May I have your Attention!!
will the real people please read this stuff...
Imagine you are forced to make a choice between starving to death & eating the corpse of your best friend.
its saturday morning and i'm flippin through channels to see whats new before i head off to work my dial stops @ Aljazeera and right there i have on my screen a black young man on the 'frost over the world show' for some reason my mind tells me he could be a nigerian and i listen on. As it turns out the dude: Emmanuel Jal is not a Nigerian, but a sudanese by birth and an ex child soldier who was rescued by a british aid worker and smuggled out of sudan.
He was recruited @ age 7 he was a “child warrior,” put into battle carrying an AK-47 that was taller than he was...for some reason @ that point haven witnessed so much opression, rape, and brutality by government forces it wasnt hard to convince emmanuel Jal and others like him to join the rebel army.
Scared and exhausted from the killing, Emmanuel and some of the other children - the “lost boys,” as they came to be known - deserted the rebel lines. On foot, they trekked across Sudan’s cracked, barren badlands, its crocodile-infested rivers and snake-laced mud patches to flee the war and be with their own tribe, the Nuer.
Four hundred began the trek, feeding on vultures, corpses, and whatever they could find. In his own words:
'at that point when we were starving we knew not to fall asleep cos if you did you would die in your sleep, I have even almost had to eat my friend when he was dying'.
Only 16 survived to find relative safety in a refugee camp in Waat, Southern Sudan.
Fast forward to the present Emmanuel Jal has won worldwide acclaim for his unique style of hip hop with its message of peace and reconciliation born out of his experiences as a child soldier in Sudan. His music can be heard alongside Coldplay, Gorillaz, and Radiohead on the fundraising ‘Warchild - Help a Day in the Life’ album, as well as in three ER episodes, the National Geographic documentary God Grew Tired of Us, and more recently in the feature film Blood Diamond starring Leonardo DiCaprio. He also featured on John Lennons ‘Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur’ amongst the likes of U2, REM and Lenny Kravitz. Also add to that performances to honour Nelson mandela on his birthday.
Do i sound like a war correspondent already?...lol there is nothing funny bout any of this stuf which brings me to my point of piecing this stuff together. Can we all just get along in this country..pips have seen much worse than some of us wil ever see...
http://www.emmanueljal.org
http://www.myspace.com/emmanueljal
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