Child Soldiers in Africa (review)

Of all the tragedies that have befallen African societies in recent years, one of the most complex and far-reaching is that of children bearing arms. Although in violation of woefully inadequate international conventions, the use of children in war has escalated in recent times, leaving its young victims socially and psychologically traumatized, thus threatening their nations' very future.

Alcinda Honwana is particularly well-equipped to analyze the difficult problem of how to heal children coerced into actively participating in killing. She begins by noting that in both Mozambique and Angola—the focal points to her research—children are incorporated into productive activities when they are considered "able" to make contributions to their families and communities, generally at a much earlier age than in Western countries. In Africa, the transition from "child" to "adult" is accompanied by well-defined rituals teaching children how to assume adult responsibilities. However, when children are forced into combat and taught to kill, preparation for adulthood is replaced by training in violence, leaving them unequipped for conventional adult roles in their society.

Drawing on Appadurai and Nordstrom's concepts of war-scapes, Honwana proposes that in the face of war, the scourge of the AIDS pandemic, and scarce income sources, conventional family values weaken; for many young Africans, a weapon at least guarantees access to food. Based on many interviews with Mozambican and Angolan children, Honwana describes the recruitment tactics, the living conditions, the survival strategies, and the moral consequences of their experiences. In most cases, the children were kidnapped and subsequently forced into combat; those who tried to escape were executed in front of the others. Physical exhaustion, indoctrination, and drugs were used to sever ties with these children's pasts and to make them insensitive to the atrocities they witnessed and performed. Honwana does not limit her study to boy soldiers; she dedicates an entire chapter to female abductees, again through individual victims' accounts. These testimonies are all the more valuable because of the reluctance of female victims to speak of their experiences out of shame: sexual abuse was a common experience, even for girls as young as seven. Some bore children; some were killed for refusing sex. Not bearing arms, the girls had little opportunity for escape.

In the last two chapters, Honwana examines in detail some of the practices carried out by local communities to promote healing and reintegration. Though these ceremonies varied in many aspects, they shared common traits. Generally holistic (involving mind and body, individual and community, the living and the dead), these rituals had the goal of freeing former soldiers from a contaminated past, purifying them, promoting physical and spiritual healing, and protecting them from the spirits of the dead. Though somewhat repetitive and at times venturing outside the scope of "child soldier," these accounts provide details of specific rituals performed to lay to rest the spirits of relatives killed during the war when funeral ceremonies could not be performed; to purify, forgive, and heal those who perpetrated or witnessed atrocities during the war; and to pacify the spirits of the dead, often blamed for the mental and physical afflictions of the living. As such, this is an invaluable document.

As for national and international policies, the demobilization process in Mozambique did not extend benefits to child soldiers (under the age of 15) because they did not fit the official definition of "soldier." Although from 1992 on the Children and War Project, a joint effort of national and international entities, helped reunite more than twelve thousand children with relatives, the Project lacked resources for support in the devastated communities to which most children returned—where not even the general population's most basic needs were being met. In Angola, too, a tremendous effort was made to assist child soldiers and return them to their families, but the testimonies reveal greater fear that the returnees would be rejected by their communities or re-recruited by UNITA forces. Anxiety about the future was expressed by...