Voice for the voiceless

Emmanuel Jal doesn't know his birthday. He reckons he was born in in 1980, but he might be a year or two out. In any case, his life really began with the war that consumed his childhood. "There was peace in Sudan for the first three years of my life, but I can't remember it," he writes in War Child, his autobiography.

The book is aptly named. If anybody was ever born of conflict, it's Jal. His mother was killed when their village was razed—Jal has no memory of her—while his father was an officer in the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), a militia formed by the tribes of the predominantly Christian south. Like thousands of other children, Jal ended up joining this army. The boys were taught guerilla tactics in a training camp equipped with books so it could pass as a school, and soon they were putting these skills to practice in battle.

He fought until the age of 11 (or thereabouts), when he fled with a group of a few hundred other children to Ethiopia, hundreds of miles away. He was one of only a few dozen to survive the trek; the remainder starved, drowned or were eaten by crocodiles.

His book relates how he was tempted to eat a friend who had died of exhaustion. He was already almost immune to the deaths of his comrades: "One day you have a friend, next day they are gone. You get used to that lifestyle." When I ask Jal about his history, he denies having been brainwashed. At the time he simply had no alternative to fighting, and he was full of rage towards the government soldiers who had killed his mother and raped his sister.

"It is difficult to make people understand," says Jal. "My village was burned down, I lost my mother and a lot of people close to me. When I was given an opportunity to be trained I thought, 'OK, this is a chance for me to get revenge.' I had no choice. I was in that environment and I had to do it."

He sounds resigned when I ask him—awkwardly, thinking of all the times the same fetishistic question must have been put to him by an interviewer—what it feels like to kill someone. "You know, when you get somebody, the joy that at that instant is amazing. But the celebration is only temporary, and after a while the nightmares come. You see, taking the life of a human being is not easy. It's like they have spirits that follow you, ghosts."

I bring up the film Blood Diamond, to which he contributed a song. Is it an accurate portrayal of life as a child soldier? He's sceptical, although he approves of such films because they bring Africa to people's attention: "When a bomb is dropping, you see someone's head is exploding, bone is sticking out, intestines – those things you never see in a movie." His voice is measured and soft, and as he tells me about his childhood he sounds like somebody explaining regretfully how they didn't really choose their career, but fell into it.

Now, though, he lives in Kenya, having recently returned there after a few years in Britain. I ask if he considers Kenya his home now. His reply is ambivalent: "Anywhere people love me I call home." Something about the throwaway self-confidence of his response makes me suddenly aware that I'm talking to a celebrity, the successful musician that Jal has become, not just the survivor, the ex war-child. Jal's life has followed an extraordinary trajectory since the long walk to Ethiopia. He was rescued by Emma McCune, an English aid-worker who was also the wife of a general in the SPLA – a marriage which won her some notoriety in the West, where she was nicknamed "the warlord's wife". She established over a hundred schools in her adopted home of Sudan, in the process finding Jal in an Ethiopian refugee camp, just after his perilous escape from Sudan. Telling him he was too young to fight, she smuggled him into Kenya, hiding him in the baggage hold of a plane to Nairobi.

McCune died shortly afterwards in a car crash, and Jal recalls her with fond sadness: "A gentle loving woman, so passionate about the people of Sudan, of all Africa." With Emma gone, Jal's education was supervised by her friends. He was a good student, and secured a place at Westminster University to study engineering. Visa trouble meant he had to go back to Kenya, where he began singing, at first in gospel choirs. He began to rap later, having listened to US hip hop through his adolescence, Tupac and, appropriately, Lost Boyz – although he says he's "easily inspired".

In fairness, he's not the most sophisticated rapper: both his rhythmic flow and his rhymes can be clumsy (at least in English; he also sings in Kwaswahili, Dinka and Nuer) but the music is redeemed by its vigorous fusion of Western with African and Arab styles, and by Jal's passionate delivery of these songs of violence and redemption. His music sold well, one song staying top of the Kenyan charts for nine months.

He recorded a second album, with the popular Sudanese musician Abdel Gadir Salim. Working with an Arab could have proved difficult: Jal spent his whole childhood blaming the Arabs and Islam for his suffering. But he is thankful for his education, which allowed him to wean himself off this hatred. "You read the Bible, you read the Qur'an. When I discovered the truth I was able to forgive."

He claims it was Emma McCune who showed him that "the best way to create a revolution is education." Eventually, thanks to his compelling story, he was able to start touring in the West, supporting Razorlight and Faithless and appearing at Live 8. He laughs as he recalls how surreal America seemed to him at first: "When I first stepped into America I thought it was built by aliens!"

Of the hundreds of thousands of Africa's war children, perhaps one was bound to be the beneficiary of such a perfect storm of good fortune, but there's a simpler word to capture his life's turnaround: miraculous. God is everywhere in Jal's music—his first hit was called 'All we need is Jesus'—and, in his book, Jal tells how a vision of Jesus prevented him from eating his friend on the way to Ethiopia. And he calls Emma McCune his angel. But when I ask him if his work is the result of a religious calling, he tells me that he's simply "writing down history. This is history I'm writing for, for generations to read."

Similarly, he positions his music in the tradition of African oral history. Telling his story is a duty. He describes the ordeal he went through writing War Child: the nightmares; how his co-writer had to coax his memories out of him. But he keeps doing it, "for the people with no chance to be heard. If I don't, I'm betraying people who are suffering." So it's odd to hear that he's recording an album of love songs, inspired by what was apparently a productive period in London. "Four years my friend...woah. Expect some love – nothing too deep."

It's an interesting thought, the murderous child turned lothario. But Jal won't be able to stop resurrecting the ghosts of his childhood. For as long as he wants to raise money to help Africa's legion of war children, he will have to keep returning to his unique selling point: not his music, but his story and his status as the miraculous survivor. It's not surprising that he's had a few calls from Hollywood. "Yeah..." he sighs resignedly, "but I'll let my story cool down for a while. I can have the movie later."