Participant Media, New Ballon Production, Parliament of Owls in Association with Netflix present Abraham Attah (Agu), Commandant (Idris Elba) Emmanuel Affadzi (Dike), Strika (Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye) Kobina Amissah Sam (Father), Francis Weddey (Big Bother), Anointed Wisseh (Tripod). Executive Producers, Elizabeth Koch, Kristina Kendall, Nnamdi Asomugha, Elika Portnoy, Todd Courtney, Tommee May, Mark Holder, Peter Pastorelli, Uzodinma Iweala; Director of Photography Cary Joji Fukunaga. © 2015
This Netflix maiden project hit us in the groin, and it went on to collect lots of accolades at world cinema stages. You can watch it if you want, for me, once is enough. Better be ready for the gruesome experience. I’ll have to pour libation for the kins of mine, best friends, and fellow citizens who lost lives in the mayhem in both Liberia and Sierra Leone. I combine the two war theaters (Liberia and Sierra Leone) because each could shout out to one another as close neighbors and relatives they are. Both theatres used child soldiers.
After watching Beasts of No Nation, I christen it as ‘An odyssey of a Child Soldier, or better yet, ‘Confessions of a Child Soldier.’ Of course, Commander (Idris Elba) does make innocent children hardly weaned from their mothers into beasts. Agu (Abraham Attah) and his two brothers were still little boys living with their parents in the Ecomod buffer zone, playing the child, they were. They were living under the protection of the United Nations. But the PA announces, this one day that all residents living in the buffer zone, The National Reformation Council recommends non-combatants to leave the buffer zone immediately as military operations begin as planned, panic broke out.
During the anarchy that grips the town as every resident fight to get out before the impending attack, Agu’s father (Kobina Amissah Sam) finds a taxi which takes Agu’s mother (Ama K. Abebrese) and baby away to the city. I remember her last parting words to her family, “Remember to pray to God every day. Always pray, but don’t be afraid.” See how Agu vehemently crying after the taxi, to go with his mother. Shortly after, a gut-wrenching scene in the movie unfolds when the NRC attacks the town, and Agu’s brother and father get shot. He loses his father and brother here.
Agu’s odyssey for survival begins, as he narrates in voice-over. After his near-death escape from the government’s NRC attack, Agu runs through swamp, mangrove, and forests until he gets captured by the Native Defence Force, a mercenary group headed by Commandant (Idris Elba). Instead of being suspected as one on reconnaissance patrol for enemy troops, Agu gets spared but recruited to join the mercenaries. He gets initiated by native doctors and dressed in the regalia of a native warrior, and shortly after, he experiences his first attack on a bridge, as an ammunition boy. And after a successful ambush, Agu is forced for the first time, to kill a man captured alive, with a machete. By the show of such bravery, though reluctantly but forced, he has passed the test of becoming one of the mercenaries, and not a spy.
Agu trains to use a gun and show sign of trust and bravery for which Commandant praises him for and even gets closer to the young boy. In successive attacks, Agu has now become a trusted and gallant fighter in the garrison. Hence, he and his buddy Strika (Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye) ride in the Commandant’s jeep when the Supreme Commandant summons their Commandant to the headquarters. The meeting with the Supreme Commandant didn’t go well. He demotes Commandant and places his next in command over him. Even when the Commandant asks for rewards for the fight, the Supreme Commandant couldn’t give him better answers. It is either the Commandant’s regiment that has killed too many people or should be prepared to answer for the indiscriminate killings once the war was over. The Commandant takes this as a dismissal, and he decides to split from the National Defence Council.
Once friends, now enemies, the National Defence Force strips the Native Defence Force of ammunition and supplies and launches dust to dawn attacks on them. During such attacks, Agu loses his buddy Strika. The Native Defence Force carves out a territory for themselves and goes gold-digging (Blood Diamonds). This condition has been going on now for six months, with no food, no ammunition. The fighters get wary as most are dying of hunger. The newly appointed second in command in the regiment, stage a mutiny to abandon the fight and disband.
All the soldiers, including Agu, disband and abandon Commandant in the forest alone. Not long after, Agu and his break-away comrades are captured by United Nations ECO MOD forces and rescued and rehabilitated.
The adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s novel by Cary Joji Fukunaga is a realistic experience that could bring renewed trauma to those who went through such fantastic experiences in my region of West Africa. It touches us who had kins that tragically suffered in the war. My sister, they said, would have met the same fate in the Liberian Civil War, like the woman and her little girl in the abandoned upstairs parlor, who gets shot in the head by Agu, while being raped. Or, almost thirty years ago, after her escape from the gruesome war, my present wife yells some of the nights, “don’t take my son, don’t take my son away!” She told me a story about wrestling with soldiers and paying dollars for her son’s head not to recruit as a child soldier.
Agu is not entirely immersed in the rebel guerilla warfare. He is forced into it, for he has no way of escaping. But soon, he finds friendship and a family in them especially, Strika. Besides, he’s almost always aloof. You can see his reluctance to kill the man and only when he is under pressure. “Agu, kill this man, these are the ones that kill your parents,” the Commandant bawls at him. Agu didn’t quite like the Commandant as he does Strika.
The story is more about Agu and his sojourn in the forest, and his adaptation to living in forests, eating grasshoppers, and how he and the break-away group eventually surrender to the UN forces. The victim of all the Native Defence Force is Commandant. Once he has this family of rebels around him, uses them to his advantage, it was all right, but when he breaks from the government and decides to go solo, he sees his downfall coming. His second in command put him at gunpoint, and even Agu holds him up but soon relents. When everyone is leaving and him cussing after them, he says, “You will remember me. You will remember your Commandant…Agu, you stay here because they don’t…” When he turns to Agu, he is walking away too. Losing Agu is like Commandant losing the most reliable hold in his life as a mercenary.
The film ends metaphorically: The captured child soldiers bathing in the sea is a baptismal and redemptive washing away of the sins they committed in war. Water doth purify-1 Peter 3:21