You're probably already familiar with the most distressing details of Emmanuel Jal's life. He was a child in southern Sudan when the civil war broke out.

His father left home to fight and his mother died when he was about seven.

In the hope of education he journeyed to Ethiopia, where he and thousands of other children were recruited by the Sudan People's Liberation Army and trained in warfare.

When the fighting became too much, a group of them undertook a three-month trek to safety, during the course of which they were attacked by wild animals, threatened with starvation, and considered cannibalism and suicide.

Jal finds it pretty difficult to talk about his past. And yet, since becoming an international recording and touring artist, the young Sudanese rapper has been required to rehearse his story for the benefit of every colour supplement under the sun.

At first, he explains, this shocked him and caused him stress: "In Kenya, people loved me for my music first," he observes.

"When I come here people love me for my story."

But these days Jal is insisting upon a positive outlook. "It's a two-way sword," he says of the rather indelicate obsession with his biography.

"It can cut me as a person but it can also cut a way for other people. I'm not the only person who's suffered as a child soldier. So if I'm the only person who can speak for them then I'll speak."

Currently working on his first solo album, Warchild, which is due for release early next year, Jal is valued highly in the world music scene thanks to the success of Ceasefire, a record he made last year with the northern Sudanese singer and oud player Abdel Gadir Salim.

It is a captivating encounter between the renowned maestro's desert blues and Sal's soft, almost liquid rapping, which slips and slides between English, Arabic, Swahili, Dinka and his first language, Nuer. But Ceasefire is also remarkable as an alliance between southern and northern Sudan.

"When they asked me to rap on this thing, I said, 'What! I can't sing with this person!" recalls Jal with refreshing honesty. "He's so different - and so good. But above all he is a Muslim. How can I sing with a Muslim when they've been killing our people?

"But then I realised, we are not the only people to suffer in the world. I had to stop the bitterness because it was finishing me as a person."

Nevertheless, Sal is enjoying the freedom of recording and performing his solo material which he says, with a laugh, is "hip hop but melodic, not dry", and "maybe not as listenable according to the standard of the old people in Sudan".

His conversion to Christianity has informed many of the lyrics but if there's a single message it's that of Gua, which went to number one in Kenya and means, simply, Peace.

Injecting heart into a scene dominated by hollow posturing, Jal is destined to become the next star of African music.

But first there's going to be another round of interviews, when Tony and Ridley Scott finish work upon their film about the British Aid worker Emma McCune.

It was McCune who, shortly before her death in a car crash, put an end to Jal's horrific years in the bush by adopting him and smuggling him to Kenya. And now Jal's life as a child soldier has become a matter for Hollywood. Does he mind?

"The way Emma is going to be portrayed as a person is what distresses us as a family and many people who knew her as a person," he says.

"They may try to make her sleep around with many men, you know how they show people. I wouldn't like someone who adopted me to be disrespected like that.

"If people want my story, fine. I just hope they will then invest in someone else's life. It took only one English woman who wasn't even rich to smuggle me out of Sudan.

"And just look now, I'm able to put other kids in school from what I'm doing with my music. You can make millions but when you die you leave them behind. The best achievement is to invest in somebody's life."

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