Child Soldier [Hardcover]

This is the amazing true story of a young Ugandan girl who left her violent, cruel and uncaring family life behind to become a child soldier, only to experience even worse brutality and violence at the hands of her superiors.
China tells the tale in her own words and style so you get a genuine first hand account of everything, but unfortunately she's not a skilled storyteller and although you can forgive her poor grammar, the lack of detail and explanation often left me confused. This could be a 5* book with the right ghost writer.

I read this book years ago when it came out and I no longer have a copy. I am only writing a review because its an important book and much better than the other review suggests. To hell with the grammar, its actually beautifully written and a very clear - I don't get the confusion - account of to a middle-class European an astonishing life of poverty and abuse as a female child soldier in a Ugandan army. Eventually after many years she gets rescued by the Red Cross. I have read thousands of books in my life and this is definitely the most harrowing, only rivalled by an account of a soldier in Vietnam but even that doesn't get close.

'Child Soldier' takes the misery shock-lit genre in an international direction and to a level that our home-grown 'crap-childhood' writers could only have nightmares about. It should be fascinating, it could be fascinating, but it isn't. I wanted to like it and I was genuinely interested to know more about the life of child soldiers but there's no hiding the conclusion that years of skipping school and fighting left the author singularly unqualified to write a compelling or readable autobiography and desperately in need of a good ghost writer and some tougher editing.

China Keitetsi was born in Uganda, and 'brought up' (in the loosest sense of the word) by a violent father and a manipulative and deceitful step-mother. She ran away to find her real mother but was so scared that her mother and her neighbours would 'eat her' that she ran away again, finding herself 'co-opted' into the National Resistance Army of M.V. Museveni. All of this by the age of eight! The army exploited small children as fully fledged and extremely obedient soldiers, using them to trick their enemies, and training them as frighteningly loyal body-guards. By becoming the family that these children lacked, the NRA instilled a shocking degree of compliance amongst the child soldiers who soon became hardened to the reality of death and destruction.

Girl soldiers were also exploited sexually by their officers and China had been repeatedly raped long before reaching sexual maturity, sometimes developing bizarre feelings for her exploiters. She becomes head body-guard to an NRA government minister who rapes her every night at 9 pm but despite this, can't bring herself to betray him when he's arrested for government crimes. Eventually, and by the most circuitous of routes, China escapes from Uganda and becomes a refugee in Denmark and an international spokesperson and campaigner for the rights and protection of child soldiers.

Now then, if you are thinking that's all bit too much plot and getting ready to give me a nasty comment about 'spoilers' let me just say that nothing above goes beyond what's written in the cover synopsis. And maybe that's part of the problem - the introduction, the dedication and the synopsis give away so much plot that there are few surprises left to the reader. We know before we open the first page that she will have a child by another soldier, that she will leave that child behind, that she'll go to Denmark, become a spokesperson for the plight of child soldiers and meet a bunch of leading politicians. To be honest, if you just read the cover and the dedication you could pretty much skip the rest of the book. For me the biggest surprise was having to plough through 112 pages (out of a total of 272) before the author even mentions the army. Considering the title was 'Child Soldier', I thought this was a bit too much scene setting and it left me feeling a tad cheated.

If you are looking for an "eye-witness account" of life in the NRA as promised in the cover blurb, you will struggle to find it here. Keitetsi is just not capable of describing her experiences in a compelling way. She flits between the significant and the mundane without any filtering of what is and isn't important (or for that matter, what is or isn't interesting). We really can't tell what order things are happening - for example we learn she's pregnant but up to that point she hasn't mentioned she was in a relationship so it comes as a surprise. Then a lot later in the book, long after her baby's born, she's writing again about being pregnant but we learn nothing of whether it's actually the same pregnancy as before or if it's not, the whole story of that possibly second pregnancy is just left hanging.

This book is painful to read - but sadly it's not the shock-value of the writer's experience that causes that pain; it's the rambling incoherence and inconsistent attempts at pseudo-patois that make it such a drag. China grew up speaking a local Ugandan language, moved to Denmark and presumably learned Danish, so why do we get subjected to this weird form of English where the odd sentence structures fail to give a sense of authenticity and original 'voice'?

China today is still a young woman and her campaigning for the rights of child soldiers the world over is undoubtedly important work. I've read other accounts of child soldiers in Africa and been intensely moved by the plight of them and their families but this book was an intense disappointment. It's also a shame we don't learn anything about China's life and work after her escape because the book ends shortly after she reaches Denmark. If you want to read one book on this topic, my recommendation is to go for well-written fiction - such as Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley (set in Sierra Leone).