Blindfold Magazine recently published an article featuring Emmanuel Jal, an internationally known rapper who is a former Sudanese child soldier. Jal’s dark and intangibly painful past gives him every excuse to be filled with a need for hateful revenge, but instead he says, “Now I’m fighting a different war: education and peace, coexistence, equality. There’s no need to revenge if you get your freedom and justice.”
From the very beginning of his life, Jal found himself surrounded with atrocities that radiated with war. He witnessed his aunt raped by an enemy soldier, and most of his siblings were killed. Jal’s father joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and his mother was killed when he was very small. In school, Jal realized he was being trained to be a child soldier. British humanitarian Emma McCune rescued him from the SPLA, after finding him and a hundred other “Lost Boys” wandering along in the wild. He writes in one of his songs, “I ain’t an angel, hope I’ll be one soon / and if I am, I want to be like Emma McCune.”
“The worst people on earth are not the ones who are committing atrocities, but the ones who are burying their heads in the sand.” – Emmanuel Jal
Jal speaks at schools across the country recognizing that children raised in conditions such as abuse, addiction, crime, and illness are similar to his own war child background. He uses his music for activism and forms a unique connection with people’s troubles that aren’t necessarily similar to his own. Upon meeting Jal, songwriter Peter Gabriel felt he was, “meeting a man with the potential of a young Bob Marley. There is a generosity and compassion in his approach to the world that is an inspiration to me, and I am sure it will be to many others.”
In his extraordinarily special way, Jal is a shining example of the hope for child soldier’s futures. We stand behind that hope 100% and are proving it through our new campaign #zeroLRA. Join us in helping abducted child soldiers escape from Joseph Kony’s rebel army and learn about how we are helping to rehabilitate them so they can resume their lives and dreams that have been disrupted by indisputable violence.
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