Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Living… in an unnamed village in West Africa. Prior to an invasion of rebel troops, Agu was living happily with his family. Agu lived with his father, brother, sister, mother and grandpa before the chaos ensued. His mother and sister departed for the capital safely, but the men were forced to stay behind. Agu witnessed the murder of his father, brother, and grandfather by the rebels.
Profession… student. Agu is a twelve-year-old boy who was attending school before his life was turned upside down from the revolution. Left with no choice, Agu became a full-time soldier for the Native Defense Forces (“NDF”), a native rebel force.
Interests… rapping and joking around with friends, but the war changed everything. Now he is only concerned with staying alive and finding his mother and sister.
Challenge… becoming an entirely different person than the one he was before war. If he is to defeat the powerful government forces as a soldier, Agu must become a ruthless, disciplined killer. The supreme leader of the NDF, the Commandant is a powerful, charismatic, and frightening person who is training Agu to do just that. Agu wants to learn as much as possible from him and earn the respect of his fellow NDF combatants. He is obedient under the Commandant’s tutelage, but Agu is conflicted given that the Commandant’s orders go against his own moral code.
Personality… hopeful, reflective, resilient, and obedient. Agu is resilient, not letting his sadness or small physical frame hold him back from being a full-time soldier. But Agu is beginning to despair that he is turning into a beast or a devil for the actions he’s carrying out as a soldier. He is so sad that he turns to the sun, saying: “Sun, why are you shining at this world? I am wanting to catch you in my hands, to squeeze you until you cannot shine no more. That way, everything is always dark and nobody's ever having to see all the terrible things that are happening here.”
Get to Know him in...
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A drama based on the experiences of Agu, a child soldier fighting in the civil war of an unnamed African country. Follows the journey of a young boy, Agu, who is forced to join a group of soldiers in a fictional West African country. While Agu fears his commander and many of the men around him, his fledgling childhood has been brutally shattered by the war raging through his country, and he is at first torn between conflicting revulsion and fascination Depicts the mechanics of war and does not shy away from explicit, visceral detail, and paints a complex, difficult picture of Agu as a child soldier.
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Now a critically-acclaimed Netflix original film directed by Cary Fukunaga (True Detective) and starring Idris Elba (Mandela, The Wire)—the movie-tie in edition of the harrowing, utterly original debut novel by Uzodinma Iweala about the life of a child soldier in a war-torn African country.
As civil war ravages an unnamed West-African nation, Agu, the school-aged protagonist of this stunning debut novel, is recruited into a unit of guerilla fighters. Haunted by his father’s own death at the hands of militants, which he fled just before witnessing, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander.
While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started—a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family, still intact. As he vividly recalls these sunnier times, his daily reality continues to spin further downward into inexplicable brutality, primal fear, and loss of selfhood. In a powerful, strikingly original voice, Uzodinma Iweala leads the reader through the random travels, betrayals, and violence that mark Agu’s new community. Electrifying and engrossing, Beasts of No Nation announces the arrival of an extraordinary new writer.
