service, repair damaged relationships with their families and communities, and resume at least some aspects of their prewar lives as children such as re-enrolment in school. Rhetorically, this is possible because while their innocence is lost, other elements of their childhood have been “stolen”, which allows for the possibility of recovery (Sanders, 2011: 216). Of course, some characters simply never have the opportunity to recover. My Luck and Mad Dog do not survive the wars in which they fight, while the aforementioned narrative structure of Allah Is Not Obliged ensures that Birahima is permanently trapped in an unending cycle of violence. The extent to which those protagonists who can take advantage of this opportunity succeed in doing so varies widely. Nonetheless, the genre as a whole invites readers to regard these outcomes as possible.
Ironically, violent scenes in which the protagonists are morally corrupted, as well as the effort required to achieve some degree of normalcy after decommission, serve to emphasize their innocence prior to enlistment. Within their respective story worlds, most protagonists cannot fully understand the moral significance of their participation in armed conflict during those portions of their respective stories. Only when they undergo rehabilitation after disarmament and demobilization do they possess the necessary capabilities — even if acquired prematurely — to adequately reflect on the developmental, social, and moral consequences of their military service. In other words, they fail to fully appreciate their innocence until it is taken from them. That said, adult readers (and, of course, the adult authors themselves) should recognize these negative repercussions. For this reason, Coundouriotis argues that many of the stories
are framed as victim narratives where responsibility for the committing of atrocity by the child soldier is largely disclaimed as either abuse the child has suffered, or the result of drug addiction from which the child must be rehabilitated. The recovery narrative allows for the problem of responsibility in the war to be shifted onto the task of recovery itself. (2010: 192)
11
According to this reading, if the matter of culpability is raised it is solely attributed to adult characters responsible for recruiting children as soldiers. Near the end of Song For Night, My Luck asks rhetorically, “If we are the greatest innocents in this war, then where did we learn all the evil we practice?” (Abani, 2007: 143). The answer is clearly presented in every narrative under consideration for this essay. Texts in the genre condemn the persons most responsible for the militarization and indoctrination of young people in wartime — Africa’s leaders, their proxies, and the rebel leaders who oppose them. No protagonist achieves the necessary rank or is otherwise well positioned enough to meaningfully interact with the leaders of the armed groups that employ them, with the partial exception of Keitetsi. 12 The only authority figures many child soldiers encounter are their immediate commanders. Therefore these characters receive a majority of the blame for the tragic circumstances of their underage subordinates. Not all commanders are portrayed negatively, but all of the stories depict similar scenes of brutality by individuals in positions of authority. These characters lack the complexity of their victims. For example, there is no meaningful difference between Major Essien, who forces My Luck to rape as an assertion of his authority, and the Commandant, who coerces Agu to rape as an act of war. Both characters demonstrate the terrible traits attributed to those responsible for orchestrating armed warfare in Africa. Neither is represented in ways that would encourage further curiosity among readers.
Consequently, during the recovery process humanitarian aid workers routinely instruct former child soldiers to renounce blame and in several stories they use nearly identical rhetoric to do so. After one young combatant admits to drinking human blood in Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen and Me, the adult narrator consoles him by saying, “It wasn’t your fault” (2005: 153). Similarly, Keitetsi is told by her UN-appointed psychiatrist “that the bad things I did was never my fault” (2004: 263). Beah is frequently consoled in the same manner while at a disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) centre and, although he initially resists the implication of the remark, he eventually embraces its purpose: “[It] didn’t make me immune from the guilt that I felt for what I had done. Nonetheless, it lightened my burdensome memories and gave me strength to think about things” (2007: 165–66). This rehabilitative model is based on Western medical paradigms, which Jo Boyden (1994) notes are indiscriminately applied to conflict zones where children reside. The other common model, which is also represented in the genre, is derived from explicitly Christian notions of repentance. Characters who rehabilitate at DDR centres under the auspices of Christian NGOs like World Vision, most notably Agu in Beasts of No Nation and Akallo in Girl Soldier, are expected to seek absolution for their misdeeds from God through repentance and prayer. That said, recovery is the final outcome in both rehabilitative strategies and in either case the characters are treated as victims of war.
Conclusion: The hegemony of moral innocence
This characterization of former child soldiers as victims both dictates how the genre is typically structured and offers a comforting resolution to otherwise unsettling stories. Yet it also foregrounds the moral dimensions of innocence in ways that may obscure questions surrounding their legal innocence. The legal rationale in the West for downplaying the culpability of child soldiers is multifold: the military recruitment of children is regarded as a more serious crime than whatever the child soldiers have done in battle, their young ages preclude true agency as autonomous individuals, and while they may commit heinous acts their moral innocence supersedes technical guilt. Even so, many narratives include brief passages that invite readers to consider the legal culpability of child soldier characters as well. On the battlefield justice is summarily administered in these stories and, no matter whether the accused are actually guilty of a crime, they are often executed without delay. Sometimes civilian children face similar threats of violence. For example, before Beah enlists he travels with other internally displaced refugee children in search of their families and, ideally, refuge from war. However, due to the fearsome reputation of child soldiers, civilians repeatedly mistake these children for combatants. Beah notes how “[their] innocence had been replaced by fear and we had become monsters” if only in the imaginations of a terrorized populace (2007: 55). Once these conflicts end the issue of culpability becomes more complicated if for no other reason than that nearly all the protagonists do kill and/or rape other characters, offences that would ordinarily warrant punishment.
The protagonists are ambivalent about whether they should accept responsibility for wartime violence. Some like My Luck do not provide excuses for their actions nor expect forgiveness. He also rejects the Christian model of rehabilitation when he states, “there are some sins too big even for God to forgive” (Abani, 2007: 79). Others seem to exonerate themselves as having been soldiers merely performing their duties. Jal finds it difficult to narrate his participation in the killing of innocent civilians during a particular battle and says that his actions continue to “torment” him, but he also maintains that he
feel[s] no guilt about that day because I was a child who took part in killings as the hatred and sorrow built up over years was released in mob violence. I did not kill in cold blood, I killed in war. (Jal and Davies, 2009: 255)
Agu consoles himself with similar thoughts: “I am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing. I am telling this to myself because soldier is supposed to be killing, killing, killing. So if I am killing, then I am only doing what is right” (Iweala, 2006: 23). Nevertheless, Agu understands that his actions are ethically and morally wrong, in spite of his initial excuses. After an especially gruesome encounter he says, “I am not Devil. I am not bad boy. I am not bad boy. Devil is not blessing me and I am not going to hell”, before concluding, “But I am still thinking maybe Devil born me and that is why I am doing all of this” (Iweala, 2006: 48). He is not consoled by the rationalization that he only performs the tasks required of him as a soldier and wonders whether it is due to his own inherently evil nature. Moreover, the civilians whom he victimizes do not accept this justification either.
Throughout the genre, civilian characters articulate various opinions as to whether child soldiers should be held responsible for their behaviour. In an especially illustrative example, the family of the main child soldier figure in Moses, Citizen and Me forgives him for the murder of his grandmother, but other members of his community consider him dangerous and refuse to accept him or other former child soldiers. A family friend explains: “Who wants a child who only knows how to kill? What kind of nightmare is that? What kind, eh? If they keep these children here, is like keeping something bad in the blood. Something rotten, isn’t it?” (Jarrett-Macauley, 2005: 19). These civilians do not reject former child soldiers because of any specific violence they have committed, but rather because of their infamous reputations. Just as this perception threatens Beah’s safety when he flees war as a civilian, it also follows characters like Keitetsi and Jal long after they withdraw from service and well into adulthood. During wartime civilians interact with child soldiers in different ways: some embrace them, others show ill will, and most accept their presence as unavoidable. But afterwards few civilians express sympathy for the ex-combatants, who are usually regarded as corrupted as a consequence of their experiences. They are widely viewed as either unable or unwilling to integrate back into their communities as civilians themselves.
The misgivings of these civilian characters provide readers with a dissenting perspective on how former child soldiers might be treated after decommission, one that privileges their identities as soldiers over those as children. But they do not constitute sufficient evidence that the genre as a whole critiques the core paradigm of childhood innocence, legal or moral. None of the child soldier characters who survive their wartime experiences are held legally accountable for their actions as soldiers in the story worlds they inhabit, nor is the issue of culpability ever seriously considered; the absence of such scenes effectively absolves them of guilt. The problem of former child soldiers being expected to reintegrate into postwar communities that distrust them is circumvented by generic conventions in which almost all the protagonists emigrate to Western countries after, or to continue, their rehabilitation. In many stories, Western humanitarian aid workers adopt these children to facilitate the resumption of more normative childhoods, far removed from the responsibilities (and entitlements) of military service. In doing so they inevitably privilege, in both content and structure, the moral innocence of children over all other considerations, including troubling questions about whether they remain legally innocent despite having committed grave abuses as soldiers.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.