A former soldier writes for children
“They would put someone in front of you (to be killed) who was either trying to run or who was afraid or kept crying at night.” MICHEL CHIKWANINE
University of Toronto student wants to share his traumatic story with a new audience in a format they will relate to
Abducted at age 5 from his school’s soccer field, Michel Chikwanine was forced to do unimaginable things as a child soldier in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Now a 27-year-old African studies student at the University of Toronto, Chikwanine has co-authored a new graphic novel about his experiences called
Child Soldier: When Boys and Girls are Used in War, aimed at kids 10 to 14.
Chikwanine, who wrote the book with Jessica Dee Humphreys, said he hopes it will help young people understand what being a child soldier means.
The illustrations, by Claudia Davila, allowed him to tell the story in a way that kept the emotional pull “without making it too graphic and shocking for the audience,” he said.
Chikwanine was taken by a group of rebel soldiers one day while playing with other boys behind his school.
After driving for hours in trucks down a bumpy road, the soldiers ordered the children out.
Chikwanine was blindfolded and the soldiers rubbed a mixture of cocaine and gun powder into a wound on his left wrist.
He was then forced to pull the trigger of an AK-47. That memory — of killing his best friend Kevin — still haunts him.
“He was my protector and the guy that I looked up to a lot,” Chikwanine said.
To brainwash the boys and keep them from running away, the soldiers continued to make them kill each other.
“They would put someone in front of you who was either trying to run or who was afraid or kept crying at night,” Chikwanine said.
After two weeks of “military drills,” the group was taken to a village to get food and gun supplies. Chikwanine saw it was his only chance to escape. “My mindset wasn’t in fear of these adults, my mindset was in fear of my father punishing me for being out late,” he said.
“I just kept running toward the jungle and somehow ended up in a town where people knew me and they reunited me back with my family.”
Chikwanine regards himself as “one of the lucky ones” for escaping. But the transition back to a normal childhood was not easy.
“It was still painful,” he said, “bearing the scars that I still have to this very day.”
His family eventually ended up in a refugee camp in Uganda. His father, a human rights advocate, was assassinated in the capital, Kampala.
As a result, their refugee case was expedited and Chikwanine arrived in Canada in January 2004 with his mother and younger sister.
At the Ottawa airport, Chikwanine saw snow for the first time. He wondered if he could eat it.
“I was like, ‘Why would anybody want to live in a freezer?’ ” he recalled with a laugh.
But the then-16-year-old also experienced a sense of peace for the first time in many years.
Recently returned from a trip to Africa, Chikwanine hopes to one day work to improve the quality of education there.
“There’s huge void of knowledge on the continent that I learn about here in North America at a privileged school,” he said.