CREDIT: Grant Black, Calgary Herald Rap star Emanuel Jal is in Calgary to perform at this weekend's Afrikadey! festival.

He was just seven when he was plucked from his family and forced to become a child soldier. Handed an AK-47 that was taller than he was, by age 11, he had already been a veteran of two civil wars in the killing fields of Sudan.

Escaping after five years of unimaginable atrocity and poverty, Emmanuel Jal learned to sing and rap as a means of catharsis, he says. Today, after moving to England he is a prolific rapper with a critically acclaimed album named War Child and is the subject of an award-winning documentary of the same name. His profile went global earlier this summer when he stole the show from the likes of Queen and Peter Gabriel at the huge London birthday concert for Nelson Mandela. He is now in Calgary to perform at this weekend's Afrikadey! festival.

But Jal is doing much more to make his presence felt in Calgary. He has a number of speaking engagements in the city, and is even taking the time to talk to expatriot Sudanese locked in local prisons, hoping to steer them on a course that can benefit their birthland.

"I was born in difficult times and I've seen horrific things," the 28-year-old says softly.

"How did I survive? How did I make the most of what was given to me? I want to talk to them and tell them they need to take responsibility, to help their families back home. A door has been opened for them and they need to go through it. Their people need them. The people back home haven't been educated because there are no schools, so they're the ones who will one day run the country. They're the future, and if they fail, they're failing their country and betraying their people."

While Peter Gabriel told the Wembley Stadium crowd on Mandela's birthday that Jal has the potential of a young Bob Marley, Afrkiday! artistic director Tunde Dawodu believes Jal has the potential of a young Mandela. Which is why he flew to London to convince the rapper to perform at this year's festival.

"We wanted to bring him here because Calgary has the largest Sudanese population in Canada and a number of them find it hard to deal with the culture shock," says Dawodu.

"They feel abandoned, neglected. He can speak to that experience, he can encourage kids to take responsibility for themselves and their actions, to not care about all the 'bling-bling' they see in other rap."

Mary Bakual, who sits on the board of the African Sudanese Association of Calgary, estimates there are some 12,000 Sudanese immigrants and refugees in Calgary and between 40 and 60 lost boys and girls of Sudan -- displaced orphans who have since found their way here.

"It's very hard for these kids, so it will be helpful for anyone to come and speak to them," she says. "They need to know about what happened back home, what happened with their families."

Jal's own life story is heartbreaking.

Infighting between Sudan's southern non-Arab populations and its northern Arab populations has led to 1.9 million people killed, one of the greatest civilian death tolls since the Second World War. As a boy living in the southern Sudanese village of Tonj, Jal witnessed his house burned to the ground and his aunt being raped, and struggled to make sense of the brutality around him.

"My mom was claimed by one of the village attacks and I never got to know how she died, just that she died.

"I didn't have an understanding of what was happening. I thought the world was ending. There were bombs falling from the skies, houses burning, people running, helter skelter, you see people getting shot, falling and dying and you don't know what's going to happen."

What happened was a decree that saw all the children in his village rounded up and sent off to Ethiopia under the ruse they were being sent to school.

The "school" was merely a front for the Sudan People's Liberation Army, which trained the children to become killers to avenge the deaths of their people. Jal, whose father had been a leader in the group, embraced his new education.

"We wanted revenge for our families. We wanted freedom. But no one was getting paid. The payment was food. The AK-47 was your father and mother."

When the fighting became unbearable, Jal and a few other child soldiers managed to split from the militia. On the run for three months, they suffered casualties on the way to the Sudanese town of Waat. There, at age 11, he says he met an angel.

Emma McCune was an English aid worker who convinced him he couldn't continue his course in life.

She adopted him and smuggled him into Nairobi, Kenya, where she died in a road accident a few months later.

Fortunately, her friends' generosity allowed Jal to continue going to school and, in his spare time, he would go to church to sing.

"The feeling music gave me was therapy," he says. "I didn't go to a therapist after all this. It's hard finding any Sudanese going to therapists, they don't understand they need it, that so many minds have been destroyed. Music gives me therapy.

The single, All We Need Is Jesus, went to No. 1 in Kenya and received airplay in the U.K. As Jal moved there, his story began circulating in the British press. His second single, Gua, found him collaborating with a well-known Sudanese Muslim musician named Abder Galir Salim, in a wish to see the country's two factions cease fighting. Another No. 1 hit in Kenya, it was also featured in a 2006 episode of ER.

This year has already been a banner one for Jal. At the Mandela concert, he sang a new song near to his heart, called Emma, dedicated to the woman who rescued him from warfare.

"When she died, I didn't have a chance to thank her for everything she did for me, for bringing me out," Jal says. "She was an angel."

McCune herself is the subject of a 2009 film project called Emma's War with director Tony Scott and actress Nicole Kidman attached. Likewise, Jal is the subject of War Child, a 2008 documentary that made its North American debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Cadillac Audience Award.

"The War Child documentary is about my story," Jal says. "The (filmmakers) discovered early photographs of me and invited me to come and watch a video of me as a kid, and I was really shocked. So it's about me telling my story and going back and meeting my family. It's distressing for me when I watch it, but it's bringing respect to the people."

nlewis@theherald.canwest.com