‘Veteran child soldier’, I read in The Independent (27 June 2007). Apparently it was a representative of the International Criminal Court who came up with the term when commenting upon the ‘fundamental dilemma’ of Dominic Ongwen, today one of the indicted leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army/Movement, but abducted as a ten-year-old from his rural home in Uganda. To quote from Honwana's admirable book on child soldiers in Africa, Ongwen must have made his ‘transition into adulthood within an environment of societal chaos’, constructing his ‘imaginary spaces and symbolic worlds with the means available’ to him. ‘War and political violence are some of those means’ (p. 44).

Honwana's book is based on more than two decades of anthropological research. Thus, for as long as Ongwen has been fighting in the war in Uganda – first as a very young child soldier, but now as a ‘veteran’ ditto – Honwana has tried to understand the phenomenon of child soldiers. With material mainly from Angola and Mozambique, she argues that the ‘term child soldier is an oxymoron that signifies the violence that this position does to established social categories’ (p. 51). Add the prefix ‘veteran’ to the term, and the oxymoron perhaps becomes even more of an impossible contradiction.

Having done research on the war in northern Uganda for more than ten years now, I am still a junior to these two ‘veterans’, and every day, it seems, I learn new things. Throughout the years I have been somehow frustrated with the two-dimensional debate. On the one side there are the many human rights organisations that present child soldiers as passive victims and ultimately anonymous numbers in the statistics; on the other side many academics claim that every individual, regardless of situation, always has agency. Inspired by De Certeau's distinction between short-term and immediate tactical agency in the absence of more long-term and strategic actions, Honwana aims at a balance in the debate, all the time pointing out that for most child soldiers this balance is nothing but a matter of everyday life and death. She builds her insights on ethnographic fieldwork with various United Nations and non-governmental organisations, and discusses the methodological pros and cons of doing fieldwork within such organisations, but also the problems of doing fieldwork with informants who have little to gain from telling the researcher about their past experiences.

The problem of child soldiers in Africa, to summarise Honwana's argument, is global in cause, about ‘economic restructuring of the world economy’ that has ‘resulted in the commodification of children’ (p. 46). So the phenomenon is in no way African in essence, she convincingly argues, yet the immediate way out is with the Africans themselves. Honwana therefore focuses on community-based initiatives of healing and reintegration. She argues that global equality, local democratic participation and ritual action, more than Western biomedicine and psychotherapy, may assist former child soldiers to come to terms with their violent experiences.

Child Soldiers in Africa gives particular attention to the violent experiences of young women, yet, to get qualitative and in-depth stories from women ex-fighters, Honwana admits, is difficult. Here I want to mention Child Soldier: fighting for my life, the painful but marvellous autobiography of China Keitetsi, a female ex-fighter from Uganda (Bellevue, SA: Jacana, 2002). Taken together, these two books ought to be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to embark on the difficult task of understanding more fully the complex realities of child soldiering in Africa, and elsewhere.