Girls at War, Girls in War: Three Female African Child Soldier Narratives

In echoing Obioma Nnaemeka’s fluid understanding of the war front and her insistence on the need to expand the notion of war as armed conflict to incorporate the idea of war as a figure of violence against humanity and human dignity, this article examines witness narratives by and about former female African child soldiers in Uganda and Eritrea. A critical reading of China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier (2002), Senait Mehari’s Heart of Fire (2006), and Evelyn Amony’s I Am Evelyn Amony (2015) reveals that the girl child is continually in/at war, regardless of whether she is at home or on the battlefield. Adopting Judith Butler’s strand of precarity and her notion of framing, the article teases out the nodes of African female livelihood in the militarised patriarchal cultures related in the memoirs, emphasising how the female African child soldier’s body occupies, inhabits, and lives through spaces of combat and domestic violence. The study also examines the feminist critique of otherness and aggressiveness towards those whose lives are considered less grievable and the authors’ agentive paradigm in their writing.