Introduction
In 1996, one of the authors, Krijn Peters, traveled to war-torn Sierra Leone to study the reintegration process of underage combatants. With only a limited budget at his disposal - he was an MSc student at the time - he rented a room in the “New England Ville” neighborhood in Freetown, from where he made regular visits to two interim care centers (ICCs) for disarmed child soldiers: “Benin home,” located in eastern Freetown and run by the Catholic Mission, and a center run by the army, located near the small village of Crafton outside Freetown.
At these residential homes, young people were “prepared” for civilian life again. Coincidently, some of the underage ex-combatants who already passed through these ICCs were living with their foster families in the New England Ville area. This provided a good opportunity to study and talk to ex-child soldiers in their day- to-day environment and away from the institutionalized ICC setting. One of the youngsters lived with his uncle a hundred or so meters uphill from where Peters stayed, and after a few informal interactions, they arranged a time for a more structured interview. Sitting on a rock overlooking Western Freetown, the boy told Peters about his war experiences and his prewar childhood days. He also expressed his passion for rap music, dating back to his time before conscription. In fact, he and his half brother - another ex-child soldier who was living with him in his uncle’s house - had recently recorded a cassette of songs, which was now on sale in the local stores. The interviewer and the interviewee agreed to go downtown to have a look in the music shop. When Peters asked for the particular tape, the salesman was somewhat puzzled by the interest of the “white man” for the recording. Peters joked that in Europe these two rappers were the biggest hit of the summer and that they were known by everyone.
“How could that be?” asked the salesman. “Look at the picture [on the jacket] of those two rappers, in those ragtag clothes. You must be joking.” No one present - the salesman, Peters, and the ex-child soldier cum rapper - could imagine that within a few years, one of the two boys (the interviewee) portrayed on the jacket would indeed be famous, well beyond Europe, and would go on to meet with dignitaries including Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela. Not because of his rap music, but because he, Ishmael Beah, had written down his experiences of being a child soldier in Sierra Leone in an autobiography titled Long way gone: memoirs of a boy soldier (2007). The book itself has become an international best seller, described by some as “marking the arrival of the African boy killer” in popular culture (Cowley 2007).The example above is as yet unparalleled in its impact but not atypical of the experiences of former child combatants whose lives have been documented, reconstructed, and mediated through processes of humanitarian intervention. In this chapter, the authors note how child soldiers have been framed and represented in a number of key transitions, from warzone to safety, from combatant to peacemaker, from perpetrator to victim, and ultimately from obscurity to ambassador and celebrity. Like other writers, the authors are keen to draw attention to the representation of child soldiers as an issue area in itself, which may drive and shape their resourcing and treatment (Rosen 2007; Macmillan 2009). Children may be complicit in these narratives, providing the central characters and plot lines but, unlike Beah, rarely able to have the last word.
The authors first comment on the well-documented rise in humanitarian interest in child soldiers, a phenomenon which provides the setting in which child soldier narratives are usually placed. Organizations have produced significant amounts of policy documents, best practice guidelines, and advocacy material on child soldiers.
The digital age has brought a new immediacy to these humanitarian campaigns as organizations manipulate and juxtapose images and accounts in the jostle for impact and resources (Wells 2008). The desire for pictures and sound bites that “give life” to war-affected children and perhaps also bolster master narratives of ideal childhood remains undiminished. In turn these narratives may be republished and reframed multiple times (Pedersen and Sommerfelt 2007) increasingly via online social networks - creating a vast sea of fragments that can be trawled by Internet search engines. This secondary displacement and disembodiment of narratives, through the circulation of cropped comments and often sourceless images, represents a Pandora’s box beyond the scope of this chapter. Here, we draw attention to first accounts - primary narratives of child soldiers created through the interview process itself. The authors begin with an overview of the “market” for child soldier testimonies and its impact on their representation and then move on to look at the power relations of children with such a voice.2