He felt a strange crushing weight in his head. Change was hurtling toward him, bearing down on him, and there was nothing he could do to make it slow down.
(Ugwu, sensing the force of History, Half of a Yellow Sun, page 175)
“Abu m onye Biafra.” [‘I am a Biafran’]
(White man Richard Churchill bravely declaring loyalty to the new state of Biafra, p.181)
This is a big, slow, novelish novel about family and relationships. It’s 433 pages long in the Fourth Estate paperback edition, and the print is relatively small, so there’s a lot of text, it’s a hefty work. Let me say right at the start that I think it’s a magnificent and hugely enjoyable novel. And that part of this is down to the clarity of Adichie’s imagining of scenes and feelings, and the wonderfully clear and lucid prose she expresses them in. I am a huge Adichie fan.
Subject matter
I knew from the blurb, from the Amazon summary, from Adichie’s Wikipedia page and from various other sources that this is Adichie’s big novel about the Biafran war, also known as the Nigerian Civil War.
The Biafran war lasted two and a half years, from 6 July 1967 to 15 January 1970. It was an attempt by the Igbo people of south-east Nigeria, after generations of animosity against them had broken out into open massacres and pogroms during 1966, to seek safety in a homeland by seceding from the Nigerian Federation and setting up their own independent state, called Biafra. Nigeria didn’t want to see them go and immediately launched military action.
The conflict dragged on for two and a half years, partly because both sides started off under-manned, inexperienced and under-resourced. After a military stalemate was reached, Nigeria blockaded all entry points to Biafra triggering one of the great famines of modern times, in which up to 2 million civilians starved to death.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an Igbo i.e. a member of the ethnic group which suffered from the outbreaks of violence in 1966, then the war, and then the horrifying man-made famine. Adiche was born in 1977 i.e. seven years after the war ended. But, as she explains in the dedication to the book and in an interview included as an appendix, the death and destruction her people suffered during the terrible struggle cast a long shadow over her childhood, not least in the fact that both her grandfathers were killed in it.
Adichie’s achievement is to cast this massive historical tragedy into fictional form on a very manageable scale. When I knew it was about a war, and realised how long and dense it is, I imagined it would be epic in size and tone, but it isn’t. It’s surprisingly domestic in scale and treatment.
In the first part, titled simply ‘The Early Sixties’, there is no hint of conflict or war and we are simply introduced to an extended group of Igbo families and friends, a few outsiders, a Brit or two, and watch them go about their everyday humdrum lives, worrying about work or relationships etc the stuff of everyday life. The aim is to get us thoroughly acclimatised to numerous normal peacetime existences. Only then do we go on to part two of the novel, titled ‘The Late Sixties’ at which point the characters, in their different ways, hear rumours about the coup (January 1966), the counter-coup (July 1966), the first massacres of Igbo civilians in the north and west of Nigeria, leading up to the declaration of an independent Biafra in May 1967.
I’m not sure whether to give the history of the war first, or the characters. Let’s do the war since it’s central to the narrative, then come back to the novel and the characters.
The Biafran War 1967 to 1970
Britain’s fault
The state called Nigeria was created by the British colonial authorities who, in creating it, yoked together over 300 tribal groups and peoples. The main ones were the semi-feudal and Muslim Hausa-Fulani in the north; the Yoruba in the southwest, also ruled by monarchs; and the Igbo in the south-east, arranged into autonomous, democratically organised communities.
The first coup, January 1966
Nigeria gained independence from Britain in 1960. In January 1966 a military coup (the ‘Coup of the Five Majors’) overthrew the democratically elected central government, the majors in question proclaiming that the country had had enough of corrupt and greedy politicians. The majors killed a number of leading politicians and army officers but failed to establish power themselves, instead creating a political vacuum. Into this stepped the head of the Nigerian army, Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, made himself president of a military regime.
Northern elements within the military were unhappy with the coup, claiming it had been an ethnic power grab by Igbo officers (most of the majors were Igbo and most of the senior officers and politicians assassinated had been Northerners or Yoruba). They were further outraged that the majors who launched the coup were arrested but not brought to trial. The last straw was when Ironsi announced Unification Decree Number 34, which would have replaced the federation structure of Nigeria – under which the North enjoyed a disproportionate amount of power – with a more centralised system. This, also, was seen as an Igbo power grab.
The second coup, July 1966
So in July 1966 Northern officers launched a countercoup which saw the Ironsi and his senior officials killed. Through the media the Northern authorities encouraged the general population to seek out and kill Igbos wherever they could (in a premonition of the role played by government radio stations in the Rwanda genocide 30 years later).
Anti-Igbo pogroms, late summer 1966
The result was a wave of pogroms against Igbos throughout Nigeria, who were not only blamed for the original coup but had also been the targets of long-standing ethnic hatred for their independence and commercial success, a little like the Jews in Europe.
Comparison of the Igbo with the Jews
The comparison with the Jews was drawn by US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, himself a Jew who escaped persecution in Nazi Germany and who compared the Igbo people to Jews in a memo written to U.S. President Richard Nixon, stating: ‘The Ibos are the wandering Jews of West Africa – gifted, aggressive, Westernized; at best envied and resented, but mostly despised by the mass of their neighbours in the Federation.’
It is also drawn by a character in this novel, admittedly the less-than-admirable Susan, representative of Western prejudices. She tells her boyfriend Richard:
“There are lots and lots of Igbo people here – well, they are everywhere really, aren’t they? Not that they didn’t have it coming to them, when you think about it, with their being so clannish and uppity and controlling the markets. Very Jewish, really.” (p.154)
Mass Igbo flight to Igboland
Up to 30,000 Igbo civilians were killed in massacres all across the country, crystallising the belief among their political leaders that they would never be safe in ‘Nigeria’ and led them to declare the breakaway state of Biafra in order to provide a permanent safe haven for Igbos fleeing from all other parts of Nigeria.
Declaration of Biafra
This new state was named Biafra and declared independent on 6 July 1967. This is the flag it adopted. According to the Flags online website the red bar represents the blood of the massacres in northern Nigeria, the black is for mourning the dead, the green is for prosperity, and the half of a yellow sun which the novel’s title refers to, represents the sun rising, as if on a new day and a new land and a new hope. (Olanna gives just this interpretation to the children in the refugee school, page 281.)
The flag of Biafra showing the half a yellow sun which the title of Adichie’s novel refers to
The phrase ‘half of a yellow sun’, describing the flag or the small version of it worn by soldiers, or copies of it sported by civilians, occurs 11 times in the text, though it seems more often, woven into the text like a musical leitmotif.
War, blockade and famine
The Nigerian army promptly attacked the forces of the new state and there was 6 months of bloody fighting with incursions into each other’s territory, but eventually led to a military stalemate. So the Nigerian government decided to starve the Biafrans out and imposed a blockade of all food and medicines. The blockade led to an entirely man-made famine in which up to 2 million civilians are estimated to have died.
Outside forces
After hesitating the UK government decided to back the Nigerian government, influenced by its commercial interests in the oil generated in areas controlled by Nigeria. Britain sent guns, ammunition and officers to train the Nigerian army. Like all wars, everybody thought it would be over by Christmas, nobody anticipated it turning into years of slog and then into the horrific suffering of the famine.
The British government which decided to back Nigeria was led by Harold Wilson. When women and children began to die of starvation, doctors filling in death certificates wrote under Cause of Death ‘Harold Wilson’. When more and more Biafran children fall sick with kwashiorkor (‘a form of malnutrition caused by protein deficiency in the diet, typically affecting young children in the tropics’) the locals rename it Harold Wilson disease (p.338). Wilson must have become deeply unhappy at being associated with what amounted to a genocide.
He and his cabinet thought that backing Nigeria was a humanitarian decision because it would bring the war to a swift end i.e. save lives. Nobody anticipated the stubbornness of Biafran resistance, how long the conflict would drag on, or that the British government’s decision would position them as backers of a genocide. (Wilson is mentioned five times in the text.)
Whatever Britain does, France can be counted on to do the opposite, so the government of General de Gaulle supported Biafra, supplying material and logistics and training. De Gaulle denounced the Nigerian government’s policy as a deliberate genocide.
The US government of Lyndon Johnson declared it was keeping a distance as Nigeria was a British sphere of influence, but in practice gave covert support to the Nigerian government, again influenced the importance of US business interests in the country. This was opposed by Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon who throughout the presidential campaign of 1968 called for the US to support Biafra. However once in power in January 1969, Nixon found there was little he could do in practice apart from supporting the largely fruitless peace talks. Supporting Biafra would have alienated all the other African nations which were struggling with secessionist movements and also the Vietnam War was creating no end of geopolitical and domestic trouble, so best eave alone.
War’s end
The war ended with the Biafran government caving in and agreeing to be reintegrated into Nigeria. The Nigerian government made the concession of reorganising the country from four large monolithic regions into 12 more locally accountable states.
A documentary
Of the documentaries I’ve watched about the Biafra war, this is the best.
Half of a Yellow Sun, the characters
There are nearly 60 named characters in the novel but the narrative revolves around four main ones, Ugwu, Odenigbo, Olanna and Richard.
Ugwu
The novel starts and ends with Ugwu, a 13-year-old boy from the rural village of Opi who his auntie, a cleaner, wangles him a much sought-after job as a ‘house boy’ or all-purpose servant and cook to a figure who is initially referred to only as ‘Master’, in fact Master is the first word of the novel. Dependent or clustered around Ugwu are secondary characters:
- his aunt, a cleaner at the university, who got him the job
- his sister, Anulika, who grows to maturity during the novel and plans to get married till the war intervenes
- Ugwu’s mother who is ill and Ugwu’s Master kindly intervenes to help and find medical care
- Nnesinachi, Ugwu’s first love from back in the village, who he has vivid fantasies about when he masturbates
- Chinyere, servant of the house neighbouring his Master’s, who often slips out at night and sneaks into Ugwu’s quarters so they can make love, though she remains eerily passive and silent throughout the process
Some of the chapters end with a bold heading The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died. It took me a while to realise these were clips or summaries of chapters from a book one of the characters will later write about the war. They are short, half-page, potted summaries of key events or aspects of Nigeria’s history and provide a counterpoint to the mainstream narrative they’re tacked onto. For most of the narrative I assumed this was the book that Ugwu would become educated enough to write. Only on page 374 are we explicitly told that it is the book which Richard will write about the war. And then, it is only right at the end do we learn that, typically, Richard hasn’t written a page, whereas Ugwu has been writing unstoppable for months a book he intends to give the title ‘Narrative of the Life of a Country’ but which, we realise, will use Richard’s title.
Odenigbo
Ugwu’s Master speaks in such pukka, jolly-good-chap tones (‘Excellent, my good man!’) that I initially thought he was white. Only slowly did I realise it is an African man named Odenigbo, Professor of Mathematics at Nsukka University. (Nsukka is a town and a Local Government Area in Enugu State, Nigeria i.e. in tribal Igboland and in what would become Biafra.)
As a thoughtful intellectual, Odenigba sounds off about the issues of the day, espousing socialism against capitalism and defending the importance of against the Pan-Africanism or African nationalism very popular in the first flush of African independence (as espoused by, for example, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana) – As Odenigbo yells from the stage of an independence rally, ‘We will lead Black Africa!’
A ‘stocky man’ (p.257), Odenigba hosts dinner or drinks parties attended by other figures from the university who chip into these conversations. As the novel progresses and the situation deteriorates their conversations and arguments about what is right and wrong, what ought to be done, form a kind of chorus to the political and historical events. They include:
- Miss Adebayo, Yoruba professor at Nsukka University, who fancies Odenigbo so creates tension with his fiancée, Olanna (see below); but her Yoruba ethnicity leads Odenigbo to accuse her of complicity in the pogroms
- Dr. Patel, Indian Professor at Nsukka University
- Professor Lehman, white American Professor at Nsukka University, irritating nasal voice , same fair hair as Richard, generally criticised by Odenigbo
- Professor Ezeka, lofty fastidious professor at Nsukka University; in the fourth part of the book he becomes Director of Mobilisation in the Biafran Army (p.286 ff.) and helps Olanna
- Okeoma, good friend, a renowned poet, at one point called ‘the voice of our generation’ (the kiss of death!), sample poem page 175
- Edna, Olanna’s neighbor in Nsukka, an African-American woman with characteristically strong opinions about race and gender
Odenigbo is regularly harangued by his Mama who dislikes Olanna and is openly rude to her when she visits.
Olanna Ozobia
Daughter of Chief Ozobia and lover of Odenigbo, attended university in Britain. Beautiful and graceful, her relationship with Odenigbo is described lovingly, as are their numerous bouts of making love. The sensitive boy Ugwu falls deeply in love with her, devoting himself to serving her, and anxiously watching the changing fortunes of her relationship with his Master.
Olanna has a twin sister, Kainene, who is her opposite in every respect, being twig-thin, unromantic and business-minded. Right at the start is a scene where Chief Ozobia ‘offers’ Olanna to an important businessman, Chief Okonji, to secure a deal, an early indication of the corruption and the patriarchal assumptions suffusing every aspect of Nigerian life, but quite quickly Olanna moves beyond her parents’ control to become an entirely free agent.
Because of her not-great relationship with her parents, Olanna gravitates more towards her Aunt Ifeka and Uncle Mbaezi who live in the northern Nigerian city of Kano.
- Uncle Mbaezi, Olanna’s uncle, brother of Olanna’s mother, founder of the Igbo Union Grammar School
- Aunty Ifeka, Uncle Mbaezi’s wife, source of comfort and advice to Olanna
- Arize, Uncle Mbaezi and Aunty Ifeka’s daughter and so Olanna’s cousin, eager find a husband and get married
It is a traumatic moment for her (and the reader) when Olanna comes across their slaughtered corpses as the pogroms and massacres kick off about 150 pages into the narrative.
Olanna’s relationship with Odenigbo is slightly problematic in the sense that he had many lovers before her, and she is still good friends with her former lover, Mohammed, a handsome Hausa man. (In a fraught scene it is Mohammed who saves her life by making her put on a veil and driving her through the mobs of machete-wielding murderers and to safety in riot-torn Kano yelling his way through them in the Hausa language which identifies him as one of them, pages 146 to 148.)
When the second part of the novel opens she is the adoptive mother of Baby, Odenigbo’s daughter by a village girl, Amara, who he slept with while theoretically going out with Olanna. When Amara said she didn’t want the baby, Olanna agreed to her and Odenigbo adopting it. Baby’s real name is Chiamaka, which means ‘God is beautiful’. Kainene suggested it (p.254) but it is rarely used. In 1967, when independence is declared, Baby is 4 (p.169).
Olanna only reluctantly agrees to marry Odenigbo and only under pressure of the war and their flight as refugees (p.187).
Kainene Ozobia
Olanna’s twin sister but very different from Olanna. She is the strong independent practical woman praised by feminists, ‘Kainene with her sharp edges and her bitter tongue and her
supreme confidence’ (p.218).
Kainene lives in Port Harcourt in the south of Nigeria, near the coast, where she runs her father’s business. In a quotable quote her father tells a friend that she is ‘not just like a son, she is like two’, showing what I suppose we would now describe as misogyny, sexism and the patriarchy. Kainene has a functional, cold relationship with the wet and ineffectual British writer, Richard Churchill.
Richard Churchill
Wants to be a writer and has come to Nigeria to explore Igbo-Ukwu art, but it’s a running joke that he struggles to write his book, in fact he can’t even decide what it’s meant to be about. At the start he hooks up with ex-pat Susan Grenville-Pitts, who spends her time with other ex-pats and plays the role of casually denigrating the locals, making casually racist or demeaning remarks (‘These people never fight civilised wars, do they?’ p.182) which Richard slowly comes to hate.
All of which explains why Richard dumps Susan and throws in his lot with the beguilingly cold and functional Kainene who he meets at a party Susan’s taken him to. Richard moves to Nsukka where he teaches at the university and so enters the social circle of Odenigbo and Olanna, taking part in parties, dinners, conversations about politics, colonialism etc. (This must be in 1963 because in the year independence is declared he is described as having been there for four years, p.169.)
Richard and Kainene’s relationship is a little tense not least because of her continuing affection for Major Madu, a lifelong friend of Kainene’s, who pops up from time to time to give us bulletins on the (generally worsening) military situation. (His perilous escape from the genocidaires during which he hides in a chicken house, pages 139 to 141.)
As the situation worsens Richard writes angry letters to the western press for their lazy coverage and racist stereotypes (‘what can you expect from such people?), pointing out that most of the ethnic hatred is the fault of Britain’s divide and rule tactics, but they are never published (p.166). He is a kind of epitome of ineffectualness.
He flies back in from London to Kano airport where he witnesses a squad of soldiers run in and shoot dead every Igbo they can find (pages 151 to 153).
Servants and class
There is a tremendous issue around class in these novels. it’s easy not to register the fact that both Adichie’s novels take place among the privileged bourgeoisie. It’s easy to overlook the way they casually talk about flying over to London on shopping sprees, buying new clothes and wigs (Olanna wears lots of wigs), enjoying fine European cuisine etc – living a high life undreamed of by the vast majority of the rural population.
Alice looked precise and petite in a neatly belted wool dress that Olanna imagined hanging in a London shop. Nothing like a Biafran woman in a forest market at dawn. (p.329)
There appear to be three classes:
- the privileged, comfortably off, intellectual and business class which Adichie’s first two novels are mostly set amongst
- the servant class
- the nameless masses who live in rural poverty and ignorance in countless remote villages
If there is an urban proletariat we never meet it.
The most obvious divide is between urban masters and servants. All the lead characters – Odenigbo, Olanna, Kainene and Richard – have ‘houseboys’, sometimes along with cooks and gardeners. Old, wizened Jomo works as the gardener at both Richard’s house and Odenigbo’s house in Nsukka. Jomo maintains an entertaining feud with Harrison, Richard’s houseboy. Kainene has three stewards, the head one being Ikejide.
I read somewhere that it is a working definition of the bourgeoisie that they are at ease commanding their servants. Well, that’s true of the four characters I’ve just listed: they expect to have servants to order around and the servants know their place. Here’s Kainene in ruling class mode.
She stood up. ‘Ikejide!’ she called. ‘Come and clear this place.’ (p.256)
Just as abrupt and imperious as the white colonials were blamed for being. Just as rude as bourgeois Beatrice is to her servant, Agatha, in Anthills of the Savannah.
All the more remarkable, then, that the ‘intellectuals’ among them, chiefly Odenigbo, spout on about socialism and tribal unity – so much so that business-minded Kainene mockingly refers to Odenigbo as ‘the revolutionary’ – while all the time enforcing a strict and unquestioned class and caste divide, as unquestioned and unexamined as medieval serfdom was in its day.
As to the rural poor, the really low uneducated peasant poor, what any urbanite no matter how poor refers to as bush people, bush man, bush woman – they are represented by Amala, the poor peasant girl who Odenigbo’s mother arranges to get pregnant by Odenigbo (see below). She has no agency whatsoever, is just a passive pawn of her betters. When she is forced by Mama into Odenigbo’s room, she has no choice.
She never once looked at Odenigbo. What she must feel for him was an awed fear. Whether or not
Mama had told her to go to his room, she had not said no to Odenigbo because she had not even considered that she could say no. Odenigbo made a drunken pass and she submitted willingly and promptly. He was the master, he spoke English, he had a car. It was the way it should be. (p.250)
The future of a developing country lies with its masses, its general population. As in Purple Hibiscus, the mass of the Nigerian population remains largely invisible, while the narrative is dominated by the confident, educated black bourgeoisie agonising over every little detail of their privileged lives.
University setting
Connected to this is the way most of the main characters are well-educated intellectuals who have had a university education (often in England), the notable ones of which (Odenigbo, Olanna, Richard) have carried on in the university-intellectual-writer milieu. The exception is Ugwu the illiterate young houseboy but even he, during the course of the novel, is encouraged by his employer to attend school, read widely, and so becomes a well-educated intellectual and writer, like his Master before him.
Maybe this is partly because Adichie’s own parents were both academics so it’s a world of cocktail parties and dinner parties and educated conversation which she knew well. But it’s also a handy milieu in which to create characters who are thoughtful and articulate and so can comment on political and historical events. The obvious alternative milieu would be the media i.e. TV, radio and newspapers, but this is fraught by endless stressful deadlines and so less amenable as a fictional setting for characters to ponder and pontificate; academia is the world Adichie knows best.
In this academic setting it’s immediately reminiscent of Chinua Achebe’s final novel, Anthills of the Savannah, which has a predominantly university setting and features an academic and a writer.
Developments
The novel is so long and complicated I’m not going to attempt to summarise it in prose. Maybe I’ll do a kind of timeline of the key moments (below). Just to recap, the first 150 or so pages establish all the characters I’ve listed above, and then history kicks in, with the coup, the counter-coup, the pogroms and then the outbreak of war following in quick succession.
In one way it’s like the Irwin Allen disaster movies of my youth, which used to spend the first half an hour or so introducing you to 20 or so passengers on the SS Poseidon (The Poseidon Adventure) or attending the opening party at the top of the Glass Tower (Towering Inferno) or preparing to catch flights at Lincoln International Airport (Airport). Half an hour of humdrum people going about their humdrum lives and then BAM! catastrophe strikes and the characters and the reader are swept away in an accelerating crescendo of death and disaster. Same here.
But Adichie is such a good writer that even what I’ve called the ‘humdrum’ opening scenes are worth reading. I’ve become a huge fan, I’d read anything she’s written for the pure pleasure of her smooth lucid prose style. The organisational or architectonic skill in the novel is the way she presents the impact not of one disaster, but a whole series of critical events, as the country descends from coup into civil war and then horror famine, through the eyes of all these well-established characters. This is a brilliant, brilliant novel.
Page by page summary
p.123 First coup announced on the radio
Details of pogroms i.e. systematic massacres of Igbos on pages 138, 142, 144,
Pages 146 to 148, Mohammed smuggles terrified Olanna through the riot-torn streets of Kano and gets her onto the last train out of town. It’s on this train full of injured, weeping people that the mother shows her the head of her daughter in a calabash.
p.156 First talk of an independent nation called Biafra to be led by Colonel Ojokwu.
p.162 Odenigbo and Olanna attend an independence rally on the university campus, where people wave the new flag and listen to speeches. Odenigbo gets onstage and declares: “Biafra is born! We will lead Black Africa! We will live in security! Nobody will ever again attack us! Never again!” which turns out to be the diametric opposite of the truth. The tendency of all these intellectual conversations to be hugely wrong and misleading, leading to a general feeling that intellectual analysis and opinions are worthless.
p.168 Kainene and Richard listen to Biafra’s independence being declared on the radio.
p.170 Colonel Ojukwo visits the Nsukka campus where Richard and Olanna watch him speak, a very softly-spoken man.
p.177 Ugwu hears the radio announcement that the Nigerian government will launch a ‘police action’ to return Biafra to the Nigerian Federation.
p.178 Vincent Ikenna, the university registrar, interrupts a calm domestic scene in Odenigbo’s house to warn them that ‘the Federals’ are on the edge of Nsukka and advancing, so they must grab what they can and leave right now! They flee to Abba. (‘During the height of the Nigerian Civil War in 1967, the capital of Biafra was moved to Umuahia from Enugu. Aba was a very strategic Biafran city and was heavily bombed and air raided during the civil war.’)
p.180 Richard, staying in Port Harcourt with Kainene, she tells him to move in and gets her driver to drive him to Nsukka to get his stuff (clothes, manuscript of the never-finished book) but they’re turned back at the city perimeter by soldiers, so he returns to Harcourt to hunker down for the duration.
p.185 Olanna, Baby and Odenigbo move to Abba where he has a second home
p.188 Olanna’s parents arrive, telling her they’re going to flee the country and have bribed their way to having 4 airplane tickets. Will she come with them? She says no.
p.190 Olanna is summoned to her grandfather’s community in Umunnachi to testify to what she saw in Kano i.e. the dead bodies of Mbaezi, Ifeka and Arize; how Ifeka’s sister, Dozie, refused to believe it, hysterically calling Olanna a witch.
p. 191 Refugees stream through Abba force Odenigbo to accept that he and Olanna will also have to flee, to Umuahia. Odenigbo’s mother refuses to leave. His voice sounds increasingly strained as if he’s beginning to suspect Biafra will lose.
p.197 Odenigbo, Olanna, Baby and Ugwu arrive in Umuahia to rent a shabby, rundown shack from one Professor Achara. Odenigbo takes up his job with the Manpower Directorate. Olanna tells Ugwu that it is here she and Odenigbo will get married. In this new place they make new friends such as:
- Special Julius, a canny army contractor
- Professor Ekwenugo, member of the science group of the Biafran army (p.198)
While the educated bicker and argue about what’s going to happen (almost always getting it wrong) Ugwu concentrates on the material actuality of the here and now and falls in lust with a neighbouring young woman, Eberechi, transfixed by her ‘perfectly rounded buttocks’ (p.199).
p.202 Odenigbo and Olanna’s wedding is interrupted by an air raid.
p.204 Radio news announcement that Biafra has lost all the territorial gains it initially made, has been pushed back to its borders, and Nigeria now considers this a war.
Part Three. The Early Sixties (pages 209 to 258)
Oddly, a flashback to the pre-war setting. The book’s in four parts 1) The Early Sixties, 2) The Late Sixties 3) The Early Sixties, 4) The Late Sixties. You’d have expected it to progress in chronological order. So why does part three jump back in time like this? The answer appears to be, in order to clarify certain key moments in the characters’ lives which the first go around missed out.
For example, I’d been puzzled why the text kept referring to Ugwu’s not liking the period leading up to Baby’s birth, when Odenigbo and Olanna’s relationship became tense and formal. I kept worrying that I’d blinked or fallen asleep late at night and missed something. Turns out that here is where we get the full story. Olanna goes off somewhere, on holiday or work, leaving Odenigbo with his mother who has brought a village girl named Amala to help her, and Ugwu watches Mama prepare his food, rub ointments into Amala’s back and begins to suspect she (Mama) is a witch preparing some spell on his Master. If so, it’s a pretty simple spell, because Mama gets Odenigbo drunk on strong palm wine and slips Amala into his room with orders to sleep with him. Why? To ruin her son’s relationship with Olanna.
It works because Amala gets pregnant, insists on having it but handing it over to Mama, who tells Olanna about it, which leads to some pretty frosty months between her and Odenigbo. So this part of the novel, part three, is where we get the full backstory.
In a similar vein, Olanna’s mother tells her about her father’s mistress and infidelities. Distraught at Odenigbo’s betrayal Olanna goes to stay with her auntie in Kano. To her dismay her auntie says she had the same problem with her husband, Uncle Mbaezi, who had numerous affairs till Ifeka threatened to ‘cut off that snake between his legs.’
Men, eh. Why can’t they keep their willies in their trousers? It should have been men who wore chastity belts. As Auntie Ikefa tells Olanna: ‘Odenigbo has done what all men do and has inserted his penis in the first hole he could find when you were away.’ (p.226)
p.227 On the plane from Kano to Nsukka Olanna sits next to a man who spouts a load of anti-Igbo slurs and propaganda, until she reveals that she’s Igbo. He has the good manners to look ashamed.
p.228 Olanna takes all her stuff out of Odenigbo’s flat and moves back into her apartment. Becomes friends with her black American neighbour Edna Whaler.
p.229 Olanna goes to consult Father Damien (so she’s a Catholic; this has barely been mentioned) who gives her the unexpected but sound advice to forgive Odenigbo, not for his sake, but to stop the anger eating away at her.
p.231 Unfortunately, Odenigbo then shows up at her apartment to explain that not only did he sleep with Amala but she is now pregnant!
p.233 In revenge and on the spur of the moment, after meeting him in a supermarket, Olanna gets Richard drunk (on ‘good white Burgundy’) and then seduces him, back at her place stripping off, touching his groin etc. Soon after having sex, Richard passes out on the floor, waking the next morning with a bad hangover.
Like Ugwu’s references to the ill feeling before Baby’s arrival, this bit of backstory explains another mysterious element in the previous two parts, namely why Richard had been nervous and twitchy around Olanna. Richard’s main concern is that Olanna will never tell Kainene about this infidelity. Men. Women. Sex. Eternal folly.
p.235 The radio news announces that Winston Churchill has died (this dates it to 24 January 1965). Richard attends a memorial service with Susan the ex-pat bigot (always referring to the locals as ‘these people’). Susan tells him she’s had a fling with the husband of her best friend. Richard reflects that all ex-pats do is sleep with each other’s partners.
p.238 Worry about his master and mistress gives Ugwu diarrhea. Mama leaves but refuses to take Amala with her. Ugwu comes across poor simple village girl Amala among his pepper plants, doggedly eating them in the hope they will trigger a miscarriage. Ugwu witnesses Olanna returning for a visit which features her yelling abuse and accusations at Odenigbo, which leads to them disappearing into the bedroom for make-up sex. But then she drives away.
p.244 Olanna goes to see Richard and tells him not to tell Kainene. But then she goes to Odenigbo’s, has sex with him again, and tells him she slept with Richard. This is borderline soap opera now.
p.245 Her American neighbour Edna knocks on the door in floods of tears and needs comforting after news that racist whites have combed a black church in the Deep South and killed four little girls.
(This is puzzling because the notorious 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham Alabama took place on 15 September 1963 i.e. a year and a half before Churchill’s death. Conclusion: Adichie plays fast and loose with historical dates for dramatic purposes. Incidentally, I’ve mentioned this racist terrorist atrocity before in connection with the work of surpassing beauty which jazz saxophonist composed to commemorate it.)
Here, Edna’s grief at real tragedy helps Olanna put things in perspective, realising that out of the tangled sex mess she and Odenigbo have created, she must actively choose happiness and a positive path. She will move back in with Odenigbo.
p.246 Olanna has more sex with Odenigbo (she gives him a blowjob while he sits at the dining room table). They are reconciled, sort of. Odenigbo met Richard in the street and told him not to visit his house any more. Olanna phones Kainene to see if her tone and attitude towards her have changed i.e. whether Richard’s told her. Turns out, no. Everyone has secrets. Soap opera, but stylishly done.
p.247 Mama sends a message that Amala has had a baby girl. Odenigbo and Olanna drive in uneasy silence to Enugu. Amala is shamed and humiliated and takes no part in the conversations. She doesn’t want the baby. Then it emerges that Mama won’t take it, either. She wanted a boy. At which point Olanna makes the snap decision to adopt it. As soon as she does it feels right. She and Odenigbo have been trying to have a baby for years and it won’t come. Here is a gift from God. Olanna surprises Odenigbo and mama but sticks by her decision. She phones sister Kainene, who approves.
p.253 In conversation with Odenigbo, Olanna affirms that she does believe in God.
She was used to his gentle jibes about her social-service faith and she would have responded to say that she was not even sure she believed in a Christian God that could not be seen. But now, with a helpless human being lying in the cot, one so dependent on others that her very existence had to be proof of a higher goodness, things had changed. “I do believe,” she said. “I believe in a good God.” (p.253)
p.254 All this seems to be going well until Olanna’s next phone call to Kainene who angrily reveals that she knows that Olanna slept with Richard her (Kainene’s) boyfriend. Soap opera. Sex in the City.
p.255 It was Harrison, Richard’s servant, who let slip about Richard sleeping with Olanna, when Richard takes him along for a week-long stay with Kainene in Port Harcourt. Harrison didn’t know the details, just that he witnessed Odenigbo confronting Richard in the street and ranting and shouting at him (for sleeping with Olanna). When he mentions this while serving Richard and Kainene, the latter insists on knowing what it was all about, and Richard, feebly, confesses everything. Kainene is, as expected, coldly furious.
Part Four. The Late Sixties (pages 261 to 433)
Part four picks up exactly where part two left off to take us into the flashback of part three, namely with Odenigbo, Olanna, Ugwu and Baby living in a shabby shack in Umuahia, and recovering from the aftermath of the terrifying air attack on their wedding.
p.262 Baby gets a cold, Ugwu drives them to the hospital where Olanna speaks in her best English, holding herself erect like an educated lady, and thus gets seen ahead of peasant women who’ve been waiting since dawn. Power is everywhere. Dr Nwala apologises, the hospital is running out of medicine.
p.267 Olanna warns Odenigbo they are running out of money, even as all the prices in the market are galloping. She attends a relief centre along with primary teacher Mrs Muokelu, who is tough but limited and prejudiced. Baby will only eat dried egg from the centre, but they don’t always have it. Supplies are ambushed by soldiers. The queues of women desperate to feed their babies become rancorous.
The official in charge of the centre turns out to be a man whose mother Olanna comforted at an airport years ago when she, a simple country woman, was overwhelmed with anxiety in the arrivals lounge. Olanna held her hand till her grown-up son arrived. Now this son, Okoromadu, recognises her and slips her items of food.
p.272 When Okoromadu slips Olanna a tin of corned beef, soldiers see it and, on her walk home, surround and mug her, just for one tin. Starvation is coming.
More and more air raids. Olanna gets sick of grabbing Baby and running for the shelter. They say the Nigerians keep up the bombing to impress Harold Wilson into giving more war aid. The school where Olanna has been teaching, Akwakuma Primary School, takes a direct hit, though empty so almost no casualties.
p.285 Master and Special Julius say their forces will rebound and make ‘the vandals’, as they call the Nigerians or Federalists, pay. Professor Ekwenugu assures them his team are on the verge of creating a special Biafran superweapon. The primary school is turned into a refugee camp.
p.286 Professor Ezeka, a supercilious visitor in the old days in Nsukka has been made Director of Mobilisation, is driven around in a shiny Mercedes and has put on weight, looking sleek and well fed among the starving refugees.
p.287 Ugwu helps a mixed bunch of refugees repair the roof of the school, listening to their stories but mostly lusting after Eberechi.
Ugwu joins Olanna in giving lessons to the younger child refugees. He is immensely proud and copies Olanna’s bearing and pronunciation. These are clearly all steps from being a peasant houseboy to becoming an educated writer…
p.295 They all hear on the radio that Tanzania is the first country to recognise Biafra, which dates this moment to 13 April 1968.
p.300 News arrives that Odenigbo’s mother is dead, shot by the invaders in her town of Abba, which she refused to leave. Olanna is in tears but Odenigbo retreats inside himself, then insists he has to bury her himself and drives off towards enemy territory, leaving them all distraught.
p.304 Major Madu recruits Richard to write propaganda to be distributed to outlets abroad. They’ll believe him because he is white. Richard’s staying in Port Harcourt, at Kainene’s apartment, and is anxious about rumours that the Port is about to fall.
p.309 Richard visits Uli airstrip, Biafra’s surviving outlet to the world, to write a piece, and bumps into the remarkable Count von Rosen, who is flying bombing missions for Biafra.
p.315 Port Harcourt is attacked. Artillery shells blow out the windows in Kainene’s apartment. Their servants pack and hurry down to the car. Kainene’s steward Ikejide is decapitated by shrapnel. they hurriedly bury him, throw their bags in the back and drive out of the Port till they reach Orlu.
In Orlu Kainene throws herself into refugee work, helping with education and health, setting up workshops, ensuring regular visits from a doctor. The incident of the pregnant woman who spits in Dr Inyang’s face because she isn’t an Igbo i.e. is one of the minority ethnic groups.
Mama’s death breaks Odenigbo. He used to force himself to be optimistic. Now he’s given in. He leaves early for work and comes home late via the tavern where he gets drunk.
p.322 Their friend the former poet Okeoma comes to pay his respects. Back in peacetime he was a budding poet and ‘voice of his generation’. Now he is a hardened soldier who no longer writes poems.
p.325 The landlord kicks Odenigbo, Olanna and Ugwu out of the shack they’ve been living in so they’re forced to move to one room in a tenement with a bathroom and kitchen shared with eight other families. No electricity. They have to use kerosene lamps for light. New neighbours bad-tempered Mama Oji and desperate mother of a girl Baby likes playing with, Adanna.
Father Ambrose who makes a lot of noise with his open-air preaching but who everyone knows he is pretending to be a pastor to avoid the army.
p.328 Olanna meets Alice who plays the piano in her secret flat, is obviously educated, but avoids Olanna or anyone else. In Umahia she was tricked into having a relationship and then a baby by an army officer who it turned out, was married.
p.332 Odenigbo doggedly tells the other men in the block that they need to build a shelter and gets going with Ugwu, the others joining in. But in the evenings he is tired and unresponsive to Olanna’s kisses or caresses. He’s lost weight. He’s becoming a shell.
The children, namely Baby’s friend Adanna, start to get kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition, widely called Harold Wilson’s disease. Olanna is amazed to receive a food package from Professor Ezeka. She gives some to Adanna’s mother.
Kainene pays a visit, coming from her base at Orlu. She’s brought a letter from their mother, now safely in England. She describes seeing her steward decapitated by shrapnel, obviously in shock. Brings her and Olanna closer.
Olanna pays Kainene a visit in Orlu in return. Harrison bows. All these people have servants. Kainene takes her to the refugee centre, introduces her to Father Marcel, shows her round (p.347). For the first time Olanna sees rooms full of dying people, women and babies with no fat, barely any flesh on their bodies, just skin and bone and huge vacant eyes.
p.350 Bored, Ugwu leaves the compound during the day and is promptly press-ganged by soldiers exactly as Olanna warned him countless times, and is tied by the wrists into a chain gang which is just being marched off when Olanna comes running up and bribes one of the soldiers to release him. Her fury knows no limit.
p.354 Ugwu suspects Master is having an affair with slight, secretive Alice. In fact, Odenigbo tells him that Professor Ekwenugo has been blown up along with some landmines he was delivering in a lorry. Ugwu is so upset he runs to the house of Eberechi, a girl his age with lovely round buttocks. They had argued when he saw her flirting with a soldier. Now, months later, all that seems trivial and she holds his hand while she cries.
One by one the central characters’ illusions and optimism are being crushed.
p.356 Ugwu and Eberechi have become an item, hanging out, holding hands. It’s returning from walking Eberechi home that Ugwu is caught by soldiers a second time, press-ganged and taken off to a miserable barracks along with other crying teenagers.
He finds an old copy of ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself’ and starts scribbling a diary on the blank bits of the pages.
Ugwu meets fellow boy sldier High-Tech, barely 13 (p.363) but an old hand in the army, a fixer, someone who always snaffles extra rations, knows the sneaks and dodges. The name derives from his ability to slip ahead of the lines and reconnoitre territory which led one of his commanders to describe him as more useful than ‘any high-technology spying gadget’ (p.358).
Compare and contrast Adichie’s descriptions of these boy soldiers with the child soldiers in The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski or Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley. Odenigbo, like the protagonists of Chinua Achebe’s 1960s novels, thought independence would bring pan-African unity, peace and prosperity. Instead it brought civil war, poverty and child soldiers murdering their own families.
p.361 We see Ugwu in action, in a trench at night waiting for the Nigerians soldiers to creep forward and detonating a mine which kills a clump of them whose boots and ammo they then loot. Ugwu becomes a star in his barracks, nicknamed ‘Target Destroyer’.
One night he and older soldiers commandeer a family’s car to drive to a bar. The soldiers show the same amoral violence and lack of respect as all African soldiers show in these stories and all the histories of Africa I’ve read. As the boy soldier in David Van Reybrouck’s Congo: the epic history of a people puts it: ‘When you’re a soldier, women are free. Everything is free.’ That is the vast, unquenchable appeal of picking up a gun and joining a militia.
So the soldiers beat the man unconscious, steal his car, drive to the nearest bar, drink heavily and then gang rape the barmaid. Why not, they have guns, who is going to interfere? They taunt Ugwu into joining them and he does, briskly and effectively fucking the girl as the others hold her down. African unity. Black consciousness. Negritude etc. Empty words.
Ugwu’s battlefront experiences become a blur of mud, explosions, bullets, the sight of men dying in a hundred different ways.
p.366 They hear on the radio that Umuahia, Biafra’s capital, has fallen, dating this to 22 April 1969.
p.367 In their next operation a mortar lands in his trench, mangling the captain next to Ugwu and sending him flying as he passes out. Is he dead?
p.368 Cut to Richard in his role as Biafra press person meeting two American journalists at the airport and driving them into town. They smell really bad but they’ve also brought their sensationalist racist views. They bridle at the starving children but are full of excuses and explanations such as there need be no starvation of Biafran leader Ojukwu agreed to open an aid corridor. That remark momentarily reminded me of the talk about trying to open corridors for humanitarian aid into Gaza, now, February 2024, almost 60 years after the Biafra war. The fundamentals of war never change.
p.372 Richard drives the American journalists to the airport at Uli to catch a night flight out. It is bombed to the journalists’ amazement. Biafran trucks bring gravel for workers to fill in the craters, and three relief planes land, and are hurriedly unloaded.
p.374 We are finally told that ‘The World Was Silent When We Died’ is the title of the book which Richard will write about the war, a fact repeated on page 396.
The impact on Olanna of Ugwu’s disappearance i.e. she’s distraught, Baby is upset. Kainene writes to say Major Madu has written to all commands to look out for and release Ugwu. Mam Oji warns Olanna that pretty little Alice sits with Odenigbo whenever Olanna is absent. Rumours abound. Everybody is blaming saboteurs. Odenigbo returns from the bar drunk on gin which deadens his mind.
p.381 Kainene arrives to tell her that Ugwu is dead. Major Madu had it from his commander whose forces suffered a massive attack and wipeout. Olanna is distraught, moves in a daze, is suddenly furious with Odenigbo’s descent into a drunken stupor.
p.383 A man arrives with a message for Alice that her entire extended family has been wiped out along with the entire population of Asaba, massacred by Nigerian soldiers.
p.385 Suddenly there is artillery fire on the edge of Umuahia, and everyone panics, packs their bags and flees. Odenigbo struggles to start the car they’ve kept all this time and they are some of the last people to drive out of the town, heading north to stay with Kainene.
Very tense reunion scene and then dinner, because Odenigbo hasn’t forgiven Richard for sleeping with Olanna and Kainene hasn’t forgiven Olanna for sleeping with Richard etc. When the men have gone to bed, Olanna bursts into tears, telling Kainene she hates this war and what it’s done to her husband. Kainene comforts her.
Time passes. Hunger at the camp Kainene runs grows worse. Olanna tries to teach the children but they’re too weak to pay attention, Babies with swollen bellies, woman covered in bites and sores. Two or three die every day and are buried in shallow graves.
p.391 News arrives that ‘the voice of a generation’, Okeoma, has been killed. Olanna screams and screams as the whole world seems to be snapping. That night she and Odenigbo make love, both of them crying.
p.393 Back to Ugwu who is, as I suspected, not dead at all. But he is in agony as soldiers carry him over their shoulders back to the hospital, which is overwhelmed with the wounded and dying. After days of pain and painkiller dreams he realises the priest from the old days back in Nsukka is talking to him and then, days later, Richard is there.
This is all nicely done. Instead of the news that Ugwu is alive coming to Odenigba and Olanna with their predictable reactions, we see everything entirely through his eyes, as he is lifted out of the dirty hospital bed, and into Richard’s car and driven to Olu, to be made much of by Master and Olanna and Baby, all hugging and kissing him. They share the best of their food and nurture Ugwu back to health, but he is a man now, blooded, and keeps aloof.
It is now that Ugwu starts to write compulsively, covering every scrap of paper he can find with everything he can remember. Maybe the much-referenced book, ‘The World Was Silent When We Died’ is by him after all. Its precise authorship becomes a narrative puzzle and tug, pulling us on through the last 30 or so pages of the text.
Kainene announces she is going to cross the front line to barter with Nigerian peasant women. Everyone’s doing it. At the same time Richard will go to Ahiara to beg for food from relief headquarters. They witness the camp women beating a man on the ground. it is an 18-year-old soldier who stole half grown crops from their fields. Total starvation.
Kainene doesn’t return the next day, as day traders ought to, or the next day or the next. Richard alternates between despair and panic. Olanna takes control. But they are all terrified. The days drag into weeks. In the middle of this, Ojukwu makes a radio broadcast announcing he is going abroad to seek peace. Cynics say he is jumping ship and abandoning Biafra.
p.411 A few days later the radio announces that the war is over, 15 January 1970. And very quickly it is. Hostilities cease and charities can immediately enter Biafra with emergency food supplies. It takes a few days for the roads to officially open and then Richard drives off to search for Kainene and Odenigbo, Olanna, Baby and Ugwu set off back to Abba (where Odenigbo kneels beside his mother’s shallow grave) and then on to Nsukka.
p.416 They are stopped at a roadblock where the bully Nigerian officer insults them for driving with Biafra number plates. He forces them to get out of the car and then orders them to join a gang of labourers carrying planks and cement over to a half-ruined house. When Odenigbo demurs, the officer slaps him hard in the face, and then a second time, so that Olanna intervenes and says they’ll do it and they spend half an hour labouring. In that time they watch him stop another car with Biafran plates, haul the driver out, rip off his glasses, force him to the floor and then viciously cane him on the back and buttocks.
This, rather than all the guff about African nationalism and pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness and Black Pride spouted by Odenigbo and Kwame Nkrumah and countless other intellectuals, was to be the symbol of independent African nations, a furious soldier thrashing a helpless civilian at a roadblock, repeated in countries across the continent to this day. The climax of Achebe’s last novel, Anthills of the Savannah, is the book’s clever, articulate, intellectual protagonist being shot dead at point-blank range by a drunken soldier.
p.418 They arrive back on the campus at Nsukka to find their lovely house long ago ransacked then abandoned to the harmattan dust and the wild grass. Soldiers had carefully defecated in every room (as they do in William Boyd’s description of a war-ransacked home in An Ice-Cream War, as they do in the vandalised house left abandoned for a while by David Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace – it is the standard vandal calling card).
Ugwu goes to visit his family. His mother died of illness during the war. His sister was gang raped and beaten. The pretty girl in the village he fantasised about has had a baby by a Hausa soldier. Everything has changed.
One day they are having dinner when soldiers burst in, force them to lie face down on the floor, search the house, threaten them with guns, then eat the still-hot dinner, belching, before leaving with some final threats. The wanton behaviour of security forces in any totalitarian state.
Richard drives to Kainene’s old house in Port Harcourt. it has a new owner who threatens to set her dog on him. He drives across to Lagos to visit Kainene’s mother and father who are back from London, who have had to spend all their money buying their old house back. Major Madu is there. Suddenly, after a civilised lunch, Richard is seized with longing to know whether Madu slept with Kainene. When he refuses to answer, Richard feebly slaps his face at which Madu, the soldier, punches Richard straight in the face, knocking him to the ground.
Food parcels arrive from abroad. Baby recovers her natural colour and hair. They’ve lost all their money and have to start anew. They search every hospital and mortuary, they put out ads and posters, they consult a witch doctor. But Kainene never returns.
The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died
Eight little bits of text tacked onto the end of some of the chapters, these amount to key moments from Nigeria’s history. At first I thought they were written by Ugwu. Then Richard came up with the title and claimed to be writing it. But, characteristically, he failed to write a word whereas Ugwu was seized with unquenchable urge to write, and so it is Ugwu’s book after all.
1. As prologue to Ugwu’s book the story of the woman fleeing Kano bearing a beautifully carved calabash bowl which contains the head of her lovely daughter, beheaded by northern killers (p.82). This incident is described in more detail on page 149 where it is Olanna sitting next to her on a train fleeing the killers, who shows what is in her bowl. The trauma leads Olanna to suffer psychosomatic illness and, for a while, not be able to walk. (And then Ugwu, after all his traumas, and entering his non-stop writing phase, gets her to relive and describe it in as much detail as she can, page 410.)
2. British soldier-merchant Taubman Goldie and his role in creation of a north and south Nigerian protectorate. The British preferred Northerners who practiced Islam and obeyed emirs and sheiks the British found easy to control and tax, compared to Yoruba or Igbo in the south, who lived in more fragmented communities and were harder to manage. (p.115)
3. How the constitutional arrangements at independence favoured the North, how the South didn’t think it mattered because soon everyone would have white jobs and wealth, how ‘At Independence in 1960, Nigeria was a collection of fragments held in a fragile clasp.’ (p.155)
4. Nigeria at independence didn’t have an ‘economy’, it had a bundle of raw materials and resources which the British exploited. Nigerian politicians had to create an interlocking economy from scratch and dismally failed for all kinds of reasons, including utopian fantasies, incompetence and corruption. (p.204)
5. How Nigeria used starvation as a weapon, making it an international issue, galvanising aid charities, becoming an issue in the US presidential election, a warning parents in the western world used to cajole their recalcitrant children into finishing their meals (as my mum did to me). (p.237)
6. He blames Britain for inspiring a conspiracy of silence over Biafra and briefly lists the attitudes of the other powers i.e. France, America, Russia and China. But this claim, like the whole title of Ugwu’s book, seems clearly wrong. Far from being hushed up, Biafra dominated the headlines for two and a half years. There were widespread protests around the western world. Harold Wilson’s government was routinely denounced. Journalists like Frederick Forsyth and Don McCullin kept pictures of Biafra on newspaper and magazine front pages throughout the war. It became a leading issue in the US presidential election. This worldwide media blizzard was so much the exact opposite of ‘The World Was Silent When We Died’ that the naming of these sections is genuinely incomprehensible. The world was yelling its head off about Biafra! (p.258)
7. He writes a poem to serve as epilogue to his book (p.375).
8. Ugwu writes the dedication of his book last. For Master, my good man.
Last thoughts
I’ve read in several summaries that the novel opens and closes with Ugwu, which is sort of true, but the first word is Master and the almost last word is Master. So it opens and closes with Ugwu in relation to his master and you can interpret that as you please, as an image of servitude or of loyalty, of subjugation or apprenticeship. The novel has shown us how long and complex their relationship has been.
The loss of Kainene right at the very end leaves a note of desolation and loss appropriate in a novel about a devastating war. Yet in other ways I wasn’t sure it was devastating enough. There’s something floaty, calm and mellifluous about Adichie’s attitude and prose style and I wondered whether, in the end, her buoyancy, the supreme confidence of her style, doesn’t at some subtle level militate against all the horrors she describes.
Lastly, there is somehow not enough about the famine. There is one scene where Richard takes the American journalists to see starving babies, and also moments when Olanna and Kainene see the starving mothers and children in the camp Kainene runs. And we are told that the household of Odeigbo, Olanna, Baby and Ugwu run very low on food. And yet, as I said above, you never really feel this. Adichie’s style is never harrowed. Her style always feels well fed.
Lots of other books about wars or famines, about the Holocaust or the Rwanda genocide, have left me feeling gutted and traumatised. This book, although it does give descriptions which ought to be upsetting, just didn’t leave me feeling like that, didn’t leave me feeling grief stricken enough.
And something similar for the final collapse of the Biafran cause. It occurs as part of the day-to-day flow of events, and then the characters are on to the next worry, driving home, cleaning up their derelict houses, visiting family and so on. Nowhere is there a really powerful description of what it felt like to have lost, to be the losers in a harrowing traumatic conflict. Maybe there should have been a postscript describing the characters’ afterlives, somehow conveying the long-term psychological impact of having ventured all on a great political movement and being completely crushed.
Credit
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was published by 4th Estate Book 2006. References are to the 2007 Harper Perennial paperback edition.
Related links
Surprisingly for a contemporary novel, the entire text is available online:
Related reviews
- The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue by Frederick Forsyth (2015) contains a chapter describing Forsyth’s journalistic coverage of the Biafran War; intriguingly, in an interview Adichie revealed that the idea of the Richard Churchill character was inspired by Forsyth, not the details of his personality but just the idea of a white man who becomes a fierce defender of Biafra, as Forsyth did
- Africa reviews
Books & Boots 
The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 3
It is nearly always invisible dangers which are most terrifying. (VII.84)
This second half of the Gallic Wars is much more exciting than the first. In the previous four books the Romans steamrollered over everyone they encountered in a rather monotonous way. Here they experience the catastrophic loss of an entire legion and then the fierce siege of Quintus Cicero’s camp, i.e. for the first time you feel the contingency and risk involved in the entire project. And both events are carefully crafted to feature dramatic episodes of a kind not found in the first four.
Book 5: The second rebellion
The book title was supplied by the editors of the Penguin edition and refers to the revolt of the Belgic tribes.
1 to 8: Illyricum and Gaulish rebels
At the end of each campaigning season in Gaul, Caesar spends the winter in Cisalpine Gaul attending to administration. He also visits the third province he’s in charge of, Illyricum. Here he stamped on the Pirustrae tribe who had allegedly been raiding over the border into Roman territory. Representatives of the tribe met him to tell him it wasn’t them, and delivered hostages as he demanded.
By this point we’re getting used to certain things.
This handful of options are repeated endlessly. In the spring Caesar returns to Gaul where he has to sort out the Treveri, a tribe living close to the Rhine whose leaders have failed to come to the annual conference of Gallic tribes. Turns out two rivals are vying for leadership, Caesar supports Cingetorix.
He rides on to Portus Itius, from where the invasion is to be launched. Tellingly, he takes leaders of most of the Gaulish tribes with him. The most dangerous of these is Dumnorix, ambitious leader of the Aedui. When Caesar insists he accompany him to Britain, Dumnorix begins spreading rumours to the other chiefs that they’ll all be killed in Britain. The sailing is delayed 4 weeks by a contrary wind, towards the end of which Dumnorix left the damp with some Aeduin cavalry. Caesar immediately delayed the sailing and sent troops to recapture Dumnorix, buy force if necessary. Dumnorix did indeed put up a fight, drew his sword and told his followers to protect him. So the Roman cavalry killed him. End of disruptive influence.
9 to 25: Second expedition to Britain
Caesar had ordered his troops over the winter to build a massive fleet eventually consisting of 600 troopships and 28 warships. He sets sail with five legions (about 25,000 soldiers) and 2,000 cavalry. Including private ships they hired, the Romans appeared over the horizon with 800 ships, an enormous force. No wonder the defending Britons decided to retire to higher ground.
They disembarked without event, set up a camp, then Caesar marched the majority 12 miles or so inland till they came to a Briton camp. The Seventh Legion stormed it and forced the Britons to flee but Caesar brought them back to work on the camp.
They set out again to confront the Britons but were informed of a large storms and when he returned Caesar saw it had damaged lots of boats. he drew them further up on the beach, ordered repairs made, sent orders to Titus Labienus back in Gaul to start building more.
He gives an overview of the British which is a bit random. He includes the plausible notion that the coastal areas have been settled by incomers from the continent with trivia such as, the natives think it wrong to eat of hare, fowl, and goose although it’s alright to keep for pastime or pleasure. He also makes the wildly inaccurate claim that the climate is more temperate than in Gaul, the cold seasons more moderate. I don’t think so.
He gives a wildly inaccurate description of the geography of Britain, making it out to be a huge triangular island off the west coast of France extending down to opposite Spain. It’s a great mystery how the Romans managed to conquer anywhere without decent maps.
He mentions that the British paint themselves with woad so have blue bodies. But then goes on to say they share wives between groups of ten or 12 men. This is the kind of wildly improbable legend that disfigures to much of the ostensibly ‘factual’ writing of the ancient world.
Back to the present, he describes a lightning British attack on the camp which takes them by surprise and causes casualties. The British fight well, making use of chariots and loose formations which replace each other ad lib.
Next day he sends legions foraging but once again the Britons attack in numbers. It’s hard fought but this time the legions turn them and chase. The Britons scatter and never again attack in such a unified way.
The Britons had united under the leadership of one chieftain, Cassivellaunus. He withdraws his forces north of the Thames which the Romans traverse and continue fighting, with Cassivellaunus hiding his chariots in the woods, till opportunities present for raids.
Envoys arrive from the Trinovantes. Their young leader Mandubracius had already crossed the Channel to seek Caesar’s protection after his father was killed by Cassivellaunus. Caesar demands from Mandubracius hostages and corn, but when these are brought, lets him go.
When other tribes see how fairly Mandubracius was treated, they send envoys seeking Caesar’s protection, being the Cenimagni, the Segontiaci, the Ancalites, the Bibroci and the Cassi. He learns that Cassivellaunus has retreated to famous stronghold built in a good defensive position. Caesar lays siege to it and storms it from its weakest side. Meanwhile Cassivellaunus had sent orders to four allied tribes to attack the Roman camp in Kent, but the Romans repel the attack, kill many attackers and capture a tribal leader.
Summer is nearly over and Caesar decides to return to Gaul. So while he was in the ascendent and the Britons demoralised, he demanded hostages and set an annual tribute for Cassivellaunus to pay Rome. And not to attack the British tribes which had allied with Rome. Then he marches the legions to the coast and into the ships and so back to Gaul.
Given the size of the invasion fleet (800 ships!) which indicated that it was a serious attempt to permanently conquer at least the southern part of Briton, you can’t help concluding the invasion – both the invasions – were a failure.
26 to 37: Revolt of Belgic tribes and massacre of the 7th Legion
Caesar distributes his legions and generals with various tribes. The Eburonians rebel and attack a Roman camp. Ambiorix tells the Romans that a Gaul-wide agreement has been made to launch a concerted attack on all the Roman forces and moreover a group of German mercenaries has crossed the Rhine. So he warns them to leave their camp and promises them safe passage through his territory.
The Romans are surprised but it makes sense that the Eburonians wouldn’t rebel on their own. So, what to do? Caesar gives a dramatic set piece debate among the two commanders, Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta who says stay put, and Quintus Titurius Sabinus who trusts Ambiorix and recommends that they leave (28 to 29).
Sabinus wins the argument and the legionaries are told to pack their most important belongings and set off. Catastrophe ensues. The Gauls wait till the legion has entered a deep narrow defile then bottles them up at either end and starts to massacre them. At one point Ambiorix asks the two Roman generals to a meeting. Cotta refuses to go but Sabinus leaves the fight to climb a hill and approach Ambiorix. He and his centurions are ordered to lay down their weapons, which they do. But as they approach Ambiorix they are surrounded and then killed. The Gauls raise a shout and fall on the remaining Romans with renewed fury. Cotta and most of the force are killed. The remnant make it back to the camp where, that night, seeing they are surrounded, they all commit suicide. A handful of survivors make it to Titus Atius Labienus’s camp to tell the story.
It is thought that some 6,000 legionaries died in this colossal blunder. The massacre happened at Atuatuca in modern Belgium.
38 to 58: Siege of Quintus Cicero
Emboldened, Ambiorix rallies allied Gaulish tribes, and led a ‘huge mass’ of the Eburones, the Nervii, the Aduatuci and their allies and dependents against the camp of Quintus Tullius Cicero. This was somewhere on the river Sambre and about 80 miles from the camp Caesar had made at Amiens. The Gauls made a surprise attack as the legionaries (as so often) were out gathering firewood etc, but they fought a fighting retreat back to the camp. This the Gauls surrounded and invested. They had with them defectors and Roman prisoners who showed them how to build the kind of siege towers and earthworks the Romans used, so these were built and turned against their inventors.
The Gauls called a parley and offered Cicero the same deal they’d offered Sabinus i.e. to lay down their arms and walk away in peace. But Cicero is not as foolish as Sabinus and makes a defiant reply, telling the Gauls that if they lay down their arms he will send to Caesar who will judge them for their rebellion. And so the siege continues. On the seventh day a fierce gale blows up and the Gauls shoot flaming arrows into the camp which burn down a lot of the huts.
Cicero sends a series of messengers to try and get through to Caesar, but all of them are caught and some of them tortured in view of the camp. Eventually a native Gaul makes it through the blockade and to Caesar’s camp, to whom the news of Cicero’s siege comes as a shock. He immediately sends a message to Marcus Licinius Crassus at his camp 24 miles away telling him to march to meet him. Same to Gaius Fabius and Labienus. Labienus writes back that the entire force of the Treveri were upon him and so, on balance, it was too risky for him to leave his camp. Caesar approves this decision and sets off with just two legions to raise the siege on Cicero’s camp.
By a series of forced marches Caesar quickly reaches Cicero’s camp and sends word through a native messenger that he is near. The Gauls lift the siege and turn their forces to face Caesar, some 60,000 warriors (49). Caesar has 7,000 men (49). With the enemy only 3 or so miles away Caesar orders the building of a camp, only smaller than usual, and instructs the soldiers to run around and given an air of panic and fear. This lures the Gauls out into the open and then up to this camp which they start besieging. But they had barely begun engaging when Caesar ordered his infantry to flood out by side gates and the cavalry to sally out and attack the flanks. Taken by surprise the Gauls fled and the Romans were able to cut them down.
Then he marches to relieve Cicero. He is astonished to see the size and number of siege engines the Gauls had built and then to discover that almost all the defenders had been wounded and fought bravely. He publicly congratulates Cicero and all his men, carefully speaking to individual centurions and tribunes to thank them. He addresses the disaster of the massacred legion and assures them it was down to Sabinus’s error, unlike the resolute leadership of their own Cicero.
Caesar’s victory goes some way to rallying the Romans and, more importantly, their Gaulish allies. But nonetheless the tribes are in a ferment, all sending each other messages discussing alliances and attacks. Caesar realises he must winter in Gaul to keep an eye on the situation. Caesar calls meetings with the heads of various tribes, partly by threats, partly by promises, keeps them peaceful. The Aedui and the Remi remain the staunchest allies.
But the Senones try to murder their king, Cavarinus, who had been friendly to the Romans. Indutiomarus leader of the Treveri is particularly rebellious. He sends messages to the German tribes across the Rhine enticing them to war with the Romans, but none sign up, replying that they’ve learned their lesson.
In Gaul Indutiomarus is more successful in recruiting a large force from miscellaneous tribes, attracting to his standard exiles and criminals, training them, procuring horses and so on. Once he feels strong enough he calls an armed convention of the Gaulish tribes at which he a) outlaws Cingetorix, his son-in‑law and rival for leadership of the Treveri; and b) declares his intention to rally the Senones, the Carnutes and several other tribes, to march through the lands of the Remi and laying them waste, before going on to attack the camp of Labienus.
Indutiomarus with his massed forces approaches and invests Labienus’ camp. The latter feigns timidity and reluctance, all the while awaiting his opportunity. He recruits cavalry from nearby friendly tribes and keeps them all hidden in the camp, while Indutiomarus and his men ride up to the walls, yell and jeer and throw spears and abuse the Romans. At the end of a day like this, the Gauls are turning to ride away, with a false sense of security, when suddenly from two gates Labienus launched forth all his cavalry. Anticipating the enemy would scatter in confusion, Labienus carefully instructed his men to resist attacking anyone else but all of them to find and kill Indutiomarus. He put a big price on his head and sure enough some of his soldiers intercepted Indutiomarus at the ford of a river, killed him, cut off his head and brought it back to Labienus.
When they learned this, all his allies among the Eburones and Nervii flee, talk of rebellion is dowsed down and that winter found Gaul quiet.
Book 6: (53 BC)
1 to 8: Further revolt in Gaul
Caesar tasks three generals with raising new recruits and asks Pompey to send him the legion he recently raised in north Italy. He hears news of northern tribes conspiring to rebel and so makes a lightning attack on the Nervii, capturing cattle, prisoners and ravaging the countryside. When he convokes the annual conference of Gaulish leaders, the Senones, Carnuti and Senones refuse to attend, indicating their hostility. Caesar marches quickly on the Senones forcing their leader, Accio, to back down and hand over hostages.
Then he marches into the country of the Menapii in the far north, burning farms and villages and taking cattle and prisoners till their leaders were forced to sue for peace and hand over hostages in the usual way.
Meanwhile the Treveri, led by relatives of Indutiomarus, had gathered a large force of infantry and cavalry to attack Labienus. Labienus feigned fear and then pretended to leave the camp, luring the Treveri across the river onto flat ground this side. Once they were over he inspired his soldiers to turn and fight them, trapped by the river. Much killing. The Treveri submitted and the Germans they’d invited to come join them decided to stay on the other side of the Rhine.
9 to 10: Caesar crosses the Rhine, retreat of the Suebi
Another Rhine crossing:
The Ubii swear it wasn’t them and he spares them. Investigation suggests it was the Suebi. The Suebi gather their men at a stronghold and await. Caesar’s men quickly build another bridge and he crosses it.
11 to 20: Description of the Gauls
Digression on the nature of Gaulish society. How the advent of the Romans reordered things to bring the Aedui and Remi into prominence. The Gauls fought every year among themselves. The Druids practised human sacrifice, sometimes in wickerwork giants which they set on fire (16).
When the father of a house, who is of distinguished birth, has died, his relatives assemble, and if there be anything suspicious about his death they make inquisition of his wives as they would of slaves, and if discovery is made they put them to death with fire and all manner of excruciating tortures.
Their funerals, considering the civilisation of Gaul, are magnificent and expensive. They cast into the fire everything, even living creatures, which they believe to have been dear to the departed during life, and but a short time before the present age, only a generation since, slaves and dependents known to have been beloved by their lords used to be burnt with them at the conclusion of the funeral formalities. (VI.19)
21 to 28: Description of the Germans
More primitive. Fewer gods, they only worship things they can see like sun, moon and fire. Sex in young men is frowned upon for stunting their growth. Land is redistributed each year to stop them becoming to land-bound and also to enforce a sort of equality. Obsession with war. When a chief proclaims a war anyone who resiles is shunned. They lay waste the land around each tribe.
The Gauls used to be more warlike than the Germans and at points crossed the Rhine and conquered. But being closer to Roman territory they’ve got used to trading and fine products unlike the Germans who remain more isolated and warlike.
He gives one of those characteristically ludicrous descriptions of the natural world, imputing to the great forest of Hyrcania a massive extent (true enough) and a number of fantastical animals.
The Penguin editor suggests that this long digression about Gauls and Germans was placed her to distract from the fact that Caesar’s second incursion across the Rhine, like the first one, achieved little tangible result. When the Germans retreat into the forest, Caesar doesn’t have the provisions to follow them and so, er, retreats back over the bridge, destroying the German end and placing a watchtower and guards on the Gaulish side.
29 to 44: Caesar returns to Gaul
Right up in the north, against the Rhine, is the territory of the Eburones led by Ambiorix. Caesar marches against them, sending ahead Gaius Volcacius Tullus with the cavalry. These go very fast and surprise Ambiorix off his guard with only a few men. However these hold off the Romans while Ambiorix saddles up and flees into the forest. He sends out messages telling every man for himself and many flee and hide.
The Segni and Condrusi come to Caesar and plead that not all Germans in Gaul are conspiring. They aren’t and give hostages and make peace.
Caesar makes his base at Atuatuca, then divides his forces in three and takes his force to ravage the land of the Eburones. Germans across the Rhine hear that there’s a free-for-all and cross the river 30 miles downstream of Caesar’s base, to join in. But prisoners tell them the Romans base is at Atuatuca, full of loot and poorly defended.
Cicero had been left in Atuatuca and initially kept the men penned up in case of attack. But after a week the frustrated men need to get out and the troops need corn so Cicero lets a detachment go collect some, and another detachment take out the animals for exercise. Inevitably it’s at this moment that the Germans appear, mounting a fierce attack, causing chaos. While a fierce fight goes on at the gates of the camp, the detachments sent to fetch food – raw recruits and servants – fell into a panic. Experienced centurions helped them form and wedge shape and make it back to the camp, but another detachment initially took to a nearby hill, then changed its mind and came back down into the flatlands where it was destroyed.
Failing to break in the Germans break off the engagement and ride back to the Rhine. Hysteria grips the Roman camp and rumours spread that Caesar and the other legions have been wiped out, until Caesar himself returns and restores order.
The Penguin edition notes that Cicero clearly deserved a bollocking but Caesar treats him very gently, listing all the extenuating circumstances he can think of. This is because his brother, the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, back in Rome, is still a political force who Caesar needs to keep onside.
This is reminiscent of the panic at Vesontio back in I.39. Caesar supervises widespread burning and ravaging of the country, with the deliberate intention of starving the inhabitants. An enquiry into the rebellion of the Senones and Carnutes concludes that it was instigated by Accio, who is executed in the traditional Roman manner i.e. scourged and hanged.
Penguin point out that by holding courts, judging and executing leaders like this Caesar was behaving like the governor of an accredited Roman province which Gaul very much was not. It was arrogant (and illegal) behaviour like this which raised so much opposition back in Rome.
Book 7: The rebellion of Vercingetorix (52 BC)
By far the longest book.
1 to 7: General conspiracy of the Gauls — Vercingetorix chosen as leader
The murder of Publius Clodius in January 52 BC led to increased political turbulence in Rome. The Gauls, hearing of this, took advantage to conspire to overthrow the invader and regain their liberty. The Carnutes lead the rebellion and sack the town of Cenabum, killing the knight Gaius Fufius Cita, in charge of managing trade.
This inspires the leader of the Arverni, far away in the south of free Gaul, abutting on the Roman Province, one Vercingetorix. Background to Vercingetorix, namely his father was at one point premier chieftain of all Gaul but was executed for seeking to be king. When Vercingetorix proclaims his ambition to kick out the Romans, his uncle and other chiefs expel him from their capital, Gergovia, but Vercingetorix takes to the road recruiting followers and building up a following. Eventually he returns to Gergovia, takes over his tribe and sends out messages for a major, allied rebellion. He enforces ferocious discipline on his recruits:
compelling waverers by severity of punishment. Indeed for the commission of a greater offence he put to death with fire and all manner of tortures; for a lesser case he sent a man home with his ears cut off or one eye gouged out, to point the moral to the rest and terrify others by the severity of the penalty.
In Italy Caesar hears of numerous tribes forming alliances constellated around Vercingetorix’s leadership. Vercingetorix moves his forces into the territory of the Bituriges.
8 to 14: Caesar moves suddenly against the Arverni
But Caesar surprises Vercingetorix by clearing the snow from a pass through the Cevennes and approaching him from an unexpected direction. He leaves Brutus in charge of his camp and makes a forced march to Vienne. He picks up two legions and marches in through the territory of the Aedui into that of the Lingones, where two legions were wintering. Hearing all this Vercingetorix returns to the country of the Bituriges, and from there heads to assault Gorgobina, a stronghold of the Boii.
This is the longest book of the 8 and is all like this, two leaders criss-crossing ancient Gaul, doing deals with, or being double crossed by, numerous tribes, sending out legions or detachments or squads of cavalry under lieutenants. The names of tribes and locations Caesar passes through, allies with or fights gets very confusing. In brief: Caesar takes three Gaulish towns, Vellaunodunum, Cenabum and Noviodunum.
15 to 31: Siege, defence, and capture of Avaricum
Vercingetorix had suffered 3 defeats in a row so holds a conference of his allies and persuades them to adopt a scorched earth strategy, withdrawing before the Romans and destroying all towns, villages, fields and crops in their paths, with a view to starving them. But the Bituriges went down on their knees and begged him not to burn Avaricum, their fairest town.
So Vercingetorix relents, but Caesar besieges it, for 25 days building an elaborate rampart wall and two huge siege towers. When the population of the town tries to sneak out one night, Caesar takes it, puts it to flame and massacres the 40,000 inhabitants.
Caesar adjudicates leadership contest between rival leaders of the Aedui. But the one he chooses betrays him, a week later telling his people that the Romans have massacred their army, so they have no choice but to go join Vercingetorix and fight for freedom.
34 to 53: Siege of Gergovia
The chief oppidum (fortified town) of the Arverni.— abandoned, after severe repulse. Impulsiveness of the troops who do not hear the recall, continue up the hill to storm the stronghold but are repulsed when the enemy muster with overwhelming numbers. — 46 centurions 700 men
This was the one and only military defeat Caesar suffered at the hands of the Gauls in 8 years. Caesar gives speech reprimanding men and insisting on discipline and then withdraws from Gergovia, marching back along then crossing the river Allier.
54 to 57: Caesar moves against the Aedui.
58 to 62: Labienus, successful against the Parisii, joins him.
63 to 74: General revolt of the Gauls under Vercingetorix.
They attack Caesar, but are defeated, not least because of Caesar’s German cavalry, and retire to Alesia, a town of the Mandubii. Caesar leaves two legions to guard his baggage and swiftly pursues Vercingetorix, killing 3,000 of his rearguard. Three Aeduin traitors are brought to Caesar.
68 to 89: The siege of Alesia
The Gauls retreat inside this stronghold. Caesar orders his troops to construct massive siege-works eleven miles in length, featuring 11 camps and 23 forts. After a confused fight between the opposing cavalries, Vercingetorix adopts the following strategy: he orders his cavalry to leave in the dead of night from a gate which isn’t yet covered by the Roman siegeworks, and to ride to their respective tribes and to raise all men of military age and bring them back, all in the name of a Final Battle which will achieve National Liberation. Meanwhile, all grain is confiscated and Vercingetorix adopts a daily ration for his 80,000 men, which should last a month or so of siege, until the reinforcements from the tribes arrive.
Details of Caesar’s astonishingly complex and thorough siegeworks which face both in and out.
Schematic side view of the Roman siege works at Alesia, 52 BC
The Gauls hold a national convention at which the tribes allot armed forces to send to Alesia, with various factions resiling and bickering. Eventually an astonishing force of 260,000 sets off, but by this stage Alesia’s food supplies have run out.
Caesar describes a meeting of the leaders inside Alesia and gives a speech – presumably entirely fictional – to Critognatus, a noble Avernian who, after a long prologue, recommends cannibalism (77)! It is also notable as belonging to that genre of speeches which Roman authors attributed to their enemies, in which the enemy eloquently describes the crushing servitude and slavery imposed by the Romans.
The weak and old and wives and children are expelled from Alesia and trek over to the Romans to beg them for food. But the Romans barely have enough to feed themselves and refuse the refugees food or permission to pass. So they are caught in no man’s land to starve.
The Gaulish hoard arrives, much to the joy of the besieged who throng the barricades to watch the battle. Caesar places all his infantry around the 11 mile siegeworks then sends his cavalry against the Gaulish cavalry. The Romans suffer casualties before an attack by German cavalry breaks the Gauls and chases them back to their main camp.
A day later a co-ordinated attack from the relieving force triggers a sortie by the besieged and the Romans find themselves hard pressed. But they are defeated by the Romans firing from their strong defences, and fall into the complex web of trenches, booby traps filled with spiked poles and so on. They are forced to withdraw while the besieged are still trying to fill in the first trench of the inner siegeworks, so the latter retreat back into the town, too.
The Gauls then mount an attack on the one Roman camp which isn’t integrated into their defensive circuit, while the besieged again sally forth. (The complexity of the siegeworks and the peril and anxiety of the repeated attacks remind me of the atmosphere at another famous French siege, Dien Bien Phu in French Indo-China, March to May 1954.)
Caesar sends Labienus with reinforcements to the hilltop camp, sends Brutus with reinforcements to the strongest point of the sallying army, then leads reinforcements in person. The forces attacking the hilltop hesitate, then Labienus sallies forth with the cohorts he had picked up. Caught between these cohorts and Caesar’s cavalry, the Gauls panic, break ranks and are slaughtered.
Sedulius, commander and chief of the Lemovices, was killed; Vercassivellaunus the Arvernian was captured alive in the rout; seventy-four war‑standards were brought in to Caesar; of the vast host few returned safe to camp.
Vercingetorix conceded defeat to the tribal leaders inside Alesia. Kill him or surrender him alive, as they wish. The leaders go under flag of truce to Caesar, who sits in front of his fortifications. Vercingetorix is handed over, all the chiefs lay down their arms. Caesar puts the Aeduin and Arvernian prisoners to one side to use as bargaining chips with their tribes, then distributes all the captures Gauls to his army as loot, one Gaul to one Roman.
(I think what this means is each Roman soldier then gets his prisoner to contact his family and demands a ransom for their safe return. So equivalent to cash.)
Caesar then receives the submission of all the tribes, and carefully allots legions and commanders in the territories of the main tribes for the winter. When news of this comprehensive victory reaches Rome, a public thanksgiving of twenty days was granted.
Book 8
This final book was not written by Caesar but by his lieutenant Aulus Hirtius. He was a legate of Caesar’s army of Gaul from 58, and crossed the Rubicon with him in January 49. He fought for Caesar during the civil war, and was appointed governor of Transalpine Gaul in 45. In other words a senior figure.
Preface
Hirtius addresses his friend Lucius Cornelius Balbus, another friend of Caesar’s, serving under him as chief engineer (praefectus fabrum) in Gaul. Balbus was said to have attended the very select dinner Caesar hosted, along with Sallust, Hirtius, Oppius and Sulpicus Rufus on the evening of the day when he crossed the Rubicon.
He explains to Balbus that he is continuing the Commentaries because they don’t link up with Caesar’s own account of the Civil; War. He says he has finished the third of the latter books, set in Alexandria, and has now set to filling the blank between book 7 and the outbreak of civil war by supplying a book 8. But it has been hard work to match Caesar’s clear elegant style and also the speed and alacrity with which he wrote.
1 to 48: (51 BC) End of the revolt in Gaul
Winter of 52 to 51 Caesar hears that the Gauls are plotting again. Alesia proves they cannot defeat the Romans when the latter’s forces are united, but might be able to pick off the legions scattered around the country in different tribal regions.
At the end of December Caesar set out on a lightning march and caught the Bituriges in the fields (it’s not actually likely they would be tilling their fields in the depths of winter, is it? Is this a stock literary convention of this genre?) Anyway, Caesar captures thousands but then lets them go and, when they see him being similarly merciful to nearby allied tribes, the Bitiruges decide to submit and give hostages.
Carnutes dispersed, Bellovaci defeated. Dumnacus besieges Lemonum, but without success. The Armoric states subdued. Drappes captured. Uxellodunum besieged and taken by Caesar. Exemplary punishment, the captured have their right hands chopped off. Labienus’ successful operations against the Treveri. Commius subdued.
49 to 55: (50 BC) Caesar and the Senate
Caesar’s triumphal reception by cities and colonies. He returns to the army in Gaul. A description of his opponents in the Senate. Caesar returns to Italy.
Thoughts
Political consequences
1. Caesar’s Gallic Wars were fought to a) clear his debts b) bring him glory and political power.
2. But in doing so he went far beyond his brief as proconsul – dealing with the leaders of free Gaul as if he was governor of a conquered province, invading Britain (twice) and crossing the Rhine, far exceeding his authority. This prompted growing criticism in Rome throughout his eight-year command. And it was this which created the mounting political crisis about whether he would ever be prepared to lay down his command and return to Rome as a normal citizen – the ultimate result being that he was too scared to do so and, instead, crossed the Rubicon into Italy with his army thus triggering five years or ruinous civil war
The war itself
1. Interesting to learn how universal the exchange of hostages was – the standard procedure to ensure peace, not only with the Romans but among the Gaulish tribes themselves.
2. The relentless Roman victories of the first four books get a bit boring. Book 5 is far more dramatic and exciting, when the massacre of Sabinus’ legion and the siege of Quintus Cicero for the first time introduce a real sense of risk and uncertainty and pave the way for the epic account of the struggle against Vercingetorix in book 7.
3. The invasion of England cost a huge amount of time and money and resources and, in the end, seems completely futile. He took away hostages from southern tribes but, presumably that lapsed when Caesar returned to Rome a few years later. Nowhere was settled, no bases or camps, no trading. Seems like an expensive folly.
Anti-imperialism
One of the interesting things about the text is the way it contains its own anti-argument. Caesar’s entire account takes it for granted that rule by Rome is best for the Gauls. And yet fairly regularly he puts into the mouths of Gaulish leaders as direct speech, or attributes to them in indirect description, the wish to be free men in their own land, living under their own laws.
It’s not an unreasonable wish. And every time you read it, you think, ‘Just what right did Caesar think he had to ravage, burn, pillage, and endlessly fight all these peoples?’ Maybe he thought he was bringing ‘peace’ to a territory plagued by endless internecine violence but it’s hard to see how the endless campaigning and fighting and burning and selling into slavery which the Romans brought was an improvement. It consistently feels worse.
Slavery
Interesting when one of the chiefs, Ambiorix, complains that hostages given by his family were being treated ‘like slaves’ and put in chains (V.27). And, of Gaul in general:
Throughout Gaul there are two classes of persons of definite account and dignity. As for the common folk, they are treated almost as slaves, venturing naught of themselves, never taken into counsel. The more part of them, oppressed as they are either by debt, or by the heavy weight of tribute, or by the wrongdoing of the more powerful men, commit themselves in slavery to the nobles, who have, in fact, the same rights over them as masters over slaves. (VI.13)
At numerous other towns the inhabitants were captured and sold into slavery. But then so were some the captured Romans. Caesar says Britain is famous for half a dozen exports to the continent, among which are slaves.
In other words, slavery was current throughout Gaul, Britain and the land of the Germans, so well beyond ancient Greece or Rome. Was there any part of the known world where slavery wasn’t practised two thousand years ago? Was slavery universal?
Eternal war
The Gauls fought among themselves every year. The Britons fought among themselves until Caesar’s incursion temporarily united them. The Germans lived for war. The Italians went on aggressive campaigns every year and spent half their time fighting each other. In Africa Jugurtha, in Asia Mithridates and the Parthians, in Egypt civil war. War everywhere, every year, all the time, forever.
The stupidity of war
Men fighting, I get. It’s what we do, what we’ve always done. But some incidents highlight the sheer brainless stupidity of war and the terrible, futile, stupid cost to civilian victims, women and children. The height of lunacy is reached in book 7 when Vercingetorix persuades the Averni, to burn down their own towns and destroy their own crops all in the name of freedom and victory. Reminiscent of General Westmoreland’s famous quote during the Vietnam War, that the Americans had to destroy the village in order to ‘save’ it. Or Vladimir Putin’s determination to ‘save’ eastern Ukraine by utterly devastating it.
War crimes
In descriptions of other Roman campaigns I’ve wondered whether what the Romans did amounted to war crimes. Yes, is the short answer. Massacring the populations of entire towns, including women and children, is a war crime.
Caesar’s sustained eight year campaign of destroying towns, massacring their inhabitants or sending them off into slavery, have caused many moderns to compare his actions as a genocide. If a genocide is defined as the systematic attempt to wipe out a particular ethnic group, then no, he just wanted every tribe in Gaul to submit, not to exterminate them.
On the other hand, when tribes or towns did hold out, it appears, from his often very casual references, that he did consciously raze towns to the ground and either massacre or enslave entire populations, most notably at the town of Avaricum, and then at Uxellodunum (VIII.44). Or:
Caesar thought that the next best way of obtaining the satisfaction that his honour demanded was to strip the country of inhabitants, cattle and buildings so thoroughly that any of the Eburones who had the good fortune to escape would loathe Ambiorix for bringing such calamities upon them and never allow him to return. Detachments of legionary or auxiliary troops went all over the country killing or capturing large numbers of the natives, burning the homesteads, and carrying off plunder, until it was completely devastated. (VIII.25)
There’s a revealing moment early in book 8 when Hirtius mentions that the population of the Carnutes are still living in makeshift tents and shacks, as all the towns in their territory have been razed to the ground (VIII.5).
At moments like this you see a vast landscape where all the towns, villages, fields and crops have been destroyed, leaving the survivors to scrape a living in pathetic shelters beside burned-out fields, and you realise this is what the Romans meant when they said they brought ‘peace’.
The scarlet cloak
Caesar always wore the scarlet cloak (paludamentum) of a commander-in‑chief (VII.88).
Video
A useful video summary.
Related link
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Posted by Simon on June 8, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/06/08/the-gallic-war-julius-caesar-3/