Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Harper Perennial, 2007. 433pp.

Reviewed by Chris Chatteris SJ

A genocidal war of secession in Nigeria disturbed the “love-ins” of the late ’60s baby-boom generation in the West and competed unequally for attention with Vietnam.

During its brief and bloody existence, the breakaway state of Biafra became a byword for human-inflicted starvation when the Nigerian central government used hunger as a final military solution. Up to two million civilians died. It began with an Igbo military coup, a counter-coup, anti-Igbo pogroms and then it blundered from a “police action” to a military campaign and thence to a food-war against the population.

The novel’s title refers to the symbol of the rising sun on the Biafran flag. The author, who has lived in the United States but recently returned to Nigeria, writes both for Nigerians and the wider reading world.

With Wilfred Owen, this young novelist’s theme is “war and the pity of war”, told from the point of view of the Third World civilian refugee.

Adichie was born after the conflict but careful research and the oral tradition of her family have clearly laid the foundations of her faithful rendering of the historical backdrop. A missionary priest of my acquaintance who arrived in Nigeria as the war broke out, testified to the authenticity of the descriptions which took him back to a time of horror, trauma and loss.

Adichie unflinchingly explores what happens when a comfortable, educated, chieftain-class family is faced with the dissolution of its world. Not all the family members are uniformally heroic, and here the author has done a brilliant job of displaying a spectrum of moral responses under extreme circumstances.

Although the family is of the élite, arguably her best character—and one through whose eyes we witness much of the action—is their poorly-educated but intelligent houseboy, Ugwu. His “below stairs” perspective, now funny, now filled with pathos, is how the work remains in touch with the plight of the common people during the struggle.

Ugwu does not have the options that his cultivated masters and mistresses have, such as that taken by the older generation of the family of flight to the West. The houseboy must make the best of it with the people to whom he has pledged a loyalty which is both feudal and colonial.

Ugwu’s most frequently repeated line is: “Yes Sah”. His liberal-minded master, Professor Odenigbo, tries hard to persuade him to drop the “Sah” (Sir), all the while addressing Ugwu in mock British colonial style as “my good man”.

Olanna is Odenigbo’s lover, and the two happily enjoy the deceptive calm of campus life before the outbreak of the conflict prompts them to return to some of their traditional values. They hurriedly get married in a ceremony interrupted by an air raid.

Olanna is beautiful, bright, idealistic and ridiculously in love with her romantic firebrand intellectual Odenigbo. Her non-identical twin sister Kainene is striking but not beautiful, extremely shrewd and dauntingly cynical. The two sisters do not get on and the appearance of Richard, an Englishman seeking personal identity and meaning in Africa, and who is smitten by Kainene, tests the twins’ relationship further. There is evidence on every page of the author’s loving care for her believable and multi-dimensional characters, including those with bit parts. It is hard to spot a cardboard cut-out.

The Biafran leader, General Ojukwu, is the most significant historical personage to strut Adichie’s stage and she has caught him well, with his youthful charisma (he was 36) and his outstanding eloquence.

My missionary friend, although an Irish republican, owned that he too was moved by the beautiful Oxbridge English spoken by Ojukwu. The power of language, both English and Igbo, in a multilingual, post-colonial African setting, is a well-crafted theme. From here in post-apartheid South Africa much of this was eerily familiar. Ojukwu’s rhetoric feeds the youthful naïveté of Biafra’s patriotism and its unshakeable belief in final victory even as it heads for ruin.

This may sound unreal to readers made cynical by a history of liberation movements which have devoured their children. But this is how it is in young countries. This is how it was in South Africa in 1994, a feeling of there being nothing we could not do.

The narrow Igbo-Biafran focus underlines how the characters are helplessly trapped and abandoned in their own little world. But universal themes suddenly erupt from the text like land mines. A young man fleeing from an air attack is decapitated by shrapnel but his corpse continues running for some distance before collapsing. Is this a quotation from Erich-Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front in which a similar event is described?

When the houseboy Ugwu, who is press-ganged into the Biafran army, returns to his civilian world, like Remarque’s alienated German soldier, he struggles to articulate the horrors he has experienced. And when the family finally returns to the campus they find that the enemy has burnt the library and are beating up academics. We have been here before and will no doubt visit these places again.

Religious faith (Adichie is a Catholic and “very much a Vatican II enthusiast”), was prominent in her previous novel, Purple Hibiscus. In Half of a Yellow Sun, it seems to have gone underground, not surprisingly perhaps, given the setting and characters.

Olanna is a St Vincent de Paul member and believes in a social justice faith, but the other academics are mostly agnostics. Ugwu is a traditionalist and fears sympathetic magic. Christianity’s representatives simply illustrate the general moral collapse. A Catholic priest molests vulnerable young refugee women and a charismatic pastor is a futile and half-mad voice, another background noise in the din of war.

The Christian-Muslim element in the conflict is touched upon. Adiche implies that the war began because the Igbos, with their Christian missionary education, felt they were being economically and politically excluded by ignorant Northern Muslims.

The award-winning Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe lauds Chimamanda Adichie accurately as having come on the writing scene “almost fully made”. She is a natural storyteller, effortlessly creating powerful, lasting images through the evocation of all of the senses, (she’s particularly good with smells), so that one is sensually and emotionally drawn into the drama. She writes compassionately and courageously about events which some think are still not healed or resolved.

Perhaps Half of a Yellow Sun will help by telling the truth that is an indispensable starting point.