African Boy Soldiers Views
Brutalised, war-ravaged and drugged-up, the child soldiers of Sierra Leone and Sudan have become a shocking symbol of today's violent world. They feature in films like Blood Diamond and a new novel by Dave Eggers, while Brad Pitt has produced a documentary on their plight. And now they're in Starbucks, as it launches its new book club with a harrowing first-person account by an ex- boy killer. So are Africans telling their own stories, or are these merely signs of our appetite for tales of 'savagery'?
Yet on another level, Blood Diamond is an important political text which, as did The Constant Gardener before it, attempts to expose the complicity of western corporations in the ruin of a resources-rich but vulnerable and disturbed African country; the ultimate villains, for all their cruelty and violence, are not the rebel soldiers but their western sponsors. Most interesting, the film investigates the phenomenon of the child soldier in Africa, of those boys and sometimes girls who are orphaned in conflict or stolen from their families and then brutalised and humiliated until, finding a new kind of family among rebel soldiers, they become drug-addicted killers, without pity or fear.
African Boy Soldiers Images
