Child soldiers have been heavily involved in contemporary African warfare. Since the 1990s, the ‘child soldier crisis’ has become a major humanitarian and human rights project. The figure of the child soldier has often been taken as evidence of the ‘barbarism’, dehumanization and trauma generated by modern warfare, but such images can obscure the complex reality of children’s experiences of being part of armed groups during conflict. This article uses the published memoirs of former child soldiers from Sierra Leone, Sudan, Uganda, Eritrea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to explore the instrumental and discursive nexus between child soldiers, memory, violence and humanitarianism. It assesses how (former-) children combatants remember and recount their experiences of war, and how these narratives can be shaped by humanitarian, literary and/or therapeutic framings. The article argues that these memoirs’ significance lies in their affective truths and what they reveal about children’s experience, and narrations, of war. Former child soldiers engage with, but also challenge, dominant contemporary humanitarian discourses surrounding childhood and violence to develop a ‘victim, savage, saviour, campaigner’ framework for their narratives. The article historically contextualizes the emergence of the ‘child soldier memoir’, before analysing the narratives of recruitment, indoctrination, and violence recounted by these former child soldiers, and their attempts to rework their identities in a post-conflict environment. It explores how former child soldiers narrate suffering and deploy discourses of trauma in their memoirs: some seeking to process wartime traumas, others leveraging their own suffering to position themselves as campaigners for those children still caught in conflict.

儿童兵大量参与了当代非洲战争。自 1990 年代以来，“儿童兵危机”已成为一项重大的人道主义和人权项目。儿童兵的形象经常被视为现代战争造成的“野蛮”、非人化和创伤的证据，但这些图像可能会掩盖儿童在冲突期间成为武装团体一部分的复杂现实。本文使用塞拉利昂、苏丹、乌干达、厄立特里亚和刚果民主共和国已出版的前儿童兵回忆录，探讨儿童兵、记忆、暴力和人道主义之间的工具性和话语性联系。它评估（前）儿童战士如何记住和讲述他们的战争经历，以及这些叙述如何被人道主义、文学和/或治疗框架。文章认为，这些回忆录的意义在于它们的情感真相以及它们揭示的儿童战争经历和叙述。前儿童兵参与并挑战围绕童年和暴力的当代主流人道主义话语，为他们的叙述发展一个“受害者、野蛮人、救世主、活动家”的框架。在分析这些前儿童兵讲述的招募、灌输和暴力的叙述，以及他们在冲突后环境中重塑身份的尝试之前，本文将“儿童兵回忆录”的出现置于历史背景下。它探讨了前儿童兵如何在回忆录中叙述痛苦和部署创伤话语：一些寻求处理战时创伤，