[207] Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“The North was wary: it feared domination from the more educated South and had always wanted a country separate from the infidel South anyway . . . the South, too, eager for independence, accepted this constitution . . . At Independence in 1960, Nigeria was a collection of fragments held in a fragile clasp.” [195]

In 1960, Nigeria decalred independence from Great Britain. But the once-colonized peoples and tribes, egged on and fueled by religious strife, chafe against the geographical boundaries that bind Nigeria together as one country. They battled over military leadership and ownership of oil. Set in this tumultous times is Adichie’s tale of twin sisters, Olanna and Kainene, physically and temperamentally dissimilar, as the New York Times has quoted, who are from an elite Igbo family in the south. Olanna denies an offer of government job and takes up professorship in sociology at a suburban university, where she meets Odiengbo, who is an expansive revolutionary. Kainene falls in love with bashful and principled Richard, an Englishman who later takes up the Biafran cause.

They will take what you write more seriously because you are white. Look, the truth is that this is not your war. This is not your cause. Your government will evacuate you in a minute if you ask them to. So it is not enough to carry limp branches and shout power, power to show that you support Biafra. . .The world has to know the truth of what is happening, because they simply cannot remain silent while we die. [382-3]

When the fragile clasp that held these fragments of Nigeria began to snap, in 1967, the coop unleashed the 3-year Biafran War, which was almost unheard-of outside of Nigeria, if not Africa, that saw Muslim-dominated forces from the North laying seige to the Christian Igbo of the South, wrangling over power and control of national assets. The Brits were accused of instigating this domestic belligerency.

We are living in a time of great white evil. They are dehumanizing blacks in South Africa and Rhodesia, they fermented what happened in the Congo . . . This defense pact is worse than apartheid and segregation, but we don’t realize it. They are controlling us from behind drawn curtains. [140]

Coiled with a sense of racial inequality, the British is accused of not giving the African the benefit of an equal intelligence. In preserving Nigeria as it was, by fixing the “pre-Independence elections” in favor of the North, the Brits were only looking into its own interest, the huge import market they monopolized. As the clamor of fractious groups escalates to a war, a massacre, through the fates of Olanna and Kainene, as well as Odiengbo’s houseboy Ugwu, Adichie uses history to gain leverage on the present. It is interesting to note that Adichie is about the same age (or even younger) of Olanna’s daughter, Baby, in the novel, who is six when the Biafran War broke out. Since Adichie’s generation has been spared of the horrifying bloodshed and famine that would haunt her characters for years to come, she deftly embraces the turmoil of from her parent and grandparent generations (see dedication). Between occasionally slow narratives are horrifying details that jumpstart reader’s soul: Shards of shrapnel cutting off a servant’s head. A refuge woman carrying in a bowl her daughter’s head. A furious mother mistaking her daughter’s swollen belly as pregnancy. These are ordinary lives laid waste and exploited, almost forgotten in history. People are dying while the world remains silent.

These [British] policies manipulated the differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist, thereby making the easy government of such a large country practicable. [209]

The heart of this novel is the betrayal that divides the sisters emotionally. They realize distrust would always lie between them, and disbelief always an option. As they respectively embrace the Biafran cause—feeding the starved, teaching the young, and fighting for relief, their struggle with checked mutual loyalty and the determination with which they cope the war show men’s weakness and irresponsibility. At the crossroad where public and private allegiances threaten to collide, the sisters show unmatched virtue and valor. At the time when they are left hanging in a national crisis, what have taken them over is their will to live, unadulterated, irresistible, pure.

541 pp. [Read/Skim/Toss] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.