A tale of two fighters: images of child soldiers in Jewish and African child soldier narratives

Abstract

In this essay I examine the representations of child soldiers in Yuri Suhl’s Uncle Misha’s Partisans and Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog. While Suhl’s novel recreates the historical fact of Jewish ­children’s involvement in the organized group of resistance fighters – called the Jewish Partisans – during the Second World War and in that sense serves to recreate the history of Jewish child soldiering, Dongala’s narrative portrays a conflict in which children are instrumentalized as soldiers in a war propelled by mere avarice, the fighters as ideologically barren, and the children involved as mainly innocent victims of adults’ myopia. In comparatively examining these two narratives, I argue that, whereas Suhl offers a positive portraiture of Jewish child soldiers as patriotic beings with agency and voice and constructs a far more nuanced perspective of childhood innocence, Dongala in his own work represents African child soldiers in familiarly negative light.

Keywords:

• Child soldiers
• African wars
• Jewish partisans
• humanitarian discourse

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to the official definition of the term as adopted and propagated by the UNICEF after the 1997 Cape Town conference on child soldiers involving international organizations and transnational Non-Governmental Organizations, a child soldier is “any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to cooks, porters, messengers, and those accompanying such groups, other than purely as family members.” See http://www.pitt.edu/ginie/mounzer/conventions.html (United Nations 1997). While I recognize the limitation of this phrase – and I observe this point in the article – in describing young people who engaged in military activities, I maintain it throughout this essay to refer to the young protagonists of the novels I analyze.

2 See Miller’s (1985) Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French.

3 Critics like Adesokan (2012) and Moynagh (2016) have separately argued that stories of atrocity and trauma involving African children appeal to both Western publishers and human rights readers. As Adesokan maintains, these stories are a “supplement to the discourse of human rights” (12). Murphy (2019) also observes that “the life narratives of people of color, people from the Global South, and women are circumscribed by the production values, political investments, and prurient interests that have always drawn Western audiences to the slave narrative” (6). Moreover, other reasons have been adduced to explain the popularity of these stories in the West, rather than in the provenances of their authors. For some of those reasons, see Gehrmann (2021)’s “Congolese Child Soldier Narratives for Global and Local Audiences”; Adesokan (2012)’s “New African Writing and the Question of Audience”; and Mastey (2015)’s “Child Soldiers and Their Fictions.”

4 See note 1 above for the referred standard definition of child soldier.

5 For more on child partisans during the Second World War, see chapter two of Rosen’s (2005) Armies of the Young, especially pages 47-56.

6 By Afropessimism, I mean the perception of Africa as one homogenous continent essentially defined by acute impoverishments, diseases, conflicts, and miseries enabled by “cultural dispositions that deviate from ‘universal standards’” (Bryceson 2000, 418). These elements characterize the setting in Dongala’s novel. For more on the concept of Afropessimism, see Sandig (2019)’s “‘Beasts of No Nation’: Afropessimism and the Rationality of Warfare in Africa”; and Evans and Glenn (2010)’s “‘TIA – This is Africa’: Afropessimism in Twenty-First-Century Narrative Film.”

7 Newman (2004) has argued that the distinction made between “old war” and “new war” is immaterial. For Newman, “the actors, objectives, spatial contexts, human impact, political economy, and social structure of conflict have not changed to the extent argued in new wars literature,” adding that if there is anything different between those two forms of war, it is that the supposed new wars are receiving more attention than those categorized as old did (179).

8 Rosen’s (2005) clarification on the presence of children in the partisan army appositely lends credence to my interpretation: “That children were among the Jewish youth fighters and partisan groups should not be surprising. Children were part of virtually every partisan and resistance movement in World War II […] The reason was simple: all Jews were targeted for death. Genocide, in singling out an entire people for death, makes no distinction between soldier and civilian, combatant and noncombatant, male and female, infant and elder” (22). Thus, Suhl’s novel reinforces and reinscribes the popular understanding of Nazism as an egregious political idea.

9 Suhl’s depiction of the partisans’ acceptance and engagement of Mitek as a spy and intelligence gatherer despite their initial hesitancy recreates one of the realities of the actual Jewish partisans. Rosen (2005, 55) reports that “the partisan units that accepted children and youth had to be willing to find a role for them under the harsh conditions of warfare.”

10 Note the chiasmus in the naming of the warring ethnic groups. The evident similarity in the names illustrates the senseless and meaningless nature of their conflict. Moreover, it shows that war in this symbolic African country is waged to maintain the status quo of oppression and corruption perpetrated by those in power.

11 See Collier and Hoeffler’s (1998) “On Economic Causes of Civil War.” See also Collier’s (1999) “On the Economic Consequences of Civil War”; and Collier’s (2000) “Doing Well Out of War: An Economic Perspective.”

12 This degrading construction of Africa is not exclusively present in Western imagination of the continent; as Tunca posits, this depiction of Africa is “supposedly perpetuated in literary works from the [African] continent as well” (2014, 147).

13 See note 7.

14 Rosen (2005, 51-2) provides a comprehensive analysis of the partisans’ warfare. The crux of his analysis is that the partisans’ use of violence was largely against their Nazi opponents and their allies.

15 As McCoy explains it, paratexts are book elements “constituted by title pages, introductions, dedications, prefaces, epigraphs, footnotes and endnotes, forewords and afterwords, appendices, and blurbs” (2015, 199). In addition to the stereotypes about Africa they circulate, I am of the view that the paratexts of African child soldier stories produced in the West also function as marketing devices for the attraction of buyers.

16 I share Wessells’s (2006, 53) submission that the change of identity on the part of young combatants is also part of the ways they exercise agency.

17 Murphy makes an insightful point about the use of the first-person narrative style in narratives such as this. See The New Slave Narratives (2019, 7, 22).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ademola Adesola

Ademola Adesola is currently a doctoral candidate at the Department of English, Theatre, Film, and Media at the University of Manitoba, Canada. His research focuses on the representations of children in atrocities, particularly child soldiers, in African narratives. Ademola’s research interest straddles representations of mass atrocities in Africa involving children as victims and perpetrators, how they make sense of their involvement in acts of violence; and the representational devices deployed through print media such as novel, memoir, autobiography, and drawing, and non-print modes such as film. Ademola’s other research interests include African literature, popular culture, and postcolonial studies. [email protected]