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Reviewed by:
  • L’enfant-soldat: Langages et images
  • Maureen Moynagh
L’enfant-soldat: Langages et images spec. Issue of Etudes Littéraires Africaines 32 (2011): 1–205.

The essays gathered together in this special issue, guest edited by Nicolas Martin-Granel, dedicated to the figure of the child soldier in African literature represent a timely literary study of a figure more often at the center of social scientific studies, yet whose appearance in literary form warrants greater attention. In his introduction, Martin-Granel notes that this themed issue marks an anniversary of sorts: the nearly ten years since the first special issue of Études Littéraires Africaines, which was devoted to the work of Ken Saro-Wiwa and featured several essays focused on his child-soldier novel Sozaboy (1985). The interest in Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy remains evident in the current themed issue. In fact, Saro-Wiwa (together with Ahmadou Kourouma) is recognized as a founder of what Martin-Granel considers “almost a genre,” that is the child-soldier narrative (7). Joining novels by Saro-Wiwa and Kourouma as objects of study in this collection are works by Chris Abani, Emmanuel Dongala, Uzodinma Iweala, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Claire Denis and Marie N’Diaye, André Lye Mudaba Yoka, and Serge Amisi. This special issue thus addresses the proliferation, since 1985, of literary interest in the child-soldier figure and the ongoing production of novels, films, and memoirs.

In his introduction, Martin-Granel signals two of the key literary-historical questions one might pose in connection with this body of writing. One has to do with its relationship to an older body of writing about the African child, which would include Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir (1953), Tsitisi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1989), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not Child (1987), but that has more recent instantiations as well. Martin-Granel also mentions Alain Mabankou’s Demain j’aurais vingt ans (2010) and Henri Lopes’s Une enfant de Poto-Poto (2012), but one could add works such as Tierno Monénembo’s L’ainé des orphelins (2000) or Chris Abani’s Graceland (2004). Another question concerns periodization. Most of the works under consideration in this issue of Études Littéraires Africaines have been published in the last decade, and most of them by a younger generation of novelists (Kourouma and Dongala excepted). How does one account for the apparent preoccupation with the contemporary child-soldier figure in light of the longer history of children at war?

To be sure, the child soldier seems a particularly emblematic figure of the contemporary moment, and not only in Africa. Yet a longer view is also possible. In fact, the collection opens with a short fictive work by Patrice Nganang that takes its inspiration from a historic photograph, reproduced on the facing page, of an Eritrean child soldier from the Second World War. Biyi Bandele’s novel Burma Boy (2007) also takes the Second World War as its setting and centers on a 14-year-old volunteer with the Royal West African Frontier Force. Bandele’s novel, however, does not figure in the archive addressed in the essays in this collection. The child-soldier figure is clearly understood as emblematic of post-independence conflicts, a position that, as Martin-Granel notes, is variously echoed in the literary-critical work of Boniface Mongo-Mboussa and Patrice Nganang. The former sees the child soldier as a nomadic figure whose perspective on a painful historical juncture is the province of a “cynical” generation of writers—“les enfants de la postcolonie,” [End Page 197] to take up the phrase coined by Abdourahman Waberi, himself the author of a novel, Transit (2003), featuring a child soldier. For his part, Nganang identifies the child soldier as the central character of the African civil-war novel, a figure who is “the most faithful sign of the violence of our present moment” (qtd. in Martin-Granel 11, my translation).

Despite the gesture to a longer history through the bookending of the essays by two photographs, the one from the Second World War and one of Serge Amisi, whose memoir Souvenez-vous de moi, l’enfant de demain: Carnets d...

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