Collage by Dami Mojid. / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: Beasts of No Nation, 2015. /IMDB.
THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / FILM DEPT.
Beasts of No Nation and the Fate of the West African Child
Collage by Dami Mojid. / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: Beasts of No Nation, 2015. /IMDB.
THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / FILM DEPT.
Beasts of No Nation and the Fate of the West African Child
Anyone faintly familiar with the current state—and history—of the world would understand the continued relevance of the subjects of violence and war. Yet, a peek beneath the surface of the affairs of humanity reveals not only a long and widespread bellicosity, but also a knack for the unconscionable in the conduct of armed conflicts. From the mass extermination of civilian captives whose only offense was to have belonged to a maligned race, to the much more recent killings and dehumanization of thousands in Rwanda, Sudan, Palestine and many parts of Europe, the story of mankind is pockmarked by a rash of atrocities committed in the name of warfare. Sometimes, the tool for the legitimization of cruelty has been an appeal to a well-meaning (read: vengeful) patriotism.
Among the countless monstrosities perpetrated in the context of wars, the recruitment of children as soldiers has been of a special kind of interest in universal and regional governance. With specific regard to West Africa, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Child Policy 2019–2030 contains a four-point statement of priority objectives. The third, focused on child protection, seeks to ensure that ‘children are not recruited as combatants in armed conflicts by the State and non-state actors.’ The policy continues the longstanding efforts of ECOWAS and cooperating supranational bodies, which have for decades led the fight against the untoward spectacle of child soldiers in the region and beyond. Through its essential participation in initiatives such as the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programmes and the operation of its ceasefire monitoring group (ECOMOG), ECOWAS has, historically, made key strides in this direction—in Liberia, in Sierra Leone and a host of other countries in the region.
A WIDER EFFORT
Advocacy for the soul of the (West African) child is a concerted effort of an even wider reach, involving the earnest contributions of non-governmental organizations and the global fourth estate. It also enjoys a wide popularity due to the work of people in the creative industries from the adult literati to the makers of music and film, who tell compelling stories about the endangered lives of weaponized children.
Spotlighted in this essay is Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 2015 film, Beasts of No Nation. Originally a novel of the same title by Uzodinma Iweala in 2005, Fukunaga’s movie pursues the solicitude for children—expressed through a stark portrayal of the tough life of its juvenile protagonist—as a major artistic concern. It follows the acts and reminiscences of Agu, a pseudo-educated but nevertheless bright young chap, who lives through a series of debilitating losses, all precipitated by a wartime reality. From the point of view of this child’s displacement and dispossession, the novel captures the precarious nature of life under conditions of unmitigated political violence. The reader mourns with Agu as he reflects on his experiences of unnecessary privation: of a normal childhood, of family and a string of friends, of home, his civilian status, his anal virginity, and perhaps most distressingly, his humanity. Ten years after its initial publication in 2005, when Beasts of No Nation was adapted for screenplay, the trope of the child soldier still enjoyed enough currency to have the film released to critical acclaim. If the movie were made today, two decades after the book’s release rather than one, would it still be a Netflix blockbuster?
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THE ‘BUFFER ZONE’
Beasts of No Nation, the film, opens with the depiction of a village-like space—simply designated as the ‘buffer zone’—in an unidentified country beset by a civil war. The idea of a buffer zone points to a marked-up area whose inhabitants are supposed to be untouched by the supervening conflict. In this protected space we see a happy Agu, cavorting with his apparently younger friend Dike, watching football through their ‘Imagination TV’ which they eventually sell, for a few plates of food, to Nigerian soldiers who stand garrison at the gates. The soldiers, operating under the aegis of ‘ECOMOD’ (an obvious variation on ECOMOG), are self-assured and warm. But their dominance is short-lived, as the Armed Forces of the National Reformation Council (NRC)—the government side of the strife—breaks the buffer agreement and enters into the protected zone.
This does not, however, come as a shock. A certain cinematic quality to this portion of the film already makes the idea of a space insulated from the surrounding trouble more than a little suspect. Agu seems happy, but only with the oblivious bliss of a child. And although many adults, eager to protect younglings from the dismay of unfortunate situations, are cheerful towards him, the wartime deprivations are already well in motion. The children, for one, have stopped attending school. Agu’s father, who was a schoolteacher, is out of work. It is unclear whether he earns a living in another way, but we do know that he is busy organizing for the zone’s defence against ‘the looters’. One begins to see the morally ambiguous, non-viable enterprise of Agu and his peers—attempting to sell a joke of an electronic device and deliberately causing a roadblock by cutting down a big tree branch which they then ‘help’ road plyers remove for a toll—for what it is: economic action taken by children whose parents had been shorn of the capacity to provide. Thus, even though he lived within a space ostensibly protected from the gore, Agu is, in a sense, a child labourer on account of the war before he becomes a child soldier.
What all of this conjures, almost mystically, is the spectre of John Pepper Clark, the great Nigerian poet, voice reverberating from the great beyond as he reiterates his lyrical warning about the total human costs of war: ‘The casualties are not only those who are dead… / The casualties are not only those who are wounded.’ In an enclosure guarded by peacekeeping soldiers, not only Agu and the rest of the people behind the barricades, but the dreams too of everyone involved, are also prisoners and casualties of the war. The buffer is not a safe zone (no such thing exists within a warring territory); it is purgatory that leads, all the way down, to inferno.
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GROUND ZERO
In the wake of the NRC army’s rampage, Agu is violently severed from the only life (and people) that he knows. His father and brother are shot by the invaders, his mother and sister shipped off to presumed safety, and his friend, Dike, disappears with his own family. So for a moment we witness post-invasion Agu thrown into a quasi-Hobbesian state of prehistoric existence—trying, but failing, to eke out a living from his sudden but unsurprising conditions: solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, but thankfully not short. His life is saved, albeit not before it was threatened, by a group of guerilla soldiers led by a man simply known as ‘Commandant’. Commandant is seconded by an earnest lieutenant, ‘Two-I-C’. The battalion, we later find out, is only one of many across the country that form the military arm of the Native Defence Forces (NDF), whose mandate is in direct opposition to the purpose of the NRC. The overall head of the NDF, whom Commandant answers to, is Dada Goodblood (codenamed: Supremo). For his movement’s nationalist (or nativist) cause, Goodblood actively courts the goodwill and support of the international community. This consideration eventually clashes with Commandant’s open deployment of child soldiers and causes a disconnect—foreshadowed by the crackling of HF communication radios—between the political vision and the military brawn of the movement.
If the movie is likened to a sandwich, the time before (and after) Agu’s encounter with Commandant’s army is the thin, expedient crust, while his peregrination with this cohort of the NDF would be the thick mess of filling. Excelling in its apparent aim to showcase the experience of an African child soldier, the narrative inundates, indeed to a point of repulsion, with details of Agu’s inevitable descent into a self-acknowledged bestiality. We see the gruesome, animistic initiation—wincing with Agu as he runs the gauntlet of uninhibited sticks, watching in collective horror as his unfortunate peer who is unable to make it through is slaughtered for his weakness. We hear the liturgy of spiritual fortification as the old Agu is ‘killed’, ‘buried’ and ‘reborn’. We scoff at the singing and dancing, recoil as Agu makes his first kill. And when he, famished, catches a single insect to share with Strika for lunch or an early dinner, it is impossible to not think of our own sons or grandsons and mouth a frantic prayer, on their account, for the peace of West Africa and the world. Through it all, Agu’s anger burns—engendered by loss, and as excellently embodied in the demeanour of the screenplay character (Abraham Attah), mixed with the confusion that often adulterates the anger of a child. And as he wallows in the mud of self-questioning awareness, he finds some solace (as well as further dehumanization) in the dubious interest taken in him by Commandant.
COMMANDANT
Commandant, played by veteran actor Idris Elba, is a charismatic enigma. He is a man of many colours and many words. ‘Everybody here is calling me Commandant,’ he tells Agu as he probes for the boy’s own name, ‘Now what are they calling you?’ From the mouth of this melodramatic character, we catch the core of the child soldier recruiter’s creed. Chastising Two-I-C for referring to Agu as ‘just a boy’, Commandant embraces the opportunity to teach the value and capacity of such a wartime resource:
A boy has hands to strangle and fingers to pull triggers. Why you saying a boy is nothing? Huh? A boy is very, very dangerous, you understand me? Very dangerous, you understand?
One gets a sense from this exhortation that, for Commandant and his ilk, the boy child is not to be left alone. He is to be either weaponized or killed. And in that scene of Agu’s first contact with the battalion, the fate of the boy is to be co-opted or ‘eaten’ by Strika, his original boy captor who is, in any case, not hungry for flesh. Agu is then drafted into the unit, and Commandant takes him under his own wings.
Kind and relatable, ruthless and aloof, a benevolent leader as well as an abuser, Commandant’s downfall is caused by that very same instrument of his success: the deployment of child soldiers. After the UN obtains evidence of the ill practice, Goodblood, under pressure to disavow his hitherto loyal soldier, reneges on an earlier promise to promote Commandant to the rank of major general. He chooses instead to make him head of security while pronouncing Two-I-C the new leader of the battalion. This apparent demotion angers Commandant. His brash reactions lead to Two-I-C’s eventual death, and he is declared wanted by the leadership of the NDF. Fugitive now, Commandant struggles to keep and provide for his battalion—until he is abandoned by most of his soldiers, including Agu, and left forlorn on the brink of starvation.
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THE FATE OF THE WEST AFRICAN CHILD
Beasts of No Nation records an undeniable success in showcasing the gruesome plight of the West African child soldier. The film instructs powerfully on the need to fight for the fate and the future of the West African child. And—let it not be mistaken—it is a decisive battle for the region, for the continent and for the world at large. But in the trenches of this particular war, the enemies are not only the commandant-type conquistadores that shove AK-47s across the bellies of underaged boys and girls. The fight is (must be) also against the loss of social cohesion or, to use an expression more fitting for the theme at hand, the collapse of nationhood. For it is in the context of this collapse that the image of a child soldier becomes a normalised expediency.
What must West Africa do to avoid the proliferation of Agus? A key lesson is to pay attention to the relational roots of war—or else we all become, to return to the lamentation of J. P. Clark, ‘casualties of the war / Because we cannot hear each other speak.’ We must address the interactional underpinnings of the violence that children end up invariably participating in. The drivers of regional integration, laudable a purpose as that is, need to reflect on the irony of waging a war, or threatening one, to maintain peace. If ECOWAS is to learn anything from the Sahel states’ exit debacle, it is that integration is always negotiation—that economic sanctions and threats of invasion, as seen in its response to the 2023 coup in Niger, should never be knee-jerk reactions but a clearly defined last resort. For what ensues in the aftermath of such disagreements is not only the reality of a fractured ECOWAS, but also the glorification of commandant-like figures who, through relentless propaganda, are whitewashed into exemplars of African nationalism for the young and the unknowing.
Do these models of a new militarized patriotism serve West Africa well? No. Nothing, save the raw subjugation and eventual impoverishment of a people, flows from the barrel of a gun. And patriotism, in the discerning words of Samuel Johnson, ‘is the last refuge of a scoundrel’. However, the flailing leadership of West African democracies, which has in part spawned the misguided appeal of the jackboot, does not serve the region well either. Beasts of No Nation reminds us of what is at stake in the tension between a politics of deliberation and its combatant alternatives. ECOWAS continues to have its work cut out⎈
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