EMMANUEL JAL

BIOGRAPHY

Emmanuel Jal is a Sudanese-born rapper who overcame time as a child soldier in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army before being smuggled to Kenya by his adoptive mother. There he studied music and by the time of his first album, 2004′s Gua, was fluently rhyming in English, Arabic, Swahili, Dinka and Nuer. Considered by Peter Gabriel to have “the potential of a young Bob Marley,” Jal has released four of his own albums and appeared on six others, including War Child’s “Help!: A Day in the Life” and “Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur.” Jal is also a spokesman for Amnesty International, Make Poverty History, Control Arms, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers and Oxfam, and he created his own charitable foundation, Gua Africa, to build schools and provide scholarships for Sudanese war refugees.