“But where do you live mostly now?”
“With the lost boys.”
“Who are they?”
“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expanses. I’m captain.”
“What fun it must be!”
“Yes,” said cunning Peter, “but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship.”
“Are none of the others girls?”
“Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.”
J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy (1911)
The thousands of southern Sudanese children and youths who fled civil war in the early 1990s were given the moniker of ‘Lost Boys’ by aid workers who took inspiration from Peter Pan’s infamously young, male and parentless crew. The label stuck; the story of the ‘Lost Boys’ who ‘formed a human river… [surviving attack] by wild animals as they trekked across the semiarid plains’ (Los Angeles Times, 1999) captured international attention for the plight of 11,000 unattached children being raised in Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya, eventually resulting in a much-publicised resettlement scheme for 3,800 Lost Boys in the United States. Included among this number was future Olympic athlete Lopez Lomong, who went on to carry the US flag during the 2008 Opening Ceremony in Beijing. In Lomong’s memoir, Running For My Life, he described his first arrival into Kakuma, where he would spend the next ten years:
Kakuma was a tent city filled primarily with boys like me, boys from Sudan who’d be separated by their families by civil war. Some had been turned into soldiers. Others came here because their villages had been destroyed in the fighting… I am grateful that Kenya gave boys like me a place to escape war. (Lomong and Tabb, 2012)
Although Lomong later went on to be reunited with his parents in South Sudan, the singular narrative of the Lost Boys has remained a persistent humanitarian brand: a generation of missing – often orphaned – boys left ageless in limbo by a violent civil war that had decimated their homes and families. The Lost Boys became a ‘Single Story’, to paraphrase Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, with which the danger ‘is not that [it is] untrue, but that [it is] incomplete’.
The 3,800 boys resettled in the US represent but a fraction of the 20 – 30,000 young southern Sudanese displaced from their communities by war – both boys and girls, children, adolescents and young adults, travelling in extended family groups or alone. Several thousand were trained as soldiers for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)’s Jesh Al Amhr (Red Army), including in the girls’ battalion Katiba Banat. Thousands more of the displaced youths did not complete the journey to Kakuma, but moved into border communities further away from the fighting and faded from the historical attention awarded to refugees and frontline child soldiers. By far the largest subset of the youth who make up the ‘Lost Boys’, this group ‘melted’ into the countryside as internally displaced people, finding work as cattle raiders or in village defence groups (Wambugu, 2019). Their lives, and those of the many others who found different paths from their violent displacement, presents a contradiction to the infantilizing, romanticised story of the Lost Boys of Sudan.
For one, ‘lost’ is a problematic misnomer, described best by anthropologist Carol Berger in her recent book, in which she recalled an exchange at a conference on South Sudan in Canada:
In response to a question from the audience regarding the ‘Lost Boys’, I remarked on the implausibility of people actually becoming lost for weeks and months at a time in South Sudan, adding that it was, however, a common trope among westerners, that becoming lost in Africa seemed a given. (Berger, 2022)
To say these youths were ‘lost’ undermines the deliberate, systematic separation of young people into refugee camps-cum-military recruitment pools by the SPLA, as well as the agency of those who navigated long and difficult journeys to their eventual residence in Kakuma or elsewhere. Melinda Alexander captured the functionality of the name ‘Lost Boys’ as ‘part of the representational schema’ that conjures ‘emotional images of childhood, loss, survival and hope’ (Alexander, 2014). The ‘lost’ need ‘finding’, which served as a powerful trope to inspire families in the US to volunteer to give new homes to the waiting victims. Some of the resettled youths were even renamed ‘Found Men [and Women]’ by their sponsors, although many of the Sudanese themselves continued to use ‘Lost Boys’ as an evocative, mobilising identity brand.
If the ‘Lost Boys’ were not indeed lost, so too can we challenge the idea that they were ‘boys’. We have already mentioned the specific girls’ battalion of the SPLA which, while comparatively small and short-lived, is an often-forgotten piece of women’s history of the second civil war in South Sudan. Many girls and young women were among the groups who travelled to Ethiopia and then on to Kakuma in 1992. As a potential source of wealth through marriage dowry, some were taken in by new families before they reached displacement registration centres. In Kakuma itself, girls were usually placed with foster families inside the camp, unlike the boys who lived together. Their visibility as a collective group with specific needs was significantly reduced, hence only 89 girls were offered resettlement in the US. In the short except from Barrie’s classic novel that opened this blog, Peter Pan declared that no girls make up his band of youths in Neverland. The ‘Lost Girls’ of Sudan were similarly excluded, firstly, in their separation and subsummation into other families in South Sudan and Kakuma, and secondly in an international narrative that removed them entirely from the story (note, ironically, that the 1911 title of Barrie’s novel was originally Peter and Wendy. In subsequent adaptions, the ‘and Wendy’ disappeared in favour of the male protagonist’s name alone).
Last, but not least, the classification as ‘boys’ – and respectively ‘girls’ – obscures the reality that most of the unaccompanied individuals who were displaced from (then) southern Sudan were adolescents. Undoubtedly there were a great many young children among them, but the majority of the 20-30,000 displaced youths were between teenagers and young adults. They were sometimes heads of households, able to generate livelihoods, aware of the various challenges and opportunities that awaited them as members of the SPLA or as refugees. They were also the most at-risk group for coercion into military service, trafficking and other exploitation. As described in a report by the Women’s Refugee Commission, ‘in the eyes of the international community, which has reached tremendous heights of political consensus around the subject of “innocent, vulnerable, children,” adolescents are woefully overlooked’. In the global imaginary, a child can be raised, nurtured and saved; they are innocents and victims of tragic circumstance. An adolescent, meanwhile, unbalances the delicate binary of saviour-saved, helper-helpless. Their existence is coded with a knowledge and experience that counters the infantilized character of African boy. As Alexander poignantly asks, ‘What if the Lost Boys had somehow retained their original label [Jesh al Ahmr]… Would the same U.S. volunteers have come forward, drawn to assist the young men from the Red Army?’ (Alexander, 2014). While technically the unaccompanied teenage youth fall under the category of ‘children’ in international law, a disregard for their status in the liminal age-set of adolescence yet further minimises the agency, capacity, resilience and, most importantly, the distinct needs of adolescents in armed conflict.
So, how does the history of these ‘Lost Boys of Sudan’ look if we take these nuanced realities into account? Neither lost, nor exclusively boys, who is made visible by paying attention to the diverse range of individuals, choices, and experiences of those who did not end up on an international flight to the US from Kakuma? While certainly not as romantic and memorable as the brand of ‘Lost Boys’, I end here by suggesting ‘extant youth’ as a more reflective classification: capturing the range of ages and genders who fled southern Sudan in the second civil war, who continue to exist and survive in different spaces and places, discrete from international attention.
Chessie Baldwin, Postdoctoral Research Associate
Recommended reading
Carol Berger, The Child Soldiers of Africa’s Red Army: The Role of Social Process and Routinised Violence in South Sudan’s Military (Routledge, 2022)
Melinda Alexander, ‘Belonging With the Lost Boys: The Mobilization of Audiences and Volunteers at a Refugee Community Center in Phoenix, Arizona,’ unpublished doctoral thesis, Arizona State University, December 2014.
Laura DeLuca and Lindsay Eppich, ‘It Takes Two Hands to Clap: Sudanese Refugee Women Contribute to Conflict Resolution in Sudan’, Anthropology News, 48, 6 (2007): 38-39
Lopez Lomong and Mark Tabb, Running for My Life: One Lost Boy’s Journey from the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games (Thomas Nelson, 2016)