This is a story about the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War.

It is told through the

intertwining perspectives of three characters: Ugwu, a poor village boy who
gets a job as a houseboy for Odenigbo, a university professor; Olanna, a
privileged woman from Lagos (educated inLondon) who leaves her lush life
behind and moves in with Odenigbo; and Richard, an English journalist (in a
relationship with Olannas twin sister, Kaneine) who receives a Grant to write
a novel about Nigeria.
Life takes these three main characters to Nsukka, in the south, into what will
become the heart of the Nigerian Civil War. Adichie digs into this political
conflict, caused by the attempted secession of the southeastern provinces
of Nigeria (populated by the Igboethnic group) as the selfproclaimed Republic of Biafra. The novel uses the economic, ethnic, cultural
and religious tensions among the various peoples of Nigeria and draws out
the emotional and psychological consequences of the conflict to construct a
multidimensional version of this war.
Half of a Yellow Sun swings back and forth between the pre-war early 1960s
and the conflict stricken southern region in the late 1960s. In the earlier
stage the reader can observe the intellectual community of Nsukka express
their ideas throughout a string of dinner parties at Odenigbos. In one
instance, the host passionately exclaims: This defence pact is worse than
apartheid and segregation, but we dont realize it. They are controlling us
from behind drawn curtains. It is very dangerous! The ideas of the educated
elite of a newly independent country echo through the pages alongside
friendly arguments between colleagues, discussions among artists, the
rhythm of local music, flowing alcohol and Ugwus delicious cuisine; creating
a vivid and idyllic backdrop to the upcoming events.
The pendular movement of the narrative is most effective as it becomes a
device which draws parallels and creates contrasts, which imply the physical,
mental and emotional changes the characters endure. There are cruel
moments that transport the reader directly to the fighting grounds, for
example when Olanna is caught in the north visiting a friend when the first
Igbo killings begin and barely makes it back alive to the south: A liquid

urine was spreading on the floor of the train. Olanna felt it coldly soaking
into her dress. The woman with the calabash nudged her, then motioned to
some other people close by. Bianu, come, she said. Come and take a look.
She opened the calabash Olanna looked into the bowl. She saw the little
girls head with the ashy-grey skin and the plaited hair and rolled- back eyes
and open mouth. She stared at it for a while before she looked away.
Somebody screamed.
Adichie unravels the realities of war beginning with the physical and literal
before going into the psychological and emotional facets. She frames the
explosion of the North-South conflict as a pivotal moment that does not just
offer historical context but functions as a stepping stone into the
psychological and emotional effects of war on individuals, relationships,
ethnic groups and the nation as a whole.
This narrative strategy is intertwined with simple moments where an action
or thought show the distinct emotional and material differences that begin to
be reflected in all of the characters; when they realize how much meat they
used to have at their disposition or they miss the scent of soap their family
members used to carry. But the story continues to surprise, recoiling from
melodrama, using humour to pave the way instead: A hawker walked into
the compound with an enamel tray covered in newspapers, holding up a
browned lizard on a stick I want some, Mummy Ola, please, Baby said.
Olanna ignored her and continued to brush her hair. Those things are not
good for you, Olanna said Baby began to cry. Olanna turned and looked at
Ugwu in exasperation and suddenly they were both smiling at the situation:
Baby was crying to be allowed to eat a lizard.
This novel is an expression of polyphony on the Nigerian Civil War. Adichie
goes beyond historical research and travels deep into Nigerias memory,
going into the roots of the conflict, into the injustice, violence and pain of
war; the irrelevance of humanity amidst these conditions.
Adichie trespasses the boundary of the historical recount of events by
interweaving human aspects, turning on multiple microphones for each of
these voices to be heard. The thematic of war opens up into the bigger
theme of humanity where we see characters struggling with issues of love,

class, race, profession and family, among others. Half a Yellow Sun is an
example of one of the many forms where fiction can coexist with history. One
could argue that it is a literary approach to Hayden Whites concept of
history as narrative. Half of a Yellow Sun, unrestrained by the margins of
truth and untruth which historians are bound to, produces a sincere version
of the Nigerian Civil War which is not just a fascinating read but an
expression of knowledge about human kind.
By Raquel Caputo
There are many novels written in English whose characters are speaking, or
even thinking, in some other language. Half of a Yellow Sun, set in Nigeria in
the 1960s, describes a world in which characters are divided from each other
by their several languages. In the first section of the novel, set in the postindependence years of the early 60s, the clashes between ways of speaking
are often comic. In the second section, which dramatises the violent
secession of Biafra from Nigeria in the late 1960s, the splits between
languages are fatal.
Adichie's characters are always crossing between languages. Italicised
phrases show when they are speaking in Igbo, though only the bilingual
reader can know for sure if the English translates or supplements the Igbo.
"Come, ada anyi . . . Let's go inside". "How is she doing? O na-agakwa?"
Idioms filter into the English narrative from Igbo. One woman shouts at
another in the street about money she has lent her. "I said you will give me
my money today! . . . You heard me say so because I did not speak with
water in my mouth!" We are made aware that we are often reading
translation.
In the first chapter, the teenage Ugwu arrives from the country to work as a
"houseboy" for Odenigbo, a highly politicised academic. He listens in awe to
what we can hear as the complacent anglophone political discussions of
"Master's" fellow academics. Odenigbo speaks to him in his own language
peppered oddly with words of English. "'Where are you, my good man?' He
said my good man in English." "My good man": the enthusiastically anticolonialist Odenigbo cannot hear the Edwardian absurdity of it.

Ugwu knows enough English to recognise its authority. "You stupid

ignoramus!" Odenigbo exclaims when Ugwu burns his socks while ironing
them. Ugwu is transfixed. "Stupid ignoramus slid out of his mouth like
music." Brutal meanings lose themselves in the flow of such sounds. When
Odenigbo's British-educated lover Olanna is due to arrive from London, and
"Master" becomes suddenly draconian about kitchen cleanliness, Ugwu is
resentful until he hears her voice. It is something better even than Master's
supposedly incomparable English. "Here was a superior tongue, a luminous
language". Much later, as violence between Biafra and Nigeria mounts, he
hears Olanna talking about reprisal attacks mounted by fellow Igbos. "He
liked the way reprisal attacks came out of her mouth." When he justifies the
murders perpetrated by his own side, Ugwu is just trying to get his precious
English words right. "'We are not like those Hausa people. The reprisal
killings happened because they pushed us.' His reprisal killings had come out
sounding close to hers, he was sure." Language prepares Ugwu for the
violence in which he will become involved.
Points of view change from one chapter to the next, alternating between
Ugwu, Olanna and Richard, an Englishman who has an affair with Olanna's
twin sister. In the chapters told from his point of view, Ugwu thinks in lucid
prose, "translated" from his own language into English. But in the chapters
narrated from Olanna's point of view, he expresses himself in halting English
"But it die, mah. The other one don't die" as he refuses to adopt the Igbo
in which she speaks to him. There are many such paradoxes: Richard, with
his earnest interest in Nigerian history, comes to understand Igbo, but the
Hausa of Olanna's uncle and his friends is unintelligible to her. Odenigbo,
intoxicated by his own political rhetoric, knows just how to pin his country's
ills on the British. Yet the colonial power gives him the force of its language,
first for his "enlightened" political debates with his university friends, then for
his evasive responses to violence. Olanna sees her own relatives butchered,
and Odenigbo tells her that "the experience had changed her and made her
so much more inward". The italicised words are his English euphemisms,
though his words for what is terrible are English, too. "He
usedmassacre when he spoke to his friends, but never with her."

Odenigbo infuriates Olanna by justifying his infidelity in an Igbo phrase, "selfassured enough to call what he had done a brief rash lust": the translation of
that formula into English shows it up. Adichie's characters have more than
one language, but this is a problem as well as a resource. When Olanna's
mother asks her to talk to her father about his mistress, she first has to
choose a language. "She would speak mostly in English. It was easy to be
formal and cold in English." This is her thought, but she ends up saying
something different from what she intends, something that makes a stranger
of him.
The mutual exclusions of languages are destined to become perilous. As
ethnic rivalry mounts, Olanna and her cousin Arize are confronted by a
threatening crowd, demanding to know if they are Igbo. Arize shakes her
head and starts speaking "fluent, loud Yoruba". The crowd loses interest and
turns on some other hapless passerby. They will listen to how he speaks, and
it will save or doom him.
John Mullan is professor of English at University College London.

The Story Behind the Book

Both my grandfathers were interesting men, both born in the early
1900s in British-controlled Igbo land, both determined to educate their
children, both with a keen sense of humor, both proud. I know this
from stories I have been told. Eight years before I was born, they died
in Biafra as refugees after fleeing hometowns that had fallen to
federal troops. I grew up in the shadow of Biafra. I grew up hearing
before the war and after the war stories; it was as if the war had
somehow divided the memories of my family. I have always wanted to
write about Biafranot only to honor my grandfathers, but also to
honor the collective memory of an entire nation. Writing Half of a
Yellow Sun has been my re-imagining of something I did not
experience but whose legacy I carry. It is also, I hope, my tribute to

love: the unreasonable, resilient thing that holds people together and
makes us human.
Q & A with the Author
Q: What led you to write a book about the Nigeria-Biafra war?
I wrote this novel because I wanted to write about love and war,
because I grew up in the shadow of Biafra, because I lost both
grandfathers in the Nigeria-Biafra war, because I wanted to engage
with my history in order to make sense of my present, many of the
issues that led to the war remain unresolved in Nigeria today, because
my father has tears in his eyes when he speaks of losing his father,
because my mother still cannot speak at length about losing her
father in a refugee camp, because the brutal bequests of colonialism
make me angry, because the thought of the egos and indifference of
men leading to the unnecessary deaths of men and women and
children enrages me, because I dont ever want to forget. I have
always known that I would write a novel about Biafra. At 16, I wrote an
awfully melodramatic play called For Love of Biafra. Years later, I
wrote short stories, That Harmattan Morning, Half of a Yellow
Sun and Ghosts , all dealing with the war. I felt that I had to approach
the subject with little steps, paint on a smaller canvas fi rst, before
starting the novel.
Q: Given that, at the time of the war, you hadnt yet been
born, what sort of research did you do to prepare for writing
this book?
I read books. I looked at photos. I talked to people. In the four years
that it took to finish the book, I would often ask older people I met,
Where were you in 1967? and then take it from there. It was from
stories of that sort that I found out tiny details that are important for
fiction. My parents stories formed the backbone of my research. Still,

I have a lot of research notes that I did not end up using because I did
not want to be stifled by fact, did not want the political events to
overwhelm the human story.
Q: Was it important to you that you get all the facts of the
war correct for this work of fiction?
I invented a train station in Nsukka, invented a beach in Port Harcourt,
changed the distance between towns, changed the chronology of
conquered cities but I did not invent any of the major events. It was
important that I get the facts that mattered right. All the major
political events in the book are factually correct. But what was most
important to me, in the end, was emotional truth. I wanted this to be a
book about human beings, not a book about faceless political events.
Q: Are memories of the Nigeria-Biafra war still alive in Nigeria,
talked about on a regular basis, or do you feel that the confl ict
is being lost to history as time passes and that it becomes less
important to Igbo culture?
The war is still talked about, still a potent political issue. But I find
that it is mostly talked about in uninformed and unimaginative ways.
People repeat the same things they have been told without having a
full grasp of the complex nature of the war or they hold militant
positions lacking in nuance. It also remains, to my surprise, very
ethnically divisive: the (brave enough) Igbo talk about it and the nonIgbo think the Igbo should get over it. There is a new movement called
MASSOB, the movement for the actualization of the sovereign state of
Biafra, which in the past few years has captured the imagination of
many Igbo people. MASSOB is controversial; it is reported to engage
in violence and its leaders are routinely arrested and harassed by the
government. Still, despite their inchoate objectives, MASSOBs
grassroots support continues to grow. I think this is because they give

a voice to many issues that have been offi cially swept aside by the
country but which continue to resonate for many Igbo people.
Q: The book focuses on the experiences of a small set of
people who are experiencing the conflict from very diff erent
points of view. When we step into their individual worlds, we
dont exactly know their every thoughtthe narrator who
follows them isnt omniscientbut rather we seem to see and
understand them through a film. Can you describe your
narrative style and why you framed these characters the way
you did?
I actually dont think of them as being seen through a film. I have
always been suspicious of the omniscient narrative. It has never
appealed to me, always seemed a little lazy and a little too easy. In an
introduction to the brilliant Italian writer Giovanni Vergas novel, it is
said about his treatment of his characters that he never lets them
analyze their impulses but simply lets them be driven by them. I
wanted to write characters who are driven by impulses that they may
not always be consciously aware of, which I think is true for us human
beings. Besides, I didnt want to bore my readerand myselfto
death, exploring the characters every thought.
Q: The character of Richard is a British white expatriate who
considers himself Biafran, drawing a certain amount of quiet
and some loudcriticism for his self-proclaimed identity.
Another key narrator, Ugwu, is a thirteen-year-old houseboy
who reacts rather than acts. Both are interesting choices for
characters for the narrator to shadow. Why did you pick
them?
Ugwu was inspired in part by Mellitus, who was my parents houseboy
during the war; in part by Fide, who was our houseboy when I was

growing up. And I have always been interested in the less obvious
narrators. When my mom spoke about Mellitus, what a blessing he
was, how much he helped her, how she did not know what she would
have done without him, I remember being moved but also thinking
that he could not possibly have been the saint my mother painted,
that he must have been flawed and human. I think that Ugwu does
come to act more and react less as we watch him come into his own.
Richard was a more diffi cult choice. I very much wanted somebody to
be the Biafran outsider because I think that outsiders played a major
role in the war but I wanted him, also, to be human and real (and
needy!)
Q: Are there other characters based on real people?
Harrison is based on a real Harrison who lived with my family until
very recently. What the character does with beets is, in fact, what the
real Harrison told me he did during the war.
Q: There is a conflict in this story between what is traditional
and tribal versus that which is modern and bureaucratic. What
is the mix today? How worrisome is it that some of the tribal
ways have been lost?
Cultures evolve and things change, of course. What is worrisome is
not that we have all learned to think in English, but that our education
devalues our culture, that we are not taught to write Igbo and that
middle-class parents dont much care that their children do not speak
their native languages or have a sense of their history.
Q: We see snippets of a book written by a character in Half of
a Yellow Sunit is an account of the conflict depicted in Half of
a Yellow Sun, written after the fact. Its authorship may come
as a surprise to some at the end of the story. What eff ect did

you want this book within a book to have on Half of a Yellow

Sun?
I wanted a device to anchor the reader who may not necessarily know
the basics of Nigerian history. And I wanted to make a strongly-felt
political point about who should be writing the stories of Africa.
Q: You must have come across many books on Biafra. Are there
any you would recommend in particular?
Surviving in Biafra by Alfred Obiora Uzokwe is a marvelous memoir of
war seen through the eyes of a young boy. Chinua Achebes Girls at
War contains three sublime Biafran stories. Adewale Ademoyegas
Why We Struck is a fiercely ideological look at the events that led to
the war. A Tragedy Without Heroes by Hilary Njoku and The Nigerian
Revolution and the Biafran War by Alexander Madiebo are fascinating
personal accounts from top-ranking Biafran Army offi cers. The writing
in Ntieyong Akpans The Struggle for Secession has a formal beauty
and he presentsinadvertently, I suspecta complex, flawed and
sympathetic portrait of the Biafran leader. Wole Soyinka was
imprisoned during the war and records this period in his magisterial
memoir The Man Died. George Obiozors The United States and the
Nigerian Civil War: An American dilemma in Africa is informative albeit
brief and has an interesting forward by Walter Ofonagoro. Herbert
Golds stark account of his visit to Biafra, Biafra Goodbye, moved me
to tears. The Biafran War: Nigeria and the Aftermath by Herbert EkweEkwe is a concise and clear-eyed look at the conflict. Chukwuemeka
Ikes Sunset at Dawn and Flora Nwapas Never Again are novels that
convincingly portray middle-class Biafra. John De St Jorres The
Nigerian Civil War presents an excellent view of Biafra from the
outside. And Sunset in Biafra, the bitter and beautifully-written
memoir by Elechi Amadi, looks at the war from the point of view of an
anti-Biafran minority.