Emmanuel Jal: 'A cold heart is my protection'

Emmanuel Jal has no fixed record of when, exactly, he was born, but he is fairly sure that he was about seven years old when he was recruited as a child soldier in his native Sudan. He didn't need much persuading to join: three years previously, his father, a police officer, disappeared at the onset of the country's second civil war (raging from 1983 to, despite the 2005 peace agreement, this very day), and his mother had just been killed in the conflict. Hellbent on revenge, Jal very much wanted to represent the Sudan People's Liberation Army because, as he explains, "no one else in the world was going to help us".

From a vantage point of some 20 years, Jal still harbours fond memories of the SPLA. "Unlike many armies that have children," he says, "the SPLA trained us well." He recounts that the training lasted a full year, in which time he was taught how to cook, camp and how to be handy with both spears and AK-47s. "By the time they sent us out to battle, we couldn't wait. My friends, my family members, had been murdered; I wanted to kill as many Muslims and Arabs as I could."

Two decades on, the fact that Jal escaped with his life is just one remarkable aspect in what has come to be a remarkable life. Now in his late twenties – he estimates 28 – this strikingly good-looking young man has settled in London, and become intent on telling his story, not just once but over and over again. Today, he is a rapper, an author and even the subject of a documentary film. "I believe I have escaped for a reason," he says, quoting the title track of his forthcoming album, Warchild. "To tell my story, to touch lives."

Listen to a snippet of Emmanuel Jal's new single 'Warchild'

Courtesy of Sonic360

It isn't difficult to spot Jal on this tatty north London street one rainsoaked April morning. Dressed in an oversized brown denim jacket and walking as if to music, he cuts a commanding figure, his tight dreads bouncing above a pair of blazing white eyes. A fan of American hip-hop for several years now, he has many of its mannerisms down pat, and you could lose track of the routine involved in trying to shake hands with him. He suggests we repair to a nearby pub where he orders a cranberry juice, which he sucks on gently through a bendy straw.

Talking openly about his harrowing past, he says in the selfsame fluid voice that, just moments earlier, had ordered the soft drink: "I remember seeing the army come and burn our villages to the ground, killing everyone. What else was I to do but fight back?"

He went on to take part in two major battles, the first of which saw him armed with just a bow and arrow, the second a machine gun. Presumably, he killed people?

"People say I did," he says hesitantly, "but I didn't see [evidence] of that myself. But I did a lot of bad things and, yes, I did participate in the attacks. How did it make me feel? When you get your enemy, you feel... nice, you are so happy. You want to do more."

When he reached his early teens, Jal was rescued by British aid worker Emma McCune (soon to be the subject of the Tony Scott film Emma's War), who smuggled him into Nairobi where she planned to raise him as her son until, just six months later, she was killed in a car accident. Jal says now that he would have been tempted to return to the only life he knew had he not by then been introduced to the church, to gospel music and to the teachings of Martin Luther King and Gandhi. "In Kenya, Muslims and Christians live together. They are friends. It showed me another way, and I no longer wanted to kill."

Instead, he became increasingly interested in rap music and made a succession of home demo tapes, one of which fell into the hands of a local radio station that gave him airplay and made him famous locally. In 2005, his first album, Gua ("peace" in his native Nuer tongue) reached the Kenyan top five and through contacts in the UK he came to play at Live 8: Africa Calling at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

"Many opportunities came my way after that," he says, "which is why I never left London. This is my home now. I know there is a lot of gun and knife crime, but I feel safe here."

Though he doesn't quite make for the most nimble of rappers, nor the most loquacious ("Everything I see makes me sad/When I think about it I go mad," he recounts in a track called "Hai"), the blunt edges bring veracity to his tales. Where wannabe gangsta rappers are wont to exaggerate their formative years in pursuit of street credibility, Jal is the real thing. "Forced to Sin" explains how many of the war's dispossessed were driven to cannibalism in order to survive; while on "Vagina", he instructs Western oil pillagers to "stop treating Africa like a prostitute"; the track "50 Cent" takes a sly poke at the US superstar rapper's harnessing of his crack-selling past for commercial gain. "Have I met him?" he repeats. "No, but that song is getting a lot of attention in America, so maybe I will one day. That would be interesting, I think."

Listen to a snippet of 'Baaki Wara' by Emmanuel Jal

Courtesy of Sonic360

In February, the documentary that shares its name with his album debuted at the Berlin Film Festival. In it, this now very media-savvy operator revisits his homeland to assess the cost of two decades of civil war, and the effects it has wrought on him personally. He is even reunited with his father for the first time since his father fled, in fear of his life over 20 years ago. "That was... difficult," Jal says of the reunion, drumming his fingers nervously on the pub table. "I wanted to feel a connection with him, but my heart is cold. A cold heart is my protection mechanism. I don't really feel anything for anyone."

I ask him whether he has ever seen a psychiatrist. The laughter that bursts from his lips seems to catch even him by surprise. "A shrink? No, no. My music is my therapy. Writing my book was my therapy."

Warchild: A Boy Soldier's Story, to be published next year, does in print what his album does in music. While working on it, he regularly fell ill: "It made me weak, my nose bleeding all the time. But I had to get it out. Why? Because I want to leave it behind, move on."

In many ways, Jal's is a very 21st-century survivor's tale. He didn't just walk away from the horrors of his youth with a few scars (and he has many), but an overwhelming need to now be a mouthpiece for that horror.

"All rappers talk about their own struggle," he argues, "whether it's about the hood or drugs or whatever. With me it's no different. There is still a war in Sudan, still conflict, and I want the world to take notice of us, and action." And has he at least found peace within himself? "I have nightmares always, but I have friends, not just here but everywhere [5,528 on his MySpace page and counting] and that's good." He smiles. "I like having friends. It makes me feel normal."

'Warchild' is released by Sonic 360 on 12 May