As the crisis in Sudan continues, with its president recently expelling aid agencies, a new book chronicles the experiences of a child soldier in the beleaguered country. Sarah Foster speaks to its author, Emmanuel Jal, who says he was saved by an ‘angel’ from North Yorkshire.

"AND now we are pleased to welcome Sudanese rap star Emmanuel Jal to the main stage at Live 8, Eden Project,” a voice booms out. Suddenly time stands still. The lights, the noise, the colours, bleed into nothing and the faces melt away. I am a child again.

“God will look after us,” my mother is whispering as we lie under a bed. She is holding on to my two brothers, two sisters, and me as we hide from a war being waged outside our hut. “One day we will be in a better place,” my mother tells us, and we believe her. But I will soon come to learn that even a mother’s fierce love will not protect me...

IT IS with this poignant juxtaposition that Emmanuel Jal begins Warchild, the story of his life as a child soldier in war-torn Sudan. Now an international rap star, who performed at Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday concert as well as at Live 8, and whose music featured in the hit film Blood Diamonds, he has come an incredibly long way. Dedicated to charity work, he has established a trust, GUA Africa, to build a rehabilitation centre for child soldiers in Sudan, and more than this, he is determined to be an ambassador for peace; a living example of a young life perverted by war.

It all began when Emmanuel, who now lives in London and who has no record of his birth but gives his age as 29, was living in a village in northern Sudan. He recalls an incident on a bus which set him on a path to hatred.

He and his mother and uncle, along with his brothers and sisters, were taunted by a group of Arabs, who targeted them simply for being Christian. His mother and uncle were beaten, and when Emmanuel tried to intervene, he too was assaulted. This was his first experience of the animosity that exists between the two religions, and made him determined to wreak revenge.

“That planted a seed in me and when I was given the opportunity to be trained, I wanted revenge and to kill as many enemies as possible,”

he says.

This opportunity arose soon enough. After being forced to flee from village to village, under attack from militias directed by the Muslim government, and having lost his beloved mother in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, Emmanuel was given the chance to train as a soldier with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

He had been abandoned by his father and misled into thinking he was going to school – now all he wanted was to kill. He writes of first encountering a jenajesh, or child soldier, and the sense of awe that the boy inspired. His desire to join the ranks of the jesh a mer, or children’s army, was fuelled by the appalling conditions at the refugee camp, where many children died from hunger and disease. With a heart full of bitterness and malice, he went to learn the tactics of guerrilla warfare.

“What did I have to lose? I’d lost everything,”

he asks poignantly. “It’s like fighting a war with people who have nothing to lose. In Sudan, when you are 11 or 12, you are considered an adult. I killed my first animal when I was seven. When I was eight I slept with an AK47.”

Emmanuel had his first taste of battle when he and some fellow “lost boys” – child refugees from Sudan – attacked a village close to the camp. The villagers were not even enemies but, frustrated at their inactivity, and having acquired a bloodlust, the boys gave vent to their murderous cravings. Worse was to come when, in May 1991, when Emmanuel was just 11, he took part in an SPLA offensive against Ethiopian rebels.

“I closed my eyes as I fired, not knowing whom I was shooting at or where,” he writes.

“I just wanted to feel the gun’s beat as the air around me filled with the sounds of jenajesh screaming as they were hit. ‘Mamayo,’ they cried. Mummy.”

EMMANUEL ended up on the frontline, near the southern Sudanese capital of Juba. It was here, after seeing the bodies of fellow soldiers butchered by the enemy, that he, too, committed atrocities. “I walked towards the man, lifting the machete as I moved closer with the other jenajesh beside me,” he writes. “They, too, had machetes in their hands, and our enemies’ eyes were begging us now for mercy as they moaned and cried. I lifted my machete as the other boys raised theirs and smashed them into the jallab (Arab). Blood spurted on to my face. Pictures. Pictures. In my head.”

Such scenes – and the feelings of guilt they inspired – have been the source of many nightmares.

All Emmanuel can do now is try to put the past behind him and remember that his actions were borne of ignorance.

“When you go to war and see some of your friends injured badly and also you have bitterness in you, and when you catch a prisoner, you don’t think twice,” he says. “You can’t have mercy at that point. There’s something about revenge. You feel so nice when you get it but the joy is only for about five minutes, then the dreams will haunt you for the rest of your life.”

By a remarkable twist of fate, Emmanuel was rescued from his life of depravity. Having fled the battlefield and emerged broken, but still alive, in the town of Waat, he met Emma McCune, the wife of SPLA rebel leader Riek Machar and a former North Yorkshire convent girl. Emma had been an aid worker in the Sudan until she met and married Machar and was drawn into the civil war.

She had made it her life’s work to help Sudanese children get an education and saw something special in the traumatised youngster.

She smuggled him into Kenya, where she gave him a home, schooling and badly-needed love. Emmanuel remembers her as “the angel who saved me”.

“I have said she was an angel and the reason I’m here today is because she came into my life,” he says humbly. “I was always causing her trouble but she never gave up on me. I never had a chance to say thank you to her.”

Tragically, Emma was killed in a car crash when she was just 29 and five months pregnant with her first child, leaving Emmanuel without his friend and mentor. In the years that followed, he struggled to find his way. Then he started rapping and discovered that expressing his feelings to music helped relieve the terrible pain he had carried for so long.

Now he hopes to repay the kindness Emma showed him by building a school in her honour.

He has started a campaign, eating only one meal a day until he has raised the $300,000 required for the project.

His greatest wish is that, through his story, others will be inspired to put an end to child exploitation and lay the foundations for lasting peace. “Nothing has changed in me – I’m still the same person,” he says. “The only thing that’s changed is that I’ve been able to forgive my enemies and move on with a different war now, which is peace and giving hope to people.”

■ Warchild by Emmanuel Jal (Abacus, £12.99). For more information visit gua-africa.org