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SIERRA LEONE - Brutalised, war-ravaged and drugged-up, the child soldiers of Sierra Leone and Sudan have become objects of fascination in the West.
They feature in films like Blood Diamond and a new novel by Dave Eggers, while Brad Pitt has produced a documentary on their plight. And now they're in Starbucks, as it launches its new book club with a harrowing first-person account by an ex-boy killer.
Are Africans telling their own stories, or are these merely signs of our appetite for tales of savagery?
On one level Blood Diamond indulges many of the stereotypes of the traditional Hollywood adventure movie set in or about Africa. The hero, a Rhodesian mercenary, (Leonardo DiCaprio), is white.
The chaos of the war-stricken African state of Sierra Leone provides the setting for his quest to live authentically and free.
He is an all-action hero, seemingly indestructible until his heart is softened by a woman - an American journalist, also white.
Yet on another level, Blood Diamond is a political text which, like The Constant Gardener, attempts to expose the complicity of western corporations in the ruin of a resources-rich but vulnerable and disturbed African countries; the ultimate villains, for all their cruelty and violence, are not the rebel soldiers but their western sponsors.
The film investigates the phenomenon of the child soldier in Africa, of those orphaned in conflict or stolen from their families and then brutalised and humiliated until, finding a new kind of family among rebel soldiers, they become drug-addicted killers, without pity or fear.
We know something of these children from innumerable journalistic dispatches from northern Uganda, from Sierra Leone, from Liberia - one of the most ravaged of all African states - and, most recently, from Sudan.
We know something of these children, too, from recent novels, such as Uzodinma Iweala's acclaimed Beasts of No Nation, which was set in an unnamed west African state and narrated in a swirling, fractured demotic by a boy soldier named Agu, and Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah is Not Obliged, which takes as its setting the civil war in Liberia.
We know something of these children but, at the same time, can we ever say that we know them - know what they feel, think, need or want?
The honest answer is that we do not, although that may be about to change with the publication next month of two remarkable first-person documentary accounts.
These are Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, an astonishingly self-revealing memoir of his time as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s, and Dave Eggers' What Is the What, a long, experimental non-fiction novel written in collaboration with Valentino Achak Deng, one of the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan who are now living in the United States, having been displaced in the civil war.
There is, too, the forthcoming documentary film God Grew Tired of Us, directed by Christopher Quinn, with Brad Pitt as an executive producer and Nicole Kidman as narrator.
Like the Eggers novel, this is a story of American immigration framed by the trauma of war in Sudan and the suffering of tens of thousands of children separated from their families, some of whom became boy soldiers.
Clearly, as the New York Times recently put it, the African boy-killer "is becoming a pop-cultural trope". Even Starbucks has sensed a commercial opportunity. The coffee chain has chosen Beah's memoir as the inaugural title of its new book club. A Long Way Gone is already a number one bestseller in the US because of the support of Starbucks, which sponsored Beah's countrywide reading tour.
As harrowing as it is violent, A Long Way Gone is an odd choice for a sanitised coffee chain. It begins relatively serenely, with a gentle portrayal of communal life in Beah's home village. One day the village is attacked by the Revolutionary United Front, the rebel army that controls Sierra Leone's diamond mines.
Beah, then 12, is separated from his family in the ensuing chaos. Once safe, he first allows himself to believe that a reunion with his family is possible, supported and protected as he is by other displaced boys - in a kind of union of strangers.
Later, however, he discovers that his parents and two brothers are dead; soon, he is separated from the boys as well, left to wander alone and bereft in the hostile bush, scavenging for food.
He is eventually picked up by government troops in the south-east. They teach him how to handle an AK-47, in preparation for his becoming part of a child unit fighting rebels.
Beah writes without self-pity of how he became addicted to drugs, "smoking marijuana and sniffing brown brown, cocaine mixed with gunpowder"; of how he ransacked villages, murdering innocents as and when he had to; and of how he learned never to wonder about the old life he left behind.
The first death is the most difficult for him, after which he kills and tortures without remorse.
Beah has no idea how many people he killed. "I never thought to keep count," he told Time magazine.
"We attacked civilians, villagers, anyone the commander deemed was an enemy; we killed them. If you thought they maybe aided the rebels, you shot them. If they withheld food, you shot them."
In 1998, he moved to New York to live with a woman called Laura Simms, who worked at the United Nations and had been paying his school fees in Freetown as part of his rehabilitation. He was 17.
He attended Oberlin College in Ohio and decided to write a memoir because he knows he has been given a second chance in life and he wants to bear witness.
The publisher is selling A Long Way Gone hard, perhaps overselling it: "This account is utterly unique - until now there has not been a first-person account of this kind."
In fact, I read something similar only a couple of years ago, China Keitetsi's Child Soldier, published by the independent Souvenir Press.
She fought as a young girl in Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army, which came to power in Uganda in 1985. Keitetsi, who lives in Denmark, was repeatedly raped as a soldier and had her first child at the age of 14. "For us female soldiers, we had to offer sex to more than five officers in one unit," she wrote.
Uzodinma Iweala, who has just been selected as one of Granta magazine's Best of Young American Writers says, "It's important and wonderful that issues such as that of the plight of the child soldiers are being written about and discussed.
"If people are encouraged as a result to think more deeply about the historical context for conflict, about the situation about which they are reading as well as the historical context of African writing itself, then that's all the better."
There is, however, a problem, what he calls a "sinister side" to our fascination with Africa.
"Is this resurgence of interest in Africa and its issues indicative of a genuine desire to see change?" he asks. "Or does it merely reflect that Africa has been centre stage for the past two or three years, even if it is now being edged out by the new celebrity cause of global warming?"
Iweala is a Nigerian, an Igbo, born and educated in America. His mother, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, was until recently the finance and then foreign minister of Nigeria. Before that, she was vice-president of the World Bank.
Her son is a child of privilege. So why for his first novel did he choose to speak in such a disturbed voice, as a child of suffering? Is he, in one sense writing for a Western audience, conforming to what is expected of a novel set in Africa?
He is silent for a while and then says: "As African writers we have a compulsion to tell our own stories. I agree that there can be an expectation for stories about Africa to be about suffering, death and destruction ... but for too long we had to listen to other people, non-Africans, as they attempted to tell our stories."
The day after we had spoken, I received an email from Iweala. He had been thinking.
"If you read articles and watch the BBC you constantly and consistently hear words like 'bloodthirsty', 'tribal'. And the wars we fight are always 'senseless' as compared to Western wars which I suppose are full of meaning.
"Personally I believe all war is senseless.
"What I'm saying is that I wonder if sometimes the fascination with the child soldier or Africa's wars is one of genuine 'how can we stop this' or whether it's that same attitude that people have when they pass a gruesome road accident.
"Why I and others like me who have written and will write about such a subject is to humanise rather than dehumanise as the press and common stereotypes often do."
The most celebrated of the current batch of boy soldier narratives is, perhaps inevitably, What Is the What by the bestselling author Dave Eggers.
Iweala is one of several of the new generation of African novelists to have endorsed the Eggers book with a cover quote.
What Is the What is a curious hybrid. It is at once a gripping, fast-paced adventure story - there are gun battles, people are eaten by crocodiles, and so on - and a more ruminative, coming-of-age narrative.
Eggers has spoken of how he wanted to write a conventional biography, to tell Achak Deng's story straight. "I didn't want my voice in there."
"In many cases, the Lost Boys of Sudan have no one else," the fictional Achak tells us, beginning another of his long internal monologues.
"The Lost Boys is not a nickname appreciated by many among our ranks, but it is apt enough. We fled or were sent from our homes, many of us orphaned, and thousands of us wandered through deserts and forests for what seemed like years.
"In many ways we are alone and in most cases we are unsure of where exactly we're going."
As a boy - aged no more than about 6 - Valentino Achak Deng was separated from his family when his village of Marial Bai in southern Sudan came under attack from Islamist Arab militia.
That was during what is now known as the second Sudanese civil war, from 1983 to 2005. (It is happening again in Darfur, western Sudan.)
Once adrift from his family, Achak, an ethnic Dinka, begins to wander lost and hungry with other similarly bereaved boys.
Together in ever-increasing numbers they begin the monumental trek north to Ethiopia, where they have been told they will find safety and comfort, "in the place that is", as well as one day having the possibility of being reunited with their families - if their families are not dead already.
Deng, who is now 25 and a student at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, eventually arrived in America in 2001, having spent a decade at the Kukuma camp in Kenya, which he describes as "one of the largest and most remote refugee camps in the world".
He was brought to America by a charity called the Lost Boys Foundation and once there he was introduced to Eggers, to whom he told his story orally over the course of many years.
Deng has granted Eggers an unusual freedom, the freedom to recast his life in fiction. The result is a deeply affecting, if problematic work.
Its chief selling point and the source of much of its considerable pathos is the claim it makes to truth - to be telling the truth, in broad outline, of the terrors of the civil war in Sudan as well as the truth, in detailed particularity, of one man's suffering and quest for redemption in America.
There is a moment, early in A Long Way Gone, when Ishmael Beah, in flight from rebel attack, describes arriving in a village in the company of a group of boys. This is before he has become a soldier.
Beah loves American rap music and carries cassettes of his favourite artists. But on arriving in the village he is searched and his rap cassettes are confiscated.
The village chief demands to know what kind of music is rap. "It is similar to telling parables," Beah replies, "but in the white man's language."
In their own different ways, Eggers and Deng, Beah and Iweala, and even China Keitetsi (whose book was published first in Danish before being translated into many languages), are all telling parables; parables of loss, flight and renewal, not in the white man's language, but in a style and idiom that is entirely their own.
Absent from their books are the grand, melodramatic generalisations about Africa that are such a feature of so much work by western writers about the continent.
The stories of Ishmael Beah, Achak Deng and the Lost Boys featured in God Grew Tired of Us are each related in long retrospective, from positions of relative safety.
They are stories of departure and of arrival in a new land, with new aspirations. They are also about the process of memory.
When Beah describes his most brutal experiences as a soldier in the bush his language contracts. It is as if such moments of horror can only be described in the sketchiest of details; to recall them otherwise would be beyond perhaps what is possible. It would be, as it were, to relive them all over again.
"Forgiveness is actually an important part of healing from the war for me," Beah says.
"To forgive is not to forget but to transform all that happened into something positive because the other route can only bring more suffering to me and those around me."
You hope that writing his book has brought him a release from suffering.
As for the other countless lost boys and kids-at-arms who have survived wars but have never made it out of Africa, you would like to believe that one day they, too, will be able to find a kind of peace.
- OBSERVER
