Girlhood in a Warzone: African Child Soldiers in Film

Since early 2000, UN edicts and NGO awareness-raising campaigns have resulted in the increasing global visibility of child soldiers. Their lives have been presented in both fictional and documentary formats in films such as Blood Diamond (Zwick, 2006), Innocent Voices (Mandoki, 2004), Soldier Child (Abramson, 1998), Ezra (Aduaka, 2007), War Child (Chrobog, 2008), and Kassim the Dream (Davidson, 2008). However, in the act of making visible the realities of the child soldier, what has too frequently happened is that the life and experiences of the girl has been ignored in favor of her male counterparts.1 Girls constitute as much as 40 percent of all child soldiers,2 yet they are infrequent focal points, with a large majority of films centering on the male experience. This chapter will examine how these complex female figures have been inflected in the fictional cinematic space and debate why the presentation of the girl soldier has, to date, been limited and constrained by dominant gender narratives related to girlhood, childhood, and the global North’s engagement with Africa. Whilst there have been several documentaries made on child soldiers (both feature-length and short), there is not enough space here to fully engage with both formats (since overall there are some key areas of divergence) and I am keen to avoid the sin of generality. Hence, this chapter focuses on the fictional space and on films that have been made by international filmmakers and distributed globally.3