TEENAGERS IN A (FORGOTTEN) TIME OF WAR

Bound within the pages of a book, the emotive intensity of a suffering child rises one notch. This goes some way to explaining why the bestselling lists have been powerless in the face of an onslaught of “misery-lit” stories of childhoods sacrificed on the altars of domestic abuse. (Famous examples: Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It; Toni Maguire's Don't Tell Mummy: A True Story of the Ultimate Betrayal; Julie Gregory's Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood, and Torey Hayden's Somebody Else's Kids: They Were Problems No One Wanted!)

Now, take that child out of the domestic setting, and plant him (or her) in a theatre of war, not simply as a victim, but as an active, even if unwilling, perpetrator of evil. What follows is an emotional effect different not in its intensity, but instead in its form; the distress evoked by domestic suffering is replaced by another feeling – a dramatic cross between shock, disgust and curiosity. Seeing violent adult impulses and emotions through the eyes and voice (and, I daresay, gun-nozzle) of one not yet equipped to handle such, is an experience in a class of its own.

A number of books, fictional and nonfictional, have recently appeared, featuring African child soldiers as protagonists: Sierra Leonean Ishmael Beah's memoir, A Long Way Gone; Uzodinma Iweala's debut novel Beasts Of No Nation (set in an unnamed African country and featuring the rotten-English speaking Agu); Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah is Not Obliged (described by the UK Guardian as “…a gruesome but exuberantly narrated litany of corruption and carnage as witnessed by a child soldier in Liberia”); What is the What, Dave Eggers' fictional recreation (novelised autobiography) of Valentino Achak Deng's life as a child refugee in war-torn Southern Sudan; and Ugandan China Keitetsi's Child Soldier: Fighting for my Life (it was China Keitetsi's life story which influenced Uzodinma Iweala in the writing of his novel). The list perhaps goes on and on.

What is clear from the above is the fact that a major distinction between Africa and the West in the 21st century is in the type of child-misery dripping onto the pages of our books: Civil War misery versus ‘Sitting Room’ misery. The war kid versus the unwanted kid.

The latest addition to the list of “warkid-lit” is Biyi Bandele's Burma Boy. But Mr. Bandele has chosen to set himself apart, not only by settling on a war much farther removed from the 21st century than the wars regularly featured in the other books (Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, etc), but also by portraying his teenage soldiers in a manner different from the “genre” trademark of tragic or damaged or traumatised victims of violence and coercion. This is one novel about a teenage African soldier that will not feel at home in the traditional warkid-lit section of the bookstores.

For one, the characters that throng the pages of this book are not child soldiers coerced into war (Lord's Resistance Army-style). In fact, Ali Banana, the fourteen-year-old protagonist, had to inflate his age in order to get enlisted into the army. And the impulse that drives him to war is neither bloodlust or fear, but rather the simple fact that his two bosom friends have enlisted. And then, the desire to prove useful to King George and the empire. Again, refreshingly, this is one war in which child soldiers feature that is not African in any way. Not in the warlords, nor again in the “booty” being fought over. (Take a back seat, Angolan oil, take a nap, Sierra Leonean diamonds, let Master Hitler et al show you how blood is shed.) These are not Hutus and Tutsis, or southern Christians and northern Muslims massacring each other, no. Instead, we see them, these young soldiers, joining hands behind a common “master”, to fight a common enemy. Mr. Bandele, in this book, seems to be trying to remind us that Africa has never owned the copyright on war.

Burma Boy is a book that is based largely on historical events and persons. There is a real-life Ali Banana, but Mr. Bandele is quick to warn us that “[the] imaginary namesake is pure invention and bears no resemblance to his historical forerunner”. There is also a real-life Wingate, the famed founder of the Chindits. In a lengthy note at the back of the book, the author acknowledges his debt to a number of books (mainly “first class accounts of the Chindits”) as well as to “…my father's stories of carnage, shell-shock and hard-won compassion”. The senior Bandele was a Burma veteran. The novel follows the “Thunder Brigade”an arm of the Chindits (an unorthodox Allied Commando Unit named after a mythical beast said to be a guardian of Burmese temples) on their journey through the jungle, dodging landmines, snipers and stray bullets from largely invisible enemies. The website www.chindits.info informs us that “The Chindits were the largest of the allied Special Forces of the Second World War. They were formed and led by Major General Orde Wingate DSO. The Chindits operated deep behind enemy lines in North Burma in the war against Japan. For many months, they lived in and fought the enemy in the jungles of Japanese-occupied-Burma, totally relying on airdrops for their supplies.”

Burma Boy is a laugh-out-loud novel, which, for one set in one of the most brutal stages of a most brutal war, is an admirable and brave achievement. When Banana discovers that one of his comrades has brought kulikuli (fried groundnut paste) along from Northern Nigeria, he cannot believe his eyes. “Kulikuli here in India? God is great.” It is also a novel of much fine detail, which manages to keep sharply poignant memories of home on the tips of the boys' tongues and hearts.

Memorable nicknames and comically mispronounced names abound; a fallout of the fact that much of the dialogue in the novel is conducted in Hausa vernacular. Bandele of course doesn't inflict this vernacular upon us, he skilfully translates into English, while leaving just enough of it to tantalise such that “Captain” emerges on the native tongue as “Kyaftin”, Sergeant becomes “Samanja”, Private, “Farabiti” and General, “Janar”. The English king, George VI transforms into a near-mythical “Kingi Joji”.

A warning though: if you are a reader looking for a rounded, “more-dimensional” representation of Japanese fighters of the Second World War, you will have to look beyond Burma Boy. My first exposure to the “Janpani” was in the war and adventure comics I devoured as a child and they presented a series of unflattering representations. The Janpani always came across as bumbling, tactless, reckless, English language-mauling warriors who seemed to prefer bayonets to bullets. Their favoured strategy seemed to be a mass stampede in the direction of the enemy, while yelling “Banzai!” Now, in Burma Boy, we meet them again at their most suicidal, seeking strength not in military strategy but in sheer number.

The reality of war is palpably evoked, and as the novel progresses it becomes evident that there is no amount of humour that can reverse the cruelties and tragedies of war. The Yoruba proverb that twenty children cannot play for twenty years is a law that even in peacetime is as true as gravity, not to talk of in a time of war.

In my opinion, the first chapter of Burma Boy qualifies as one of the best first chapters of any novel in recent times. The character profile of the fictional Wingate – a man whose life was bound up in near-equal measures of fact and myth – and his hallucinatory, Atabrine-induced stumbling through the streets of Cairo into his hotel room, the eventual scene of a failed but gruesome suicide attempt, is simply in a class of its own. However, juxtaposed with the mastery of this opening scene, I found the novel's ending strange and unsatisfying, laced with exaggerations that seemed bent on camouflaging the novel's “helmet” in ill-fitting leaves of magical realism.

In Burma Boy, Biyi Bandele pays tribute to the “boys” who left their homes in 1940s Nigeria for a jungle ridden with death and disease, to fight a war they understood little or nothing about. These were the ancestors of today's Agus and Ishmael Beahs. Unlike their descendants however, they have largely lain unsung, forgotten even. The collective amnesia with which the sacrifice of these brave fellows has been paid back cannot only be attributed to the unavailability in those times of CNN-type “embedded” news coverage – or the absence of now-ubiquitous dollar-soaked NGOs who pump solicited fortunes into the war against child-soldiering – but, in our defence, because new wars have not stopped arising to replace old ones.

The novel blurb informs us that “Burma Boy is the first novel to depict the experiences of black African soldiers in the Second World War.” We have Biyi Bandele to thank for this well-realised act of resurrection and immortalisation.