Interrupted and difficult coming-of-age narratives have often been the focus of postcolonial novels, and more recently this narrative has undergone a renewed exploration in works that focus on children’s involvement in civil wars, particularly on the African continent. While the easy symbolic parallels between child and nation have fallen apart, the reality of child soldiers involved in African wars looms large in contemporary novels and memoirs. It is estimated that up to three hundred thousand child soldiers are currently part of armed forces worldwide, with one hundred and twenty thousand in Africa alone. With the staggering numbers and easily available accounts of the abuse perpetrated by and upon child soldiers, children’s participation in civil wars and genocides has steadily become the subject of novels and memoirs from war-fraught postcolonial regions. Yet another factor that has contributed to the rise of these narratives is the Western publishing space, which has provided abundant opportunity and encouragement for these works to thrive, whether in the form of book contracts with major presses or in terms of prizes, mentions on bestseller lists, and movie option deals.
It is thus no surprise that the last few years have seen the child soldier novel come to life on the big screen, with Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog (2008) based on a novel by the Congolese author Emmanuel Dongala, and most recently Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation (2015) based on the novel of the same name by the Nigerian-American writer Uzodinma Iweala. Fukanaga’s adapted film is much more of a commercial and highly publicized event compared to the more modestly released Johnny Mad Dog. Part of the reason is that the novel was widely celebrated in the United States, unlike the translated Johnny Mad Dog, which was disseminated to a largely academic audience. Beasts of No Nation was voted “A Best Book of the Year” by Time, People, Slate, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine and was reviewed in major media outlets such as the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and O magazine. With such a strong mainstream force behind it, there was a ready-made audience for the film version, thus overriding the Hollywood concern that it is hard to produce and disseminate cinema from or about Africa. Furthermore, casting the well-known British television and movie star Idris Elba in the role of the cruel Commandant also ensured a Western audience.
Beasts of No Nation starts with a frame-within-the-frame as a broken television set zooms out to reveal a group of kids playing in a large meadow. The narrator, Agu (played by the Ghanaian actor Abraham Attah), tells the viewer in heavy, halting English that “our country is at war,” while the young boy Agu on screen is seen happily chatting away with his friend in Twi, devising games, and eventually moving from the meadow into a street that seems destroyed by war. The camera continues to pan to shots of tanks, and the narrator tells us that they are safe since they are in a buffer zone, while people are suffering elsewhere. As soon as it is established that Agu is a young boy with a bright future, the story morphs into a ruptured coming-of-age tale in which the young adult Agu is orphaned and descends into a hellish world, his psyche altering slowly until brutality becomes normal and he commits acts of violence with ease. He comes in contact with the Commandant, a soft-spoken yet menacing man who attempts to play surrogate parent to his child soldier militia while forcing them into gruesome acts of violence. Agu starts to be shaped by his experience of trauma, with eyes glazed, hope fading, and the flashbacks of his old, happy life becoming more and more distant until he soon resembles everyone else in the gang. Once his only ally, Striker, dies, Agu puffs harder at his cigarette and no longer seems burdened by the weight of his helmet and gun.
The violence of war is depicted not only in scenes of shootouts and beatings but also through the theme of sexual abuse that runs through the plot, although the Commandant’s rape of Agu is explored more explicitly in the book than in the film. In a different iteration of this theme the young boys are shown at a beat-up bar bullying and harassing young women forced into prostitution, a scene in which neither the women nor the boys pretending to be men experience much pleasure. From here on, the film moves toward the final act where frustrated and marginalized masculinity is foregrounded. The Commandant waits for many humiliating hours to meet a politician as his gang of boys, who had viewed him as invincible, watch on. Soon enough, U.N. forces pile the children into a truck and Agu ends up in a rehabilitation center. The film ends with children frolicking about in the ocean and a new, possibly reincarnated, Agu moves to join the group.
The book as well as the film are set in an unnamed nation, yet various particularized references challenge this notion. We see what might stand in for ECOMOG (the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group) peacekeeping troops (only superficially disguised as ECOMOD), and Agu announces that the Nigerians are keeping the peace. While the title itself announces that there is, in fact, no nation, it is startling to hear the Ghanian Twi, the reference to Nigeria, and visual nod to ECOMOG, and one is led to believe that Fukunaga might have offered a more complex understanding of the precise setting rather than creating an ambiguous war space. Once Agu is enlisted into the Commandant’s army of child soldiers, it becomes clear that there is no attempt here to inquire into the historical and political context or offer any insights into the complex web within which this war is taking place. While it is not uncommon in fiction and film to embed a narrative in an “unnamed” or a “fictitious” country, there is a huge difference between the two categories. A fictitious location often becomes a space of critique and satire where vibrant details, allusions to specific issues and events, attempts at allegory, and a full range of complex particularities are available to the author or filmmaker. Narratives set in an unnamed location, by contrast, are often vulnerable to broad generalizations and have a tendency to sacrifice depth and detail in an attempt to render a more universal human condition. Beasts of No Nation certainly falls into this trap. The unnamed country in this film stands in for a stereotyped Africa mired in violence and in need of saving. This is particularly unfortunate in light of the fact that since it builds on existing representations of the continent, it manages to turn the story of a particular war and particular child soldier into one that is supposed to portray an entire place and people.
It could be said, of course, that Fukunaga’s main intention in bringing this novel to screen was not to offer a realistic or didactic depiction of war in the first place, but rather a hallucinogenic rendering through a surrealist lens with elements of fantasy and horror mixed in. When a destitute Agu is lost in the forest, he catches sight of a pink feathered headdress which reveals itself to be a painted and madeup person, who then runs off. In a scene reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, Agu chases this vision until he is taken captive by the child-soldier army. In the fighting scenes, similarly, a melancholic crescendo changes the mood from violent to dreamlike. Cavernous canopies of trees are made to appear menacing, and the interplay between the still close-ups of ants, jewelry, flora, and random objects and the fast-paced scenes of running and shooting generates a sort of hypnotic mood. We are inside a nightmare, Fukunaga seems to be saying. Pushing this even further, the film makes use of red and fuschia filters in what might be a nod to Richard Mosse’s award-winning photographs of Eastern Congo which are bathed in an infrared light in order to blur the real and the fictional. Fukunaga thus solidifies his vision, rendering an aesthetically vibrant understanding of civil war in which the highly stylized cinematography works in counterpoint to Agu’s stoic and detached narration.
Fukunaga’s film is visually captivating, and Abraham Attah’s spectacular performance allows for particularly a strong understanding of the child gaze as it drinks in the morally and physically shattered universe. However, while the film has received much acclaim in the form of awards, high ratings, and great reviews, it does not add anything new to existing understanding of the African child soldier narrative. Attah does manage to carry the film through its more tedious moments when the scenes tend to feel repetitive and are reiterating the same point about child brutality and the senselessness of war. Idris Elba also commands the screen though the interpretation of the character of Commandant as someone alternating between martyr, father, and brute, although his performance often feels self-conscious and staged. But while the film may not break new ground, it has been at the center of digital debates. It was the first film to be produced by Netflix and was simultaneously screened in movie theaters and made available online. Returning to the initial frame of a hollowed out television set through which we watch children play football, we see that the television is not merely a symbol of the layers of adaptation that this story has undergone, from book to film to digital event, but also points toward the fraught nature of framing. This frame is, after all, entirely Western, as a young African boy’s story is consumed digitally by millions in the global North while ironically remaining unavailable (except in pirated versions) to Africans themselves.
