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COMBATANT CHILDREN: A STUDY OF SOME 

SELECTED AFRICAN NOVELS 

Ijeoma Eucharia Ugwuanyi 
English Department, FCE (T) Umunze, Anambra State 

Email: ijeomaugwuanyi2013@gmail.com 

 

Abstract 

This paper investigated combatant children of war in Uzodinma 

Iweala’s Beasts of no Nation and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way 

Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. It examined the ways the 

authors have portrayed children as combatants of war, the 

authors’ use of grotesque features, and the consequences of war 

on the lives of the children. A content analysis of the works was 

examined employing the post-colonial theory. It exposed the 

new wave of exploitation of children who have been a signifier 

not only of war and lawlessness, but also of a marginally 

alienated African people. Through the evaluation of the 

characters as children and soldiers, as innocent and guilty, and as 

protectors and destroyers, it becomes clear that the children need 

to be protected from any form of violence. Psychoanalytic 

theory was also adopted as the children suffer disorder that cause 

them to lose contact with reality and their behavior become 

bizarre. At the end of the study, it was discovered that combatant 

children were exposed to dangerous acts of militancy at the 

expense of their basic needs of life. This paper advocates for 

children’s rights and protection, and putting to an end the use of 

children to commit all sorts of crimes, including employing them 

as soldiers. 

Keywords: Children, African Novels, Psychoanalytic theory 

 

 

mailto:ijeomaugwuanyi2013@gmail.com


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Introduction 

There are unique features of legends or epics which establish 

some links with Beasts of no Nation by Uzodinma Iweala and A 

Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah; 

except for pre-colonial novel of Thomas Mfolo’s Chaka which 

used magic.  Chaka is inoculated by a magician, sorcerer and a 

priest with medicine of blood: “Your sole purpose should be to 

kill without mercy and thus, clear the path that leads to the glory 

of your kingship” (17). Chaka turns to a killing machine like a 

child soldier today. Chaka is eventually consumed by the 

violence that made him king and he lives out the rest of his days 

in what can be described as schizophrenia. Both during and 

before Chaka’s time, children were not warriors. According to 

Ocaya-Lakidi, Dent, “The standing army was made up of young 

bachelors in their warrior age grade. It was young men in their 

twenties who saw actions” (12). Studies do show that African 

society is structured in age-grades and age sets which have some 

connections with war. Although age grades and age sets are 

closely connected with war and the formation of armies, age sets 

are created for socio-cultural matters such as marriage. 

Uzodinma Iweala and Ishmael Beah’s novels about children who 

engaged in war use their grotesque imagery to offer a new 

representation of children’s marginalization as a result of war. 

This paper takes into account not only the tragic, ugly or 

grotesque deviance and inversion through which combatant 

children are portrayed, but also the meaningful patterns that lie 

hidden in these features and make the issue of using children to 

fight war understandable. This issue of children engaging in war 

is prominent after the end of colonial rule. The post-colonial 

theory offers a new perspective on how post-colonial children 

are both victims and agents of violence. This paper examines the 

ways the authors have portrayed the children as combatants in 



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war, the stylistic features found in the works and the 

consequences of war on the psyche of the children. 

Children as Combatants in War 

Children are uniquely vulnerable to military recruitment and 

manipulations into violence because they are innocent and 

impressionable. They are forced or enticed to join armed groups. 

Agu, a twelve-year old child soldier in Beasts of no Nation, 

having witnessed the killing of his father by enemy soldier hides 

because he thinks he will be safe after being separated from his 

mother and only sister. He is given the choice of joining the 

army or being killed. As part of his initiation, and to prove that 

he is not a spy, Agu is given a machete and he is ordered to hack 

a man (an enemy soldier) to death. The Commandant assures 

Agu; “It’s just like killing a goat. Just bring this hand up and 

knock him well” (21). With this last order, the Commandant 

closes his hand over Agu’s as the boy holds the machete, and 

brings it down on the enemy’s head. Agu, in this justifies his 

action saying: 

I am not bad boy. How can I be bad boy? 

Somebody who is having life like I am 

having and fearing God the whole time…I 

am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is 

killing, so if I am killing them, I am only 

doing what is right. (23-24) 

Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier 

explains the tactics of manipulations used to obtain and brain 

wash children, turning them into killing machines which, 

ultimately made it extremely difficult for them to leave and 

reintegrate into the society. The protagonist, Ishmael and his 

brother Junior, together with his friends, Mohammed and Talloi 

are stripped of their homes, and the family fear and uncertainty 

as they search for parts of their country that have not been 



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affected by war in order to seek refuge. They are accosted by 

Charles Taylors and a few mercenaries from Burkina Faso. They 

join the group. Ishmael started fighting from ten years old “His 

teen years are killing field”. He attests that: “My squad is my 

family, my gun is my provider and protector and my rule is to 

kill or be killed” (126). 

Children who are recruited into fighting wars are turned into 

killers through a brutal initiation process in “A Long Way 

Gone”. New recruits are often forced to kill the escapees or even 

the members of their family to prove they are worthy of 

recruitment. If they refuse or try to decline, they will also be 

killed. They force recruits to eat or drink the blood of their 

freshly killed victims with the explanation that the initial RUF 

(Revolutionary Volunteer Front), are carved wherever it pleases 

the rebels, with a hot bayonet. This not only means that you are 

scared for life but that you cannot escape from them. 

Children who fight war are victims whose participation in 

conflict bears serious implications for their physical and 

emotional well-being. They are commonly subjected to abuse 

and most of them witness death, killing and sexual violence. 

Mary Hugas in her report for UNICEF in 2007 observed that it 

was estimated that approximately 35,000 children were being 

used for military purposes in African’s most intense conflicts in 

North Sudan, South Sudan, Central African Republic and 

Nigeria. Hugas maintained that some African leaders recruited 

them because they have claimed that children, despite their 

underdevelopment, brought their own quality as combatants to a 

fighting unit, being often remarkably fearless, agile and hardy. 

These children face harrowing experiences of pain in war and 

injuries to their young bodies. They are forced by hardship into 

manhood. 



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In recruiting the children as soldiers, they are forbidden to use 

their birth names, traditional names or any other names related 

to their past experiences with their families. They are instead 

given war names that identify them with their roles in the war. In 

the Beasts of no Nation some of the boys are given names as 

Rambo, Strika, Preacher, Griot etc. This is intended to severe 

their links with their people, eliminate their desire to escape and 

rejoin their families, and accept their new world and roles. They 

are indoctrinated into believing untrue things and that the so 

called enemies killed their parents and took away their loved 

ones, and therefore, must die. Thus, anybody the boys come 

across, man or woman is an enemy. To make them stronger, 

braver, and forget their families, they are shown war movies and 

they are given hard drugs. These take away their humanities. 

Agu in Beasts of no Nation is enticed by the Commandant’s 

uniform and shiny sword, holding gun as the Commandant is 

shouting: “Left, Right”, Left, Right”. The Conductor tells Agu 

that being a soldier is like “falling in love”. Agu believes him so 

much that he joins the military. While the war rages, he becomes 

increasingly divorced from the life he has known before the 

conflict started – a life of school friends; church services, and 

time with his family are no longer intact. As he recalls these 

“sunnier times”, his daily reality continues to spin further 

downward into inexplicable brutality, primal fear, and loss of 

selfhood. 

In A Long Way Gone, military commanders, often times, force 

children to take drugs like amphetamines, crack cocaine, palm 

wine, brown and brown (cocaine mixed with gun powder), 

marijuana and tranquilizers in order to disengage the child’s 

action from reality. According to Ishmael in A Long Way Gone, 

“Taking the drugs made it easier for them to kill because it 

numbed them of any emotion” (95). Once the children are 



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addicted to drugs, they will do just about anything that is 

ordered. They now evolve from boys into soldiers. This creates 

loss of identity for both the rebels and the boys. They are handed 

over AK – 47 and then, drugs become part of their world. 

Ishmael Beah recounts walking through villages killing 

everyone in sight. He is now quite different from the boy who 

loved hip-hop and danced around to the music. The war has 

taken many parts of his spirit. He does not know fear because he 

is filled with drugs which bring a false sense of power. 

Agu, in Beasts of no Nation confesses, “gun-juice” (drug) makes 

one stronger and braver to kill. “Everybody is always wanting 

gun juice because it is drug and it makes life easy… It tastes like 

licking sweet (55).  Drug makes the boys not to feel hungry 

when they are fighting: “Everybody is looking like one kind of 

animal and smelling like chicken or goat, or cow” (58). 

After taking drugs, the protagonists and other combatant 

children indulge in sexual exploitation. The soldiers turn the 

children into sex machines; Agu describes what happens after 

the commandant has told him to remove his cloth. 

So I was removing them. And then, after 

making me touching his soldier and that 

entire thing with my hand and with my 

tongue and lip, he was telling me to kneel 

and then he was entering inside of me…. 

(85) 

Through sexual exploitation and general act of brutality 

associated with the war, the boys lose their faith and innocence. 

Quoting Molarah Wood in his review of Beasts of no Nation, 

“Agu, is not only aroused by acts of violence, penises are 

soldiers’ standing at attention, and the abusive Commandant 



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gives the boy special favours because, as the child says: ‘I am 

saluting his soldier for him” (147). Agu’s rape of a woman keeps 

haunting him and he continually wrestles with the thought of 

whether he is a devil or not. Ishmael Beah’s memoirs of the 

people he has raped and killed caused him migraine, 

sleeplessness and sadness in A Long Way Gone. 

Grotesquery as a Stylistic Feature Employed By the Authors 

There are many stylistic features employed by Uzodinma Iweala 

in Beasts of no Nationand Ishmael Beah in A Long Way Gone: 

Memoirs of Boy Soldier, such asJourney motif, memoir, 

grotesquery among others, but this paper focuses on grotesquery. 

Anything grotesque, according to Oxford Advanced Learners 

Dictionary is “strange, bizarre, ugly and unnatural so as to cause 

fear” (525). It focuses on human body and all the ways that it 

can be distorted. However, as a stylistic form, it presents many 

difficulties. It intersects with many other stylistic variations, 

such as comedy, parody, caricature, horror, bizarre, tragedy, and 

the absurd. The first impressions of child soldiers’ human 

behavior are often confusing, making it difficult to speak of 

these actions without wishing to classify them as grotesque. 

According to Harpharm, Galt in his work, The Grotesque: 

Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature, the word 

designates “a condition of being just out of focus, just beyond 

the reach of language” (3-4). In this case, it accommodates the 

things left over, when the categories of language is exhausted. It 

is a defense against silence when other words have failed. 

In art, some objects or things are presented to us as grotesque or 

monstrous, but as Harpham explains, “hideous dragons” and 

“terrible beasts” are not necessarily grotesque. Those creatures, 

simultaneously, invoke and repudiate our conventional language 

based categories. The grotesque is understood by most critics as 

a mingling of human with animal features or mechanical 



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elements, the monstrous, the mishaps, which Sachs Gysin in The 

Grotesque in American Negro fiction, simply refers to as “the 

inverse of the ideal” (31). It is evil or absurdity portrayed in 

incongruously compounded human and non-human images that 

are in various degrees both disturbing and abstract. In her study 

of Child soldiers in Africa, Alvinda, Honwana describes child 

soldiers as  “those who find themselves in an ambiguous 

position that defies dichotomies between civilians and 

combatants, victims and perpetrators, initiated and initiators, 

protected and protectors, and as others argue, even human and 

non-human” (7). Agu and Ishmael Beah, the protagonists in 

Beasts of no Nation and A Long Way Gone can be described as 

beasts, the equivalent of animals. They are a combination of 

humans and beasts. They lack a socially defined place. They 

create a world that remains incomprehensible because, while 

childhood is associated with innocence, weakness, and 

dependence upon adult guidance and care, children who are 

engaged in war by contrast, are associated with strength, 

aggression, and the responsible maturity of adulthood. 

The paradoxical combination of childhood and combatant 

becomes unsettling because children at war find themselves in 

an unsanctioned position between childhood and adulthood. 

“Before the war we are children but now we are not”   (Beasts of 

no Nation 46). Ishmael Beah and other children who engage in 

war, as well as Agu and Strika are simultaneously producers and 

products of violence on the one hand; they are initiators and 

responsible for actions of violence while on the other hand they 

are subject beings. They respond positively to the needs of those 

they are loyal to. In the role of soldiers, they are put in a position 

of domination, while as children; they are unambiguous victims 

of abduction. 



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If Agu and Ishmael seem grotesque, it is not necessarily because 

of their odd appearance, but because, as individuals, they 

represent a corrupt or alienation of familiar forms. Taken as 

symbols of life and death, the child and the gun are two elements 

that fuse two opposites into one, although the gun the boy holds 

up (as soldiers do in time of war) is for self-protection and 

therefore, life saving. Agu, Ishmael and his friends are 

threatened by their identities on one hand, and those imposed on 

them by dominant elements of society which refer to them as 

outlaws, outcasts or public dangers on the other hand. It is the 

prevailing grotesque images of these combatant children as seen 

through the distorting lens of the society that is part of the appeal 

of this paper aimed at protecting the children fighting wars; 

preventing them from doing what adults do. 

The transformation of a child soldier into a cruel being may or 

may not be descriptively convincing. His body is a reflection of 

a decadent post-colonial world. By aligning tropes (which is a 

deviation from literal convention or proper language use, 

swerves in location sanctioned neither by custom nor logic) like 

madness, obscene, violence, and so on, and with these grotesque 

analysis like distortion, animation, and so on, it shows that the 

tropes are devices provided by language which we can use to 

identify problematic areas of Ishmael and Agu’s cognitive 

experiences. Hence, “the power of words is injected into 

language from outside, that is, from the institutions which 

delegate authority to the speaker” (Thompson John, 69). 

Uzodinma Iweala and Ishmael Beah employ their grotesque 

imagery to offer a new representation of children’s 

marginalization as a result of war. This paper takes into account, 

not only the tragic, ugly, or grotesque deviance and inversion 

through which combatant children of war are portrayed, but also 

the meaningful patterns that lie hidden in these features and 



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make the issue understandable. Their harrowing experiences of 

pain in war should not be praised; instead, we make a spotlight 

to show how combatant children have been forced into manhood 

by hardship. Grotesquery is a useful technique employed by the 

authors to show a decadent post-colonial society. It is a symbol 

of culture which has failed, on one hand, to control the passions 

of the younger ones, and on the other hand, to improve the 

conditions of children that drive them into violence. The war in 

Sierra Leone is taken to the climax by rebel leaders such as 

Foday Sankoh. The actions of people like Samuel Doe, Charles 

Taylor, Johnson, Sir Leaf  and so on, are far more violent, 

grotesque and terrifying. 

Consequences of War on the Psyche of Children as 

Characters 

Many of the children who engage in war have extreme cases of 

bitter experiences which lead to emotional problems. Their 

dreams to become useful in life are aborted by engaging in war. 

They are hunted by people they killed during the war. Ishmael 

Beah’s memoir takes one through his suffering, survival and an 

endless struggle against the seemingly impossible. As a former 

boy soldier, he tells his High School friends his encounters 

during the war as a warning for others not to venture into such 

act. 

Agu and Ishmael in Beasts of no Nation and A Long Way Gone 

respectively, experience loss of identity, and loss of their family 

members who are slain in the war. They also experience the loss 

of their innocence. Horror, fear and danger follow them to both 

unconscious thought, leaving them in a world where day and 

night are the same. They help in the destruction of their villages.  

Adults and most respected members of African society begin to 

fear their own children, as they kill and set villages on fire. They 

now behave like beasts which have no nation. The variables that 



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“pull” children towards violence are parallel to the “push” 

factors. Because of their age, immaturity, curiosity, and love for 

adventure, children are susceptible to temptation of becoming 

combatants. The fact that the children try to justify themselves 

by giving reasons for becoming soldiers is what Ogunmola, 

Kasimo calls “push” as opposed to “pull” factors. By “push,” it 

means that there are factors which give children no choice but to 

get involved in violence while “pull” refers to those which 

slowly attract them and encourage them into violence.  Trauma, 

brutalization, deprivation and other socio cultural related issues 

are among those push factors which drive children into violence.  

Conclusion 

Uzodinma Iweala and Ishmael Beah, as the authors have given a 

voice in their stories. The voice as narrators, although given 

expression through the gunshots, is a metaphor of the 

deconstruction of society. These children remind us of their 

pain, sadness and death which some of them survived while 

others did not. Recruiting children for military purposes is 

harmful for a number of reasons. Children’s development, health 

and well being are disrupted when they are drawn into military 

organizations. They suffer a severe disorder that causes them to 

lose contact with reality. Their thoughts, perceptions and 

emotion become distorted and their behavior may be bizarre. 

Children engaging in war have lingering effect of exploitation in 

a post-colonial contest. It continues to haunt the African 

continent. The children are now exposed to dangerous act of 

military. This paper advocates protecting them and putting to an 

end the use of African children to commit all sorts of crimes, 

including employing them as soldiers. 

 

 

 



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Works Cited 

Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider. 

Faircr:  Straus and Giroux, 1998. 

Dent, Ocay-Lakidi. “Manhood, Warrior hood, and Sex in East 

Africa: Perspectives from the 19th and 20th Centuries” 

Journal of Asian and African Studies. Kattel, vol. 5, no. 

2, Jul. 2007. pp 12-13. 

Galt, Harpham. The Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in 

Art and Literature. Princeton:  UP, 2008. 

Gysin, Sachs. The Grotesque in American Negro Fiction, 

Franke, 2000. 

Hornby, A.S. Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary 8th ed. 

Oxford, 2010 

Iweala, Uzodimma. Beasts of no Nation. John Murray. 2005  

Mfolo, Thomas. Chaka:A Historical Romance. Oxford: UP, 

1931 

Ogunmola, Kasimo. “Socio-Economic Injustice and Gonysim; 

War Lordism and Terrorism in the Sierra Leone Civil 

War” War Lords of Our Time. Cambridge: Up, 2009. 

Thompson, John. Studies in theTheory of Ideology. Polity, 2008. 

United Nations. State of the World Children’s Report  

MaryHugas, UNICEF, 2007.House Report 518. 

Wood, Molara. “Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of no Nation”. War 

in African Literature Today 26. Edited by Ernest 

Emenyonu. Heinemeann, 2008.           

 

 


