Spartelen

Slechts twee dagen na oud en nieuw streden vijftien teams uit heel het land in drie poules voor de overwinning. “Sommige mensen moesten nog een beetje bijkomen van hun nieuwjaarskater”, lacht Julian de Ruiter van Wave. Het Wave-team viel net niet in de prijzen. “De winnaars kregen lekkere taarten”, aldus De Ruiter.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” cried physicist Robert Oppenheimer, ‘The Father of the Atomic Bomb’, as he watched a mushroom cloud of radioactive vapour rise over New Mexico’s desert sands, ushering in mankind’s most horrendous weapon of war yet. 
In Africa over the past four decades, guns, machetes and savagery however have done Death’s bidding no less horrifically as the scientist’s ingenious bomb. Africa and mankind’s history is a chilling tale of endless violence, death and misery, all in the name of war. This is the bloody backdrop of War Child by Bruce Cerew, a fictionalised memoir of the author’s life from a boyhood in war-torn Africa, to his miserable plight as an asylum-seeking refugee in the Netherlands.
War Child tells a story of tragedy, despair, hope and triumph through Ray, a fictional character caught in a web of hate and deceit. Ray is forced to leave his Nigerian home at age 12, only to be captured by marauding rebel troops involved in fighting in Liberia and Sierra Leone, before finally escaping Africa, only to once again be held prisoner as an asylum-seeking refugee in the Netherlands.
Cerew’s book is a testimony to Africa’s millions of innocent victims, the men, women and children who have been murdered, maimed, raped, tortured and forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in the indignity of a life as hopeless nomads in foreign countries, where destitution, discrimination and the constant shadow of fear blights their collective existence.
The second part of War Child chronicles Ray’s flight to the Netherlands, where the war in Africa is replaced by rejection and hardship in a Dutch refugee observation camp, and where Ray is challenged by incidents of betrayal, disappointment and temptation in his new ‘home’ country.
Ray meets and falls in love with a beautiful woman in the camp, but his joy is short-lived when he is sent away to the ASC refugee camp in Haarlem. With no money, job or friends, Ray is overtaken by depression, hallucinations and thoughts of suicide. But just when all hope seems lost, he meets Ginger, who helps rekindle his hope in life, before a sad, sudden twist also ends their relationship, and a dejected Ray is returned to the ASC.
Faced with unrelenting and heartbreaking setbacks, Ray nevertheless fights to overcome his misery and suffering as a refugee and asylum seeker. In the end, Ray finds love again, this time with Trudy, a Dutch woman, and together they embark on a personal journey of love, compromise and sacrifice that makes life worth living for.
War Child unflinching looks at the horrors of human abuse and war‚ while also reflecting on how those horrors continue to twist and shape the lives of refugees long after they’ve escaped their own countries. Cerew’s (and Ray’s) ultimate freedom is hard won, and only achieved through his indomitable spirit and strong faith against all odds. In the end what saves him is human kindness, dignity and the emotional rescue of love.
War Child is the compelling story of hope against despair that reads like a Hollywood thriller, with all the adventure, suspense and action, detailing an extraordinary odyssey that celebrates the human spirit, while delivering a bold message to humanity to reject wars and their devastating effects, which, like Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb, seek only to destroy mankind.

‘War Child’ by Bruce Cerew, available in Dutch bookstores and at www.warchildnet.com. Bemgba Nyakuma, MSc Sustainable Engineering, from Nigeria, is also a published author: his short story collection, ‘The Dreamcatcha & Other stories’, is available at www.africanwriter.com.