Half Of A Yellow Sun

#31

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You can’t have had an insight into the humanitarian catasthrophe brought on by the Nigerian civil war if you haven’t read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half Of A Yellow Sun or lived through the experience. You can read about her previous offering, Purple Hibiscus which I critiqued as having an eerie realistic feel here. She’s done it again. Only better this time! 

The novel, set during the Biafran secession of the ’60s, recounts the ordeal of three individuals. Ugwu a village boy brought to the city to work for a professor at Nsukka university. Olanna, his fiance and Richard, an Englishman who falls in love with the Igbo-Ukwu art and subsequently Olanna’s twin sister, Kainene. We watch their lives evolve from normal to abnormal, as they navigate the treacherous terrains brought on by war while striving to remain sane in the whirlpool they’ve been thrown into.

The leitmotiv regarding the perception of Easterners today in the political arena and indeed when you speak of patriotism is that their leaders caused the war, they deserved what they got and the question of whether they still consider themselves as Nigerians remains unsettled. Chimamanda, being Igbo herself, biased my thinking initially when I picked up the book. I half expected it to be an epistle on the gallantry of the Igbo people. But as I went further, I found that though narrated from the perpective of Biafrans she did justice to both sides. The book stoked my interest to learn more about that dark period in our country’s history.

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In Half of A Yellow Sun, she showed us how the Igbo’s were led and eventually misled by their leaders. She showed how the Hausa’s who, ignorant and arrogant, slaughtered countless Igbo’s in the name of God. She showed how war makes animals of men. And most poignantly, she showed that while a ravaging war that claimed the lives and livelihoods of millions was going on in one part of the country, in other parts it was business as usual. Nigerians who weren’t direcly involved in the war were quick to dismiss anything from the Biafran side as propaganda and as such, had no knowledge of the full scale of events.  

And the genesis of the war…

Once upon a time, Nigeria was colonized by the British. Their parting gift upon independence in 1960 was to rig the Northerners into power. In 1966 a coup led by four Igbos and a Yoruba major ousted the then Northern head of state. In  retaliation thousands of Igbo’s in the north were killed, dispossessed and deported for what the Northerners saw as an onslaught by the Igbo’s. At this point Major Chukwuemeka Odimegwu Ojukwu declared Biafra in independent state. Nigeria cast the first stone.

So the story goes; the simplistic version, of course. Regardless of whose doorstep one chooses to lay blame, the Nigerian Civil War remains a blight in our history. It still is that bruise that hasn’t quite healed. The war has ended, but it’s causes are still as virulent today as they were forty years ago.

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There’s an excellent compendium of Biafran and post-Biafran documentaries and interviews on Max Siollun’s blog.

Here’s one of my favorite Fela songs… when the police go away and army dissapears what do they leave behind if not sorrow, tears and blood?

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