“Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for thoe glorious future.”
Ngozi Adichie’s ftirst novel, Purple Hibiscus, took as its focus a very personal, i0ntimate look at a troubled Nigerian family. The wider political context of a country “coming to terms with its imperial past” (as it has been described) is there, but it’s in the background, and the precise period of the setting is no5#0*t critical. Half a Yellow Sun is a much more political novel. It is set in the 1960’s following Nigeria’s independence from the UK, and features the tribal and political conflicts that followed, culminating in the Biafran war of 1967-1970.
I confess I knew little about this period before reading this novel – the name Biafra was familiar, but I doubt I would have been able to find it on a map. Britain’s role in this conflict derives initially from its construction of Nigeria from a patchwork of different tribal kingdoms and states as a calculated tactic to produce a divided country, to its shameful support for the Nigerian side during the Civil War, including providing arms to the besieging Nigerian Army. I suppose it is hardly surprising that this is not a war that is taught in British schools!
Half a Yellow Sun is not, however, just a history book. The war is the setting and the inspiration for the novel, but the conflict is shown as a personal as well as national tragedy. The complex web of narratives are woven together using three principal narrators: Ugwu, a ‘houseboy’ (servant) to a prosperous university lecturer, his master’s partner, Olanna, and Richard Churchill, an English ex-patriate, boyfriend to Olanna’s twin sister. Thus Adichie captures the perspectives of the Nigerian working-class, the more prosperous middle-class, and an English ‘outsider’ point of view.
The novel uses a non-linear time structure. It starts in the early 1960’s, post-independence years. Teenage Ugwu starts work for Odenigbo, the lecturer boyfriend of Olanna. Ugwu is a naive village boy bewildered by the opulence of Odenigbo’s home and furnishings. But he is bright and Odenigbo is patient, and he quickly learns his duties. Odenigbo hosts intellectual dinner parties in which the post-colonial future of the country is debated. He is sceptical about the concept of Nigeria itself:
“the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe…I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”
Most of the characters in the novel are also from the Igbo tribe, and it is largely the perspective of this group that is shown throughout the novel. Odenigbo articulates a compelling analysis of imperialism, although it is principally an intellectual, theoretical rather than a practical position:
“The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.”
Through Odenigbo we meet his partner, Olanna Ozobia, daughter of a prosperous and influential Nigerian businessman. Olanna and her twin sister Kainene are strong young women who have to work hard to retain their independence from their parents. Kainene is in a relationship with Richard Churchill, the novel’s third narrator. Richard is an English writer who studies tribal African art and teaches at the local university. Richard is a distanced observer of the events of the novel, only briefly a participant.
Four years later, conflict between the Northern Hausa people and the Eastern Igbo tribe is sparked by a political coup in which Hausa leaders are murdered. A counter-coup leads to massacres of many Igbo people living in the North. The new republic, Biafra, seceedes from Nigeria, ostensibly to create a safe nation for the Igbo people. Olanna, Odenigbo, their infant daughter and Ugwu are forced to flee as refugees. These chapters of the novel contains many cryptic references to a parallel conflict between Olanna and Kainene which has led to a painful separation, references which are only finally explained in the next part of the novel, which jumps back in time to shortly after the first section.
Eventually the secret of this pain is revealed. Odenigbo betrayed Olanna: manipulated by his deeply unpleasant mother he slept with her servant, Amala, who went on to have his baby. Olanna takes revenge by sleeping with Richard, who has been nursing a long-standing crush on her. Odenigbo and Olanna decide to adopt the new-born baby girl, while Richard and Kainene decide to stay together and try to repair their relationship. In anger Olanna also destroys Odenigbo’s manuscript of the book he was working for – throughout the novel books are destroyed, burnt, buried, and frantically repaired and replaced. This emphasises the importance of the conflict being memorialised, and of writing itself.
The final section of the novel is the most compelling and traumatic. I found myself only being able to read a few pages at a time, as the war bears down on the lives of the characters who have become important to the reader. Even though they are relatively prosperous, and therefore protected from some of the more severe deprivations of the war (Olanna and Kainene’s parents fly out to England for the duration), their situation slowly deteriorates. There is finally no escape from the brutality of the war, no ending even after the ceasefire.
Ugwu’s story arc is in some ways the most compelling. He starts as an ‘uncivilised’ village boy who shows great loyalty and love towards his employers. He continues to study throughout the novel and his voice slowly becomes more articulate and educated. Several sections of the novel end in extracts from books about Biafra, and although at first it is implied these are written by Richard Churchill it becomes apparent that they are most likely written by Ugwu, and that he eventually becomes a writer. He is a kind soul, but even he is corrupted by the war, and when he is conscripted he takes part in the gang-rape of a young woman. Despite this complicity in a war crime Adichie still portrays Ugwu more as a victim of the war than a participant or criminal.
This is a wonderful ambitious novel. In addition to the central portraits it contains a wide range of minor characters, all sketched vividly, and while some are archetypes they still come to life, such as Harrison, Richard’s ‘houseboy’, who takes pride in his Englishness and his ability to cook traditional English dishes from local ingredients, and who maintains certain standards of etiquette even in the depths of famine and war. Another important sketch is of Mohammed, a former boyfriend of Olanna. Mohammed is a Muslim from the Hausa tribe, and is therefore technically an enemy of the central Igbo characters, but he rescues her from tribal violence and epitomises the civility of the Hausa aristocracy, providing nuance to the portrait of the conflict.
Although the Nigerian-Biafran War has been written about before Half a Yellow Sun, this novel has an immediacy and relevance. Starvation of civilian populations as an extension of warfare wasn’t invented in Biafra, but it was taken to a cruel and new level. I am sure the war is seen in a different light by Nigerians compared to how it is perceived in the West, and this is an important step in redressing that balance.
While the legacy of colonialism is an important theme in the novel, it is not didactic. The reader doesn’t feel beaten around the head with the politics of the conflict, while at the same time it is entirely clear on the war’s origins in the creation of the nation of Nigeria, and the ongoing complicity of the West. This is a hugely rewarding complex novel which was rightly lauded by critics and with prizes, including the Orange Prize for Fiction (now called Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) 2007. I am glad to have finally read it, having seen it on various reading lists many times in the last few years. It marks a dramatic progression from what looks now like an immature first novel in Purple Hibiscus, a graduation to the top level of modern writers.
The Reading Bug 