"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.
