Monsters or Victims: An analysis of the African child soldier as depicted in Chris Abani’s Song for Night, Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog and Ieweala Uzodinma’s Beasts of No Nation.

Abstract

CHAPTER ONE: ITRODUCTION Background to the Study The issue of child soldiering is one of the most controversial issues as far as the history of the world is concerned and the controversy lies in the question: “are these children aggressors they turn out to be or are they simply passive victims of circumstances?” Children have either been violently abducted or coerced into volunteering to serve as soldiers in the American Revolution, World War 1 and World War 2 and as if that’s the growing trend, Africa has also adopted the system of child soldiering, especially West African countries like Congo, Sudan, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. According to Drumbl (2002), not only have millions of children been forced to witness war and its atrocities, but many have also been drawn into these conflicts as participants. Wessels (2006) asserts that civilians have grown to be the general target of today’s wars, mostly women and children, thereby indirectly making children soldiers of choice. Civilians are targeted in the sense that today’s wars use torture and terror, rape and murder, maiming and mutilation, destruction of homes, villages, schools and towns as a way of instilling terror. It is so unfortunate that children get intimidated more easily than adults; they get more traumatized and at the end of the day are forced to commit acts of atrocities against their family members, neighbours and adult civilian populations. Denov (2010) argues that this is because of the fact that children are small, weak vulnerable and far less mature to withstand the pressure of being abducted or forcibly recruited by certain military forces. 3 Wells (2009) postulates that child soldiers throughout the history of this world have been serving in these wars and conflicts as uniformed soldiers or camouflaged insurgents acting as combatants, spies, porters, human land-mine detectors, sexual slaves and so forth. The fact that not all these child soldiers are boys is very disgracing, upsetting and even barbaric in the eyes of most prominent scholars in this field and worse still humanitarian organisations. Nearly a third of them are girls and one can only imagine the dangers they face from pregnancy, child birth complications and the rejection they (both their babies and themselves), are later on subjected to. A culture of impunity, moreover, and a world order in which International law is enforced selectively has so far provide a green light for many who have adopted this rather immoral system of child soldiering to do so without the fear of the consequences. Industrialized and former colonial powers, private military contractors, war lords, rebel forces and mercenary to mention but only a few have been relying on children trained to kill and maim as a key weapon to advance their selfless goals. As a matter of fact, International laws have rather failed to end this growing trend of child soldiering, according to UNICEF’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, as of mid 2004, up to a 100, 000 children, some as young as nine were reported to be actively involved in armed conflicts, only in Africa. The International law, influenced by the research of Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and his followers accept the fact that there is a link between chronological age and cognitive development. They accept the fact that there are stages in the development of cognitive thinking; especially the ability to make moral and correctly informed judgments and that it is at the age of eighteen that such development comes to a completion. Thus basing on this argument, being concurred by the 4 fact that all our child protagonists in the novels to be researched are all below the age of eighteen, one is then forced to answer the question: ‘Are these child soldiers aggressors or monsters as some of the prominent scholars in this field would like to argue or are they mere innocent, passive victims of circumstances?” The reality lies somewhere in between the lines. As the likes of the Oxford University Professor Jason Hart would argue, before the discussion of the recruitment of child soldiers, one should first attempt to understand the material conditions which often drive children into violence, that is, ‘ profoundly asymmetrical power relations which give rise to systematic oppression of these children’(Denov 2010). But one would like to argue, is this point of view fair enough on children when it has been scientifically proven that the growth of the mind, the ability to make decisions comes to a completion at the age of eighteen? How can then one, the likes of Rosen (2005) argue that these children are not always passive victims but often make a rational decision that not fighting is even worse than fighting, that they are not victims of adult manipulation but thinking agents of their own destiny.