bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

sponsorType

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Beasts of  No Nation

by Uzodinma Iweala

John Murray, $132

Desert Children

by Waris Dirie

Virago Press, $132

Loss of childhood innocence features prominently in   Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation, a haunting  first novel about a young boy who's thrown into the violence and chaos  of war, and Waris Dirie's Desert Children, a treatise against the practice of female genital mutilation among African communities in Europe.  Both books offer a dis-quieting glimpse of the terrors faced by many African children.

Written in a lilting first-person voice, Beasts of No Nation tells the story of Agu, a once-innocent child who dreams of becoming a doctor  or an engineer. Before war comes to his village, Agu is an ordinary boy.  He excels at school, loves to read the Bible with his mother, and plays at being a soldier with his friends. But when the UN evacuates his mother and sister, and his father is shot in front of him, the game becomes reality.  Agu is pressed to  become a soldier and is forced to kill.

Agu is told not to think about  it, told that he will be killed if he doesn't obey orders, but his Christian upbringing haunts his conscience.  Soon his life becomes a blur of hunger, pain and exhaustion. His  days are filled with mindless looting and killing, aided by 'gun juice', which is 'a drug and making life easy easy. Gun juice is making you to be stronger and braver.' By night he's forced to endure the sexual abuse of his commandant.

Flashbacks of Agu's happy life before the war  are juxtaposed with  the terror, despair and loss of self that characterise his  life as a soldier. One  of the book's most powerful aspects   is that it lacks specifics - Agu could  be from any west African nation, the  band of soldiers from any faction. This eliminates the reader's political bias and emphasises Agu's own experience of survival.

Iweala, a 23-year-old American of Nigerian descent, wrote Beasts of No Nation as his undergraduate thesis at Harvard, and at times - particularly  in the book's too tidy ending - his youth shows. This is a minor quibble, however. Iweala's voice is  compelling, haunting and refreshing.

Dirie  gained fame as a  model, but she's best known for her poignant memoir, the international best-seller Desert Flower, in which she  recounts growing up in Somalia, enduring female circumcision when she was five, running away to London, and being discovered by a  photographer. After her memoir's publication, Dirie became a UN special ambassador against female genital mutilation.

Desert Children, which was written with journalist  Corinna Milborn, investigates the practice of female genital mutilation in Europe.

In this slim volume Dirie gathers the stories of African women in Europe who've suffered the practice. Although their origins stretch from Somalia to Mali, Congo, Sudan and many other nations, their stories are achingly similar. Wealthy families have their daughters mutilated by  doctors; poorer families take their daughters back to Africa where grandmothers find a local woman to carry out the procedure.  All the girls are left with terrible emotional and physical scars.

Dirie  speaks with those who are trying to end the practice. She meets   Linda Weil-Curiel, a French lawyer who takes  cases to court in France (the only European country where offenders are convicted) and attends the trial of two parents accused of mutilating their daughter. She also visits  physicians who re-infibulate  and repair the damage.

Although hampered at times  by stiff writing and a disorganised presentation, Desert Children is a well-researched and heartfelt call for an end to the practice.



African customs