South Sudan's rebel founder John Garang conscripted ten of thousands of children into soldiers

A new book details how South Sudan’s founders forcibly conscripted tens of thousands of children.

In early 1987, John Garang, the southern Sudanese rebel leader who laid the groundwork for his country’s independence, issued a radio order to his field commanders: gather up children from their villages in southern Sudan and ship them to camps in Ethiopia where they would receive military training and later serve as the independence movement’s child soldiers.

The order marked the official endorsement by the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) of a policy that would result in the forced recruitment of tens of thousands of children from southern Sudan who would form the Red Army, a little-known force of child soldiers within the SPLA.

In her deeply researched book The Child Soldiers of Africa’s Red Army, Carol Berger, an anthropologist and former foreign correspondent, details the rise of the SPLA’s youth wing, which played a critical, though largely unacknowledged, role in southern Sudan’s decades-long insurgency against Khartoum, culminating in South Sudan’s independence in 2011.

It adds a dark footnote on the legend of Garang, who was championed by Christian evangelicals in the United States and lauded by Republicans and Democrats alike as a heroic African revolutionary. U.S. President George W. Bush would eulogize Garang, who died in a helicopter crash in Uganda, as a “visionary leader and peacemaker” for signing the landmark 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended Sudan’s longest-running war and secured him the vice presidency; Garang took office in July 2005, just weeks before his death. It also demolishes a widely held misperception about the Lost Boys as a generation of orphans, displaced by war, who found refuge in Ethiopia and Kenya.