Special to the AmNews/ Amsterdam News Editor
A slit wrist. Gun powder mixed with cocaine rubbed into the wound. An abducted 5-year-old boy blindfolded, given an AK-47 and told to shoot his 12-year-old best friend.
“It’s not easy,” Michel Chikwanine, 27, former child soldier, told the AmNews. “Every time I talk about it—it is like reliving a painful story.”
He rolled up his sleeve to reveal the scars that he still has on his left wrist. When Chikwanine retells his gut-wrenching story to an awestruck audience of middle schoolers, he cannot help but fight his own emotional response.
It was an initiation process that Chikwanine, now an activist and author, endured after being kidnapped while he played soccer with his friends after school in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The toxic cocktail left him and the other children disoriented. What followed was a harrowing experience that included being forced to kill his best friend, planning a dangerous escape and running through the jungle to his freedom. All of it happened within two weeks. He said if he could go back in time, he wouldn’t change his experience, because it has added purpose to his life.
Keen observers will notice a quiet, internal fighting of tears as he speaks about the abduction. “They slashed my wrists,” said Chikwanine. “As I started to bleed, they took a substance called brown-brown, which is a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder, and they rubbed this into the wounds so that I would go crazy. Then they blindfolded me and they told me to put my hands out, and as I did, they dropped an AK-47 in my hands.
“There’s a reason why this happened. If I’m going to stop it and if I’m going to challenge the world to do something about it, it’s going to have to come from me from a different perspective. It can’t just be an emotional perspective. It has to be a very educated perspective.”
A studied and calm man, Chikwanine has just co-authored a graphic novel called “Child Soldier: When Boys and Girls Are Used in War.” It’s his way of educating 10 to 14 year olds and instilling in them how the effects of their actions—more importantly inactions—influence the lives of others.
He told the AmNews, “The drive for me to tell this story never came from me wanting people to feel sorry for me. It came from seeing my father being this incredible human being and was courageous enough to know that in order to make something happen—have positive impact—you have to be courageous. Somebody has to do something. Having that example of a father really put a lot of purpose into my family’s journey.”
Last month, hosted by U.S. Fund for Unicef, Chikwanine spoke both at the U.N. and at P.S. 126, Manhattan Academy of Technology, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Now a student in Canada, Chikwanine told the AmNews that having lived in North America for 11 years, he is disturbed at seeing how Africa is portrayed “as this very naturally violent, naturally poor continent.”
“This misconception of what Africa is got me really upset,” he said. “And going to school, I figured I had to say something in my story, which is why everything I say and in the graphic novel speaks about context: the legacies of colonialism, the legacies of poverty, that Africa was a continent before Europeans got there. All these things are so important. I saw this as an opportunity for my family to move forward, but also to educate people.”
Speaking at P.S. 126, Chikwanine mixed humor and the taut lessons of his pain, noting, “We are going to have these incredible young people here who are going to be in a position of power one day. They’re going to be making decisions that impact their peers across the world. They need to understand the information, and they need to be engaged in those decisions from very moral and ethical backgrounds, and that’s my attempt at telling the story.”
Although his experience in the Congo does not mirror the daily challenges faced by children in North America, his message has not been lost in translation. His recent audience of 13 and 14 year olds sat in the auditorium of P.S. 126 and listened intently. They understood the call to action in their lives.
“He talked about overcoming fear and overcoming everything to be a better person,” said 13-year-old student Kai McCormick. “He also talked about conflicts like bullying and instead of not doing anything, because you don’t think you can stand up, you have to do something to make a change.”
Bullying, an issue on the rise here in America, seemed to be the common thread between Chikwanine’s story and his young audience that day. William Li, 14, reflected on Chikwanine’s emphasis on solidarity against what is wrong.
“Michel was talking about community and how people should help each other, and in our classroom, we talk about community and how we should build each other up and help our friends when they are bullied,” said William.
Isabella Palaez, 13, was surprised by how much she and her classmates could do to make a difference in other parts of the world, such as researching topics that are affecting others around the world and finding foundations that they can donate to. They all agreed that they would talk to their parents about looking for organizations that they can make contributions to—as little as a $1.
“We can really do [something] to stop human trafficking and child soldiers,” said Isabella.
Some educators and parents may be a little reluctant to share the contents of this book, which details the horrific reality of what’s going on in the world, with an already impressionable age group. It’s a concern that Chikwanine and his co-author, Jessica Dee Humphreys, thought about carefully.
“The fear is definitely warranted,” said Chikwanine. “You still want to keep the children’s innocence.”
But Chikwanine, who is a student at the University of Toronto, remembered a startling fact that he once learned for a project, and it helped solidify his decision to continue with the book.
“High school students walk past 15,000 ads a day and get asked whether they’re cool enough, rich enough, happy enough, sexy enough,” he said. “They should buy these shoes, buy these jeans. To be cool you need this. I thought about that, and I thought about how much information we are giving young people and how important is this information.”
Chikwanine has, for the past four years, been traveling worldwide, speaking on abolishing the use of children in warfare. Also a part of Oprah Winfrey’s Angels Network, he sits on the advisory board of the Romeo Dallaire Child Soldier Initiative. As he addressed a gym full of fully attentive New York City grade schoolers, Chikwanine encouraged teachers and guardians to have an open conversation about the dire circumstances that people around the world are living in every day.
“These are topics that I think need to be addressed from a world view,” said Chris Piccigallo, a teacher at P.S. 126 and co-creator of the Lower Eastside Young Historians organization. “Bringing that to my students is a wonderful experience because they get to learn about other countries and learning about social activism, which we’re really getting into here in the city itself.”
The United Nations has estimated that more than 250,000 children are being pressed into fighting on the front lines of various conflicts around the globe.
One of the lessons Chikwanine tries to teach in his book and during his presentations is how the historical context of colonialism, poverty and violence has shaped the current conflicts in Africa. He has found that most people are surprised to learn these facts, because the mainstream media does not report them. The result is a large number of news consumers who are not critical of what they are seeing or aware of a different perspective. Chikwanine does not want to add to the preconceived notions.
“I can’t just go up and tell my story, because then what I’m making people assume is that Africa is just a violent continent,” said Chikwanine about the importance of also explaining why parts of Africa are steeped in conflict.
Being able to share his story around the world has been almost therapeutic. It’s given him a way to transform his sadness into triumph. Often, as he speaks around the world, he reflects on the work of his father and is motivated by his courage. His father was exiled for being a political activist and murdered by the time Chikwanine was 12.
“As a kid, from a young age, I knew what he was doing was important,” said Chikwanine. “But as a kid, still it’s your dad and missing your father in your life is such a hard thing to go through.”