Sofonie Dala: The Girl Born Between Wars

Sofonie Dala was born in Angola in 1991, in the final breath of one civil war and the first heartbeat of another. Before she could even speak, the sound of gunfire had already become the soundtrack of her existence.

Her mother used to say that Sofonie entered the world on a night when the sky itself seemed afraid. The electricity had failed again in Luanda, and distant explosions trembled through the dark like angry thunder. Women whispered prayers while fathers listened anxiously to the radio, waiting for news about battles, bombings, and shifting territories.

 

Angola had already suffered for sixteen years.

The First Phase of the Angolan Civil War, from 1975 to 1991, had torn the country apart after independence from Portugal. The MPLA, supported by Cuba and the Soviet Union, fought against UNITA and the FNLA, backed by the United States and apartheid South Africa. Entire villages disappeared into smoke. Roads became graveyards. Childhood itself became a luxury.

And then, just as peace appeared possible with the Bicesse Accords in 1991, everything collapsed again.

In 1992, when Sofonie was still an infant learning to crawl, war returned more violently than before. The disputed elections ignited the Second Phase of the Angolan Civil War, one of the deadliest humanitarian disasters in Africa’s modern history.

For Sofonie, fear was not an emotion. It was an environment.

Every night she slept listening to bullets crack through the darkness. Her heart learned panic before it learned peace. Sometimes she woke to the sound of screaming neighbors running through the streets barefoot. Other nights students fleeing from school shootings rushed into her family’s house, hiding under beds and behind furniture while adults blew out candles and prayed soldiers would not search the homes.

The children of the neighborhood stopped playing games about superheroes. Instead, they played “escape the soldiers.”

Sofonie remembered one afternoon when she was seven years old. She was walking home carrying school notebooks against her chest when explosions erupted nearby. The ground shook. A teacher screamed for everyone to run. Children scattered in every direction. Sofonie hid inside a drainage tunnel with three other girls for hours while helicopters circled overhead like giant predators.

After that day, she developed a habit: whenever she entered a room, she immediately searched for the safest place to hide.

The war lasted until 2002.

By the time peace finally came after the death of UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi and the signing of the Luena Memorandum, Sofonie was eleven years old. Angola celebrated. People danced in the streets. Radios played music instead of military updates.

But Sofonie’s nervous system no longer understood silence.

Even peaceful nights frightened her.

When fireworks exploded during celebrations, she dropped to the floor instinctively.

Still, she dreamed of a different life. She loved books, languages, and computers. She imagined a future where no child would sleep listening to gunfire.

Then came another journey.

In 2005, at only thirteen years old, Sofonie was sent to Russia with promises of education and opportunity. Recruiters had traveled through Angola convincing desperate families that their children would receive scholarships and a better future abroad.

Her parents believed they were saving her.

Instead, Sofonie and around twenty other Angolan children became trapped in a nightmare.

When they arrived in Magnitogorsk, the promises disappeared. The organizers vanished after taking money from families. Many of the children were left without proper schooling, protection, or financial support. They struggled to survive in freezing temperatures thousands of kilometers away from home.

For the first time, Sofonie understood another kind of war — the silent violence of abandonment.

The Russian winter felt like punishment itself. She had never imagined cold could hurt physically. Snowstorms buried the streets while homesickness buried her spirit.

Some nights the children cried together quietly so nobody would hear.

They learned how to survive:

• stretching small meals for days,

• translating documents they barely understood,

• protecting one another from exploitation,

• pretending to be stronger than they truly were.

The newspapers later described the situation as child trafficking and educational fraud involving Angolan minors.

But newspapers could never capture the loneliness of being a frightened child in a foreign land with no certainty about tomorrow.

Years passed.

Sofonie slowly rebuilt herself through education and resilience. She began believing the worst was behind her.

 

 

Then, in 2008, war found her again.

This time it was not Angola.

It was the Russo-Georgian War.

On August 8, 2008, tensions exploded between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Television channels suddenly filled with images of tanks, bombings, burning cities, terrified civilians, and soldiers advancing toward Georgian territory.

 

For many people, it was geopolitical news.

For Sofonie, it was trauma returning in a different language.

The sounds of military aircraft reopened memories buried deep inside her childhood. Her body reacted before her mind did. Every siren transported her back to Angola. Every explosion on television awakened the same terror she felt hiding from gunfire as a little girl.

She realized then that war does not end when treaties are signed.

It migrates inside survivors.

Yet despite everything, Sofonie refused to disappear.

She studied.

She survived.

She carried the memory of every frightened child she had ever met:

• the students hiding in houses during bombings,

• the trafficked children stranded abroad,

• the families divided by conflict,

• the girls who learned fear before freedom.

And somewhere beneath all the trauma, another identity slowly emerged.

Not just a victim of wars.

But a witness.

A survivor.

A woman born between conflicts who kept searching for peace in a world that repeatedly tried to teach her despair.