Author: Chessie Baldwin

The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70, also known as the Biafran war, was a turning point in the history of modern humanitarianism as well as Nigeria’s modern history.[1] This was a highly civilianised conflict, with some four million refugees enduring ethnic massacres, aerial bombing, and military incursions. With the Nigerian Federal government imposing a blockade on the secessionist Biafran state, famine spread across the population. Women and children suffered intensely in this war. By the wars end in January 1970, between one to three million people are estimated to have died of starvation and disease, the majority of them children.

The ’starving Biafran child’ became integral to Biafran propaganda and humanitarian iconography.[2] Children became the visible face of Biafran suffering, in what Lasse Heerten describes as the ‘post-colonial politics of pity’.[3] The moral figure of the child became a ‘sacred icon of global civil society’ and a dominant signifier of death’ in the twentieth century, their salvation legitimating transnational humanitarian intervention.[4] The child as famine victim was key to generating international sympathy and action for Biafra, leveraging powerful affective economies around notions of childhood innocence and protection.[5]

But this is not the whole story of children’s experiences of the Nigerian civil war. Biafran children were more than just starving famine victims: they also contributed to their families’ survival and to the Biafran war effort more broadly. The Biafra children in humanitarian photography are overwhelming young – mostly infants, represented in isolation from their families and society. Older children however contributed to household and community economies of survival by growing, foraging and hunting for food, fetching water and firewood, caring for siblings and carrying supplies. Some worked in relief camps and hospitals. Girls were involved in ‘attack trading’ for food and other resources across front lines.

Such agency and resilience did not neatly fit the idea of children as innocent victims requiring salvation that dominated humanitarian discourses, so these children do not appear much in humanitarian campaigning. Children are also marginalized and largely silenced in the remaining archives of the war. They are however often visible in war reportage and photography. But where their actions and experiences become most visible is in the recent published writing and interviews with former Biafran children (see below). Some of these memoirs are explicitly framed as ‘child soldier’ memoirs to draw parallels between historical and contemporary experiences of children’s recruitment and use in war.

Children and youth were also part of militarization and mobilization of Biafran society. Teenagers joined local militias and civil defence units to protect their communities. Among the most visible militarized children however were young boys who formed ‘Boys Companies’, or ‘Boscompi’. These were not formal military units but mimicked the Biafran army and often fed into its ranks. Boys, usually between the ages of six and fourteen, would drill and parade in public, sometimes in homemade uniforms and with wooden guns.

Teenagers served in significant numbers as part of the Biafran army, in increasing numbers as the war continued. Whilst many were rejected as too young when trying to patriotically volunteer at the start of the war, by 1968 boys as young as thirteen were being conscripted and forcibly recruited. Some received only a few days training before being sent to the front lines. Many were killed or captured, some became disabled veterans before reaching adulthood. Where children perhaps played the most significant role, however, was in the Biafran Organisation of Freedom Fighters (BOFF). BOFF deliberately recruited and trained young children as spies, usually aged ten to fourteen, to operate behind enemy lines and gather intelligence. Their youth allowed them to infiltrate Federal camps without suspicion, acting lost, traumatized, or undertaking domestic services for Nigerian troops. Their memoirs reveal their pride at their skills and successful operations, and the camaraderie that many found among their peers.

Biafra’s children fought and laboured, as well as suffered, during the war. Their roles and contributions have been neglected in the writing of Nigeria’s civil war. But their own writings and interviews [6] are now giving voice to their contributions to Biafra’s war effort, and facilitating a reappraisal of both Biafra and of the broader histories of child soldiering and children in armed conflict in African’s history.

By Stacey Hynd

Selected Writings of Former Biafran Children and Child Soldiers:

John Mozie, Charles Spiropoulos, Edozie Ezeife (eds.), Through the Eyes of a Child: Anthology of the Nigerian Civil War (London: Scribble City Publications, 2021)

Okey Anueyiagu, Biafra: The Horrors of War: The Story of a Child Soldier (Atlanta: Brown Brommel, 2020).

Emmanuel Iduma, I am Still With You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance and History (Glasgow: William Collins, 2023).

Chioma Talent Mundy-Castle, A Mother’s Debt: The True Story of An African Orphan (London: Author House, 2012).

Arua Okereke, The General’s Orderly: An Autobiography of a Biafran Child Soldier (Bloomington: Life Rich Publishing, 2018).

Ike Ude-Chime, Warchild of Biafra: Memoir of a Boy Soldier (self-published, 2021)

Egodi Uchendu, ‘Recollections of Childhood Experiences during the Nigerian Civil War’, Africa 77 (30) (2007).

Ewa Unoke, Dear God, Never Again: Memoirs of a Different Child Soldier: Reclaiming the Dreams of a Forgotten Nation (Mustang, OK: Tate Publishing & Enterprises, 2014).

Alfred Obiora Uzokwe, Surviving in Biafra: The Story of the Nigerian Civil War (Lincoln, N.E.: Writer’s Advantage, 2003).

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[1] See Michael Gould, The Biafran War: The Struggle for Modern Nigeria (IB Tauris, London, 2013).

[2] Nicholas Ibeawuchi Omenka, “Children in the Nigeria-Biafra War”, in Chima J. Korieh (eds), New Perspectives on the Nigeria-Biafra War: No Victor, No Vanquished (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 181-203.

[3] Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism, pp. 9, 152; Desgrandchamps, L’humanitaire en guerre civile, pp. 87-118.

[4] Nieuwenhuys, ‘Keep Asking’, 294; Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 179.

[5] See Aviva Sinervo and Kristen Cheney, ‘NGO Economies of Affect: Humanitarianism and Childhood in Contemporary and Historical Perspective’, in Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification and Objectification, eds. Kristen Cheney and Aviva Sinervo (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 3.

[6] See e.g. https://biafranwarmemories.com/

Current humanitarian norms, as outlined in the 2007 Paris Principles, define child soldiers as “any person below 18 years of age who is or who has been recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children, boys and girls, used as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes”.[1] This project reads this definition backwards in time, applying it to conflicts and individuals across twentieth century Africa, to trace historical patterns of children’s military recruitment and use. This methodology reveals the tensions around and challenges to the label of ‘child soldier’.

Firstly, childhood is not a universal category: it is historically and culturally contingent, with marked differences between global norms and local African understandings of childhood.[2] It also overlaps with the category of ‘youth’. Youth is as much a social and political as chronological category, but commonly applies to those between the ages of 14 to 40: as the majority of ‘child soldiers’ are 15-17 years, many claim the label of ‘youth’, thereby highlighting their political agency. Gender can be as significant as age in shaping children’s military experiences.

Military service itself is regarded in many cultures as a marker of adulthood, and therefore underage soldiers who are chronologically under 18 often consider themselves as ‘adults’ rather than children due to their military status and experience. In other cultures however, such as in South Sudan, communities may still regard chronologically and biologically-adult former underage recruits as ‘boys’ because they have not undergone then required processes and rituals of initiation to be regarded as adult men, where these initiations were interrupted by war.[3] Before the mid-1990s the ‘child soldier’ was almost universally coded as male, but it is now recognised that around a four in ten of underage troops are ‘girl soldiers’ .[4]

Secondly, the category of ‘soldier’ itself does not fully address children’s participation in armed conflict and violence. Many children do not bear arms, and are instead involved in support roles, or move between front line and auxiliary roles. However, communities and individuals still commonly ascribe the label of child soldiers only to those with guns. Categories of war and armed forces or groups also require interrogation. Teenagers fighting the apartheid regime in South Africa, particularly in the African National Congress’ armed wing, are not regarded ‘child soldiers’ but broadly fit current definitions.  Many young African anti-colonial ‘insurgents’ or ‘freedom fighters’ from the 1950-80s would today be classified as ‘child soldiers’.

Thirdly, the ‘child soldier’ as a humanitarian category has acquired particular connotations that can drive individuals to claim or reject it. Some avoid it due to potential stigmatization where this global label has come locally to hold connotations of violent perpetration and human rights abuses, as with the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Instead, they lay claim to alternative identities, as ‘freedom fighters’ or ‘veterans’, to gain social status or access support. Concerns about stigmatizing current and former underaged soldiers led many advocacy and child/human rights groups to drop the label ‘child soldiers’ in favour of ‘child [formerly] associated with armed forces and armed groups’, or CAAFAG. The lack of transparency of this acronym however means that the term ‘child soldier’ remains common outside of these circles.

Conversely, some former under-age fighters now deliberately adopt the category and language of contemporary human rights-based ‘child soldier’ discourses. This can be as part of a victimcy narrative to access available Disarmament, Demobilization, Rehabilitation and Reintegration (DDRR) support and resources. Those who served as minors in conflicts prior to the emergence of the ‘child soldier crisis’ in the late 1980-1990s have also appropriated the label. Former underage Biafran combatants from the Nigerian-Biafran civil war (1967-70) frame their narratives as ‘child soldier memoirs’ to highlight their war contributions and locate their experiences within global narratives of victimhood. In doing so they differentiate between their version of ‘child soldiering’ for community defence and the present-day exploitation and abuse of children by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria.    

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[1] UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), The Paris Principles. Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated With Armed Forces or Armed Groups, February 2007. https://www.refworld.org/reference/research/unicef/2007/en/42827.

[2] See Allison James, Chris Jenks and Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, [1998]2015).  

[3] See Deng Adut with Ben McKelvey, Songs of a War Boy (2017)

[4] See https://www.un.org/youthenvoy/2015/02/4-10-child-soldiers-girls/

For many people, the primary image of a child soldier, is of a small African boy, in ragged clothes, wild-eyed and carrying an AK-47. Such images have proven powerful in shaping action against children’s military recruitment. But they do not tell the full story. There has been significant debate over who and what should be classified as a ‘ child soldier’, in law and across conflicts, militaries and individual perspectives. David M. Rosen traces the evolution of international humanitarian law in child soldiering, arguing that a new “transnational politics of age” shaped the concept of childhood and therefore that of child soldiering.[1]

When the military use and recruitment of children was first proscribed in international humanitarian law as part of the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention in 1977 state parties and armed groups were required to ensure that: “children who have not attained the age of fifteen years do not take a direct part in hostilities and, in particular, they shall refrain from recruiting them into their armed forces”.[2]

Behind the scenes, during diplomatic negotiations on the protocols, opinions had sharply varied over who should be designated a child for the purposes of this protocol. Delegates noted that the ages of majority ranged from 12 to 21 in different countries. Brazilian delegates proclaimed that a minimum age of recruitment of eighteen was necessary ‘as a general condemnation of the policy of using minors for military purposes’, whilst Britain joined Greece, Canada, Japan and North Vietnam in arguing that 15 to 18 year olds ‘have the mental and physical capacity to fight, and will wish to serve their country in time of need’.[3]

Humanitarian dissatisfaction with the minimum age of fifteen and a focus only on children’s direct participation in hostilities led to a protracted campaign to extend the definition of ‘child soldiering’, with many organisations taking a ‘Straight 18 position’ and arguing that 18 should be the minimum age for military recruitment and use.[4] The campaign failed to secure a change during the negotiations on the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child which maintain the minimum age of fifteen years for recruitment into armed forces.[5] The 1998 International Criminal Court similarly declared “conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years” into armed forces or groups as a war crime.[6] However, as the campaign gathered momentum the International Labour Office’s Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention of 1999 Art 3(a) listed “forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict” as a worst form of child labour, taking eighteen as the definition of a ‘child’.[7] Reflecting the centrality of Africa in actions to combat child soldiering, the 2000 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child art 22(2) became the first and only regional rights charter to prohibit the state recruitment and direct participation of any child in armed conflict, also defining a child as ‘below the age of 18 years’.[8]

In 2000 the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict was signed, establishing that “persons who have not attained the age of 18 years are not compulsorily recruited into [state parties] armed forces” or armed groups, and that those states that permit voluntary recruitment under that age were to ensure “such recruitment is genuinely voluntary’, with full knowledge of the duties and consent of family or guardians.[9]

With growing acceptance of the ‘Straight 18’ position, attention turned from definitions of ‘child’ to ‘soldier’. Advocates strove to expand understandings of child soldiering beyond simply children bearing arms, to reflect the reality that children served in multiple military roles, both direct and auxiliary. In 2007 the Paris Principles extended the definition of a ‘child soldier’ in terms of role to include “any person below 18 years of age who is or who has been recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children, boys and girls, used as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes”.[10]

These instruments highlight the evolution of the category of ‘the child soldier’ in international humanitarian law, which was both shaped by – and shaped in – turn transnational advocacy, popular cultural and local understandings of childhood and war. The label of ‘child soldier’ however remains contested, bearing different meanings and different contexts, as is explored here.

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[1] David M. Rosen, “Child Soldiers, International Humanitarian Law, and the Globalization of Childhood.” American Anthropologist 109, no. 2 (2007), 296-306. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2007.109.2.296.

[2] Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), Geneva, 8 June 1977, Article 77(2). See also Protocol II, Article 4(3)(c).

[3] ICRC, Official Records of the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts, Geneva, Volume XV, CDDH/III/SR.45, (ICRC: Geneva, 1977), 64-75.

[4] See Rosen (2007); Stacey Hynd, “Constructing the Child Soldier Crisis: Violence, Victimhood, and the Development of Transnational Advocacy against the Recruitment and Use of Children in Conflict, circa 1970–2000.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 12, no. 3 (2021): 265-285. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hum.2021.0017.

[5] Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the UN General Assembly, Res. 44/25, 20 November 1989, Article 38(3).

[6] Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted by the UN Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, Rome, 17 July 1998, UN Doc. A/CONF.183/9, Article 8(2)(b)(xxvi) and (e)(vii).

[7] Convention concerning the Prohibition and Immediate Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour, ILO Convention No. 182, adopted by the ILO General Conference, Geneva, 17 June 1999, Articles 1 and 3(a).

[8] African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, adopted by the Sixteenth Ordinary Session of the OAU Assembly of Heads of State and Government, Res. 197 (XVI), Monrovia, 17–20 July 1990, OAU Doc. CAB/LEG/24.9/49 (1990), Article 22(2).

[9] Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, adopted by the UN General Assembly, Res. 54/263, 25 May 2000, Annex I, Articles 2–4, 6(3) and 7

[10] UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), The Paris Principles. Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated With Armed Forces or Armed Groups, February 2007. https://www.refworld.org/reference/research/unicef/2007/en/42827.