The Child Soldier as a Mercenary: An Interpretive Recontextualization of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is Not Obliged and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation

Abstract

ABSTRACT The United Nations Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children (1996) remains the global template for the wholesale denunciation of the participation of children in war. This is based on the virtual ossification, in mainstream discourse, of the assumption that child soldiers are vulnerable victims of adult manipulation and exploitation for their lack of agency and consciousness. In spite of the popularity of such assumption, it runs against the grain of field research which shows that the number of voluntary enlistment outweighs forced recruitment of child soldiers. Using Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is Not Obliged (2000) and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation as it analytical touchstone, this paper recontextualizes the child soldier phenomenon by way of an alternative narrative to the uncritical conception of the child soldier as victim. With interpretive textual analysis as its methodology, the paper demonstrates that in Africa, the child soldier is not only a conscious agent but also a profit warrior whose motivations are economically driven and socio-culturally conditioned. The paper recommends the recognition of the voluntary factor in military enlistment as a basis for factoring the socio-economic and cultural contexts that undergird child soldiering into global policy and programming on the subject.