Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literatu ...

disintegration. Disputing the rationale of light arms development being a catalyst of child soldiering (he says the weapon of choice is the AK-47, available since 1949) and of the rhetoric surrounding child soldiers being inevitable byproducts of (failed) postcolonial nation-states, he cautions against the automatic coupling of postcolonialism with chaos, violence, exploitation and irrationality (Armies of the Young 14, 12). Therefore, he argues, “the child-soldier crisis is the crisis of the postcolonial state” (14); the figure of the child soldier as a metonymic substitution for a wayward, irrational state appears suspiciously in need of assistance from a sensible, firm adult (with international humanitarian institutions and mechanisms performing functions of parent, lawyer, and therapist). Rosen draws attention to the role of non-governmental organizations in lobbying efforts to develop IHL regarding child soldiers, and cites the Machel Report, a landmark study of child soldiering “authorized,” he argues, by Graça Machel's participation in national liberation movements (and marriage to Nelson Mandela), for providing “a template for virtually all human rights reporting on child soldiers” (“Child Soldiers” 298): “Machel's revolutionary ‘credentials’ are important because the idea that warfare in the postcolonial world is qualitatively different from earlier forms of war is central to the humanitarian narrative” (Armies of the Young 12). This critique raises the question of how to write about African child soldiers, or child soldiers more broadly, as a serious problem without replicating the Western, ethnocentric bias of much of the current commentary. Rosen's insight into how a globalized “politics of age” in legal and humanitarian narratives of child soldiers substitutes for a more material politics about social inequity in the postcolony and around the globe shapes my readings of the enthusiastic consumption, at least in the global North, of fiction that features African child soldiers.⁸ His argument asks us to consider not “just,” as Andrew Mawson queries, “Can a convenient fiction about what is a child carry the weight of so much violence?” (Mawson 141); it also suggests the need to uncover other narratives buried within those fictions. What can we not see when we look at child soldiers through the parameters set by the idealist bildungsroman or most IHL, two signposts of modernity? In order to rethink modernity