Malaise in modernity: the child soldier in contemporary sub-Saharan literature

This study analyses the figure of the child soldier in French-language contemporary Sub-Saharan literature. In particular, it challenges the dominant critical tendency to read this figure as one that comforts Afro-pessimist perspectives within and without the literary domain. The first part of the study examines the characteristics of modern and modernizing discourse underscoring its dependence on developmental progress and linearity. A parallel between modernity and the literary model of the Bildungsroman is then drawn. The second part of the study consists of textual analyses of the child soldier figure in two novels by the Cameroonian writer Leonora Miano. The two parts of the study, as a whole, contend that the child soldier does not so much reinforce the intrinsically flawed nature of an African continent that is slow to embrace Western modernity then it does the latter's fundamental violence.