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"I don't know when I was born," admits Emmanuel Jal casually, when asked his age. "So I just put a date, the first of January, 1980. I'm, like, 29. That's what a lot of Lost Boys do. You just go for the beginning of the year."

He laughs at this explanation for his birth date, throwing his head back and slapping his fists down on the table. But in the next moment, when speaking of his mother, he is quiet. "I have forgotten what she looked like," he says, shrugging. He last saw her when he was 7.

"She doesn't come in my dreams any more. But the impact she left on my life is what is making me push now," he continues, his eyes shining as he looks out from behind long tendrils of hair.

Such is the pattern of an interview with Mr. Jal, a child soldier turned activist and rising hip-hop artist whom Peter Gabriel called "someone with the potential of a young Bob Marley" when he introduced him at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday celebration in London last year. Mr. Jal's new memoir, War Child, is explanation enough for his personality, which veers from vulnerable, lost boy to the philosophical and forgiving man he has struggled to become.

His is an improbable rifles-to-rap story.

Caught in the brutal civil war between northern and southern Sudan, he knew only three years of peace, none of which he can remember. With his family, he moved southward as a young boy after the Islamic government took control of tribal territories rich in oil, water and other resources.

For him, loss of innocence came early, at 5 or 6, as members of his family were beaten and raped. He was separated from his mother, who later died, during a village attack, and at the urging of his father, found himself on his way to Ethiopia with other children who were told that they would be attending school. Once he arrived, after a long, arduous march, there was only a vast, disease-ridden refugee camp. He had become one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. His father, it turns out, had duped him. At the age of nine, he was recruited into the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), a southern rebels group. "This gun is my mother and father now," one of the officers screamed to the children as he raised a Kalashnikov above his head.

"What the training did was make me stronger," Mr. Jal says, without explaining, as his book does, that it involved repeated beatings and cruel punishments. "It kind of, like, cut down my feelings. … I lost my childhood."

He saw unspeakable violence and killed many Muslims without guilt, he writes. And at one point, on a trek through a desert, he was tempted to eat his dying friend. "The lowest moment in my life," he says softly. Close to death himself, he waited until morning, praying to God for food. In the morning, a crow flew across the sky. He was too weak to shoot it, but another boy did. "God had done as I asked," he writes. "He had delivered me from evil."

In the end, Mr. Jal's greatest fight was not so much for his sanity or even his life, but for his better self.

"I had a choice to make — either to be bitter and be locked and depressed, like the rest, or forgive and come out and move."

That statement makes it sound easy, as if it happened overnight, but the struggle was a long one, with many setbacks. In 1993, at the age of 13, he was rescued by Emma McCune, a British aid worker who was married to Riek Machar, an army commander with the SPLA. With the consent of her husband, she smuggled Mr. Jal into Kenya and enrolled him into a school in Nairobi, a chance she gave to nearly 150 children before she was killed in a car accident.

The young teenager was clever, but his behaviour often landed him in trouble. Once, when he was expelled, he wanted to kill the headmaster. "I said, 'Look, I am going to show this person that I am a soldier.' I took a pistol. I had the temptation in my mind. … I had to struggle with that all night. I don't know what made me stop."

He looks up from his lap. "That's the mentality of anyone who lost hope. When they feel someone is blocking them, that's what they want to do."

His faith, instilled in him by his Christian mother, kept calling him back, he says. "When there was a crisis, she had faith and humility," he recalls.

Eventually, he immigrated to England, where he continued his education on sponsorships, and recorded his first album in 2005. His songs speak of violence, his faith, and are a call for peace in Sudan.

"I believe I have survived for a reason, to tell my story, to touch lives," he raps in one of his songs. His latest album, also called War Child, was released in May last year. A documentary of the same name about his life and the plight of lost Sudanese boys won numerous awards at film festivals last year.

How does he feel about the people who helped him?

"Angels," Mr. Jal says without equivocation. "In my life it has also been a woman to direct me to the next step, and what I think is that it would be my mother whispering into another woman's ear, 'This is my son. Please take care of my son.' Or it could be God, saying, 'Look, take care of this boy. He has something to tell the world.'"

The calm Mr. Jal exudes is elusive, though. As he walks across the room at the start and end of the interview, he moves with odd, jerking movements, uncomfortable somehow in the skin of a man who lives among people who have never seen anything more violent than a fender bender.

"I am a healed person," he avows at one point. "I am free. The chains are broken."

But in the next sentence he says, "I can never be healed completely. You can never brush your past away. The way I am talking, there are symptoms of a troubled child."

His friends and project collaborators often point out how he needs to change his behaviour to suit the western world of business, he says. He also works on himself. "I have to constantly renew my mind, getting new stuff into my head. I have Muslims around me who are good. One of my managers is a Muslim. I did an album with a Muslim, and it was amazing. I am exercising what I thought I've done to forgive, and so now the perspective of me thinking about Muslims is gone."

His goal is to raise money for his charitable organization, Gua Africa. Gua means "peace "in Nuer, a tribal language in southern Sudan. His plans include building a school in Leer, in West Upper Nile, called the Emma Academy, in honour of Ms. McCune.

"Fame doesn't interest me," says the spokesman for several charities, whose music has been featured in the movie Blood Diamond, the documentary God Grew Tired of Us and on the television show ER. He also performed in Bob Geldof's Live 8 concert in 2005.

"I am on a mission. I want to make a difference and influence people positively."

But that, he admits is not always enough to free him from crushing despair. Many times, he has thought about suicide, he confesses.

"Faith, you lose it many times, and then it comes back," he says. When he laughs this time, tipping his head back, it seems to be directed at the world, which has held him at its whim, capable of enormous harm and, when he least expected it, surprising grace.

War Child: an excerpt:
We spread out into a line, some helping the injured men, others taking up positions to search for the jallabas. I was shaking, a red river crashing inside me as I stared at the trees. Where were they? Lam and I fired again and again until something moved on the edge of the trees.

"I've shot one," Lam shouted as he got up to start running.

I followed him, running through the grass, my hate rolling onto my tongue and making me scream. I raised my gun, desperate to find something to shoot at as we ran into the trees. Two other jenajesh were with us as we ran.

Then we saw him.

The Arab was lying in the grass, his leg bleeding red onto the green uniform he was wearing. He looked like an officer. His hand was injured as he lifted his pistol. It fell from his grip as he tried to fire.

I heard someone behind me and turned. The big soldier who had first stared up into the tree was standing looking at the jallaba; all around us others were pushing deeper into the forest to search for the enemy. For a moment, we were silent as Lam, the big soldier, the other jenajesh, and I stared at the Arab. I could see fear in his eyes as he looked at us.

With a grunt, the big soldier ran forward and kicked the jallaba in the head before stamping on his chest. The man screamed, words pouring out of him as he tried to reach for his gun again.

Pictures. Pictures. In my head.

"Allahu Akbar," the Arab screamed.

Me. A child. Dust rising in the air as Arabs shot their guns at us.

"What's the best way to make this fuck feel pain?" I shouted at Lam.

"We have to cut him," he said.

We looked at each other for a moment and our rage stared back at us from the other's eyes. I turned my head. Lying nearby was an old brown machete. I put down my gun and walked a few steps to lift it up. I turned back to the jallaba. His eyes pleaded with me, staring out from his pale skin. Eyes light brown like a bush baby and skin the colour of unripe dates. I stared at Lam's eyes — black with hate. I looked at my hand — my black skin holding the machete. Both Lam and I marked by our blackness, which had made us this jallaba's enemy. I did not think of my God in that moment who had also pitted us against each other. He was lost to me now.

I walked toward the man, lifting the machete in my hand as I moved closer with the other jenajesh beside me. They too had machetes in their hands, and the Arab's eyes were screaming at us now, begging for mercy as he moaned and cried.

I lifted my machete as the other boys raised theirs and smashed them into the jallaba. Blood spit warm onto my face.

Pictures. Pictures. In my head.

From the book War Child © 2009, by Emmanuel Jal and Megan Lloyd Davies, published by St. Martin's Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.