Half of a Yellow Sun
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fourth Estate
****

Reviewed by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

With her award-winning debut novel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded as the 21st century daughter of Chinua Achebe, a giant of African literature. Walking in a giant’s footsteps entails fearlessness, and in Half of a Yellow Sun, her second novel, Adichie takes on the Nigerian civil war of the sixties. In 1967 the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria seceded to form the independent nation of Biafra resulting in a three-year war.

Ugwu, a thirteen-year old houseboy is the primary narrator of the story. His master, Odenigbo, is a university professor and an ardent anti-colonial whose passionate sermons on self-reliance have drawn around him a circle of admirers and attracted Olanna. The London-educated voluptuous young beauty has abandoned her life of privilege, and a long line of suitors, for the charisma of her new lover. Meanwhile, her twin sister, Kainene, tall, angular, icily remote, helps manage their rich father’s varied business interests. Enter Richard, a shy Englishman enthralled by Igbo-Ukwu art, who is attempting to write a book on Nigeria. Dismayed by his countrymen’s condescension of the African people, lost in the expatriate crowd, he falls for the enigmatic Kainene.

Adichie takes these five people on an epic journey through the sixties, and through their lives and loves, explores how war, with its tentacles of brutality, loss and hunger, ensnares and mutates people. The narrative leapfrogs between early and late sixties – a device that makes the story pacy and also intrigues the reader by presenting a familiar character in a transformed avatar: Odenigbo, an Agitator, trudging into the interiors to educate the people, Olanna queuing up for powdered egg yolk while dreaming of her lace tablecloth, Richard writing articles for the Propaganda Directorate and Ugwu, forcibly conscripted, training for his first operation. As the pages unfold the process of transformation is unveiled and with it, the itinerant miseries of colonialism, racial superiority and political jockeying.

Half of a yellow sun, the symbol of an independent Baifra, apparently stood for a glorious future. It was sewn on the uniform of soldiers who were drafted from Igbo intellectuals and peasants alike, some boys as young as ten. All were united in their belief that “Biafra will win this war, God has written it in the sky” – even as the soldiers held guns made from bamboo and the rest of the world refused to recognize Biafra. The horror and senselessness of this war, Adichie limns with quiet power. Olanna is invited by a woman to look into a calabash. Inside it lies a little girl’s head with braided hair and open mouth. “Do you know?” the woman says. “It took me so long to plait this hair? She had such thick hair.” At some point in the narrative it seems like the world, once rational, has tipped over as sirens cry, people scramble into bunkers, shrapnel hits a man and the headless body keeps running, a man places both hands on his blown-open belly to hold his intestines in. “Imagine children with arms like toothpicks, with footballs for bellies and skin stretched thin…”

The novel’s leit motif is ‘allegiance’; allegiance to land, to ethnicity, to loved ones. Odenigbo’s mother will not leave her home even as Nigerian soldiers advance upon the village. Olanna’s love ruptures dangerously when she discovers Odenigbo’s infidelity, yet she cannot tear herself away. Odenigbo himself, the Biafran zealot, works mindlessly at the Manpower Directorate amassing names and addresses, yet returns home with lit-up eyes. Cool-headed Kainene throws herself into relief work, risking her life on occasions.

Adichie, who divides her time between the US and Nigeria, effortlessly evokes her homeland in the cassava patches and cashew trees of the scenery, the Igbo words lyrically interspersed in English, the pepper soup and fried plantains and the local superstitions. When Odenigbo’s disapproving Mama meets Olanna she rebukes, “I hear you did not suck your mother’s breasts...  you witch.” 

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