(The Guardian) – David Zelu, not yet 16 years old, looks up, smiles, and stretches his arms to the sky where the sun is finally breaking through the clouds. The rain that has hammered on the wooden roof of the small hut he shares with four other teenagers has passed. Crows wheel overhead, and small thin children jump in puddles. David is one of seven “bodyguards” of a senior officer of a rebel militia in the east of South Sudan, and so a “child soldier”, like thousands of others in his country, and tens of thousands more across Africa.

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