Half of a Yellow Sun

"This is such an amazing novel about the challenges of fractured Nigerian society and what it meant for politics in the young Nigerian state. It’s a novel about life in the late 1960s, before, during and after the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War because of the attempt by the region of that name to secede. It really highlights a fundamental problem of modern state-building in Nigeria and in many African countries, and that is the challenge of forging unity amidst diversity within the often very arbitrary boundaries created by Europeans. In the 1960s, the average person living in what was called Nigeria did not feel particularly Nigerian , and in such a context, inequalities in resources and conditions provided fertile ground for conflict. “In the 1960s, the average person living in what was called Nigeria did not feel particularly Nigerian” Adichie’s novel offers a perspective on such conflicts, particularly between Hausa and Igbo people, from the vantage of a few key characters. Perhaps it is appealing to me because a key character is a university professor who likes to engage in conversation about what it means to be Nigerian, and whether politics should be organized in terms of identities or in terms of other types of ideologies, such as socialism. It highlights the everyday reality, the fact that people often interact across ethnic lines, and that these lines are often blurry, and more or less meaningful to some people relative to others. In the context of an ethnic civil war, we also see that these categories aren’t as hardened as political leaders make them out to be, or as outsiders frequently describe. Ultimately, just telling this story highlights why it’s challenging for these national governments—in this case, Nigeria—to maintain order. There are several complicated characters. That’s one of the things that I love about the story. Just as in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography , we are reminded that all people are complicated, each day facing competing pressures around family, passion, material self-interest and the greater good. Too often Africans are portrayed in the media and even in academic work as being almost single-minded in terms of their wants and needs. I suppose the protagonist of the book is Ugwu, the village boy who comes to work for the professor and becomes a trusted and loyal member of the family. He gets involved in various love interests, is also trying to pursue his education, but then is forced to participate in the horrors of war. The book does not provide a neat and happy ending."

"Yes, they dominate the literary space. I did struggle with my pick of books because I realized that I chose three, but the Nigerians really are out there. You can’t move without bumping into a Nigerian novel and quite a good one at that. They’re very accomplished. Also, they’re still very connected to their culture. That’s what makes the big difference. The storytelling is very rich and still very grounded in an African-ness. They have a certain confidence, I think, in the way they write their stories. This is a story about a family during the Biafran war, focusing on twin sisters. They get caught up in the war, and they get separated. It’s about the political landscape at the time, and how it affected this family. I was very impressed by the breadth of the story and the work that went into writing it, the historical research that Chimamanda did, and how she managed to make fact into fiction. That, for me, craft wise, was such a big achievement. It stayed factual, even though it was fiction. That’s why I chose it and that’s why I liked it. I was very impressed by it as a work of literature. In terms of the story, I didn’t feel it was an amazing personal story, but it was interesting. If you’re invested in reading about the Biafran war, this book is very accessible. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know about it either. That’s not surprising because I didn’t know about a lot, my worldview was very narrow. This is why works like this stand out to me. Yes. Funnily enough, by Biyi Bandele. It is and I only just realized that! It depends on where you are: in some areas they’re considered bad luck and in others they’re considered good luck. For me, twins have always been fascinating, because I just had it in my mind, all my life, that I was meant to be a twin. This is actually not even my first story about twins, I have another story, which I haven’t finished, that’s about twins as well. I think, for me, it’s the possibility that two people could be connected telepathically, emotionally and spiritually, and there’s no need for them to speak. If we’re connected in the spirit, then communication is at that level. For me, I wanted to look at how would that play out as a reality, two people who believe they’re one person, but to the outside world, and according to our construct that we know, they’re two people. That’s what I played with. “We’re not there if we’re not writing our own stories” I’ve always asked, ‘Who made that rule? Why do they say we have to do this? Why is this like this?’ I’ve always asked those questions. I always want to know why I’m being told a certain thing, and why we believe certain things. Where did it start? So I just wanted to imagine starting from the very beginning, where we’re not told anything. This is what my twins are, characters who know absolutely nothing of world constructs. They are completely connected to spirit and as they emerge from this place, where they’re born and grew up, they now have to navigate a world which has rules and laws and ways of being that have been put in place over time. Nobody knows why, but it’s just how it is. People have just accepted. It’s set in quite a stylized East Africa. I used the terrain of the East African continent because it had everything that I needed: mountains, desert landscapes, seascapes, ports. Also, simply because of my original intent to write about pirates. When I started writing, the setting just kind of worked with the story and it felt right. I borrowed influences from all parts, the stories and histories. I made it to Ethiopia for a day and I have been in Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zanzibar. I used a lot of the influences of those places in how I constructed my setting."

"Slightly out of envy! Chimamanda wrote a phenomenal novel at such a fresh age. Her story is told by three powerful, self-aware and intellectually upright characters who are swept up in the struggle to establish an independent Nigeria. This would have been in the 1960s, close to when The Poisonwood Bible is set. It’s probably a hundred years after when Song is set, but then the struggles of colonialism almost became more acute as time rolled on. Colonialism became even more of an issue as survival became less of an issue. In the 1800s, there were other matters at play. They didn’t have the luxury of looking at colonialism so deeply perhaps, its cause and effect. “It’s a call to arms. It’s a standing up and rising up” Chimamanda head-on tackles colonialism and ethnicity. Class is also huge in her story. She talks about the white man carving up Nigeria into a map, how they were Igbo, not Nigerian, before the white man came. It’s a call to arms. There aren’t the layers and subtlety of Song ’s era. It’s a standing up and rising up. With the topic of the Biafran War, she was taking on a moment in history that has long deserved more attention. Certainly, there is a long legacy of great writing that comes before her, but she takes her place among that lineage and exposes the subject again. Her novel could have almost no political backdrop and it would still be beautifully crafted. You can see the living room and you can taste the food bubbling on the stove. And she handles the love and the sex so delicately and romantically. All of her books are politicised but, if you take the politics out, they’re beautiful books."

"I remember reading Half of a Yellow Sun when I had just moved to Morocco to live with my husband, Abdel. It came out maybe a year after. I met Abdel when I went to do research for the first of my Moroccan novels. We’ve been married for eighteen years now, but at that time I was feeling displaced on the African continent. I thought, ‘I need to know more about Africa.’ This novel came out to a real fanfare of people acclaiming it as a superb piece of fiction. I’d heard a lot of people talk about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and what a brilliant writer she is. I thought, ‘I’ve got to give this a go.’ Oh my goodness! It’s another really big, immersive novel by somebody who really knows their stuff. And because it’s such recent history—late 60s and 1970—she has been able to draw on primary sources. That’s a rare thing when you’re writing historical fiction, that it’s still within living memory. So you know it’s right, that the details are correct. It’s like reading news reports, but in this incredible narrative, in which you’re really bound up with the characters. It was a huge event for Europeans as well because it was very much a European-caused war. It was post-colonial. The whole European colonialism of Africa is still a really sore topic in Europe, even today. The British being in Nigeria caused a lot of problems, but the problem is that when a big colonial power leaves the country, it always leaves a political vacuum. You end up with these warring factions and all these long-buried tribal problems that suddenly rear up again and become hot and painful. I didn’t know anything about it or the history before I read this book. I still don’t know very much about it, but I can tell you that the characters really made me care about the situation because they were caught up in it. The central character is called Olanna. A lot of the drama is about the tension between her and her sister. They fall out and are estranged for a long time and much of the story is about the way that they are brought back together as sisters, through the war. You also see things through the eyes of the houseboy, Ugwu, who is working for Olanna and her husband. They’re academics, this privileged Nigerian couple. Ugwu’s a really engaging character. He had a very simple upbringing, and he hasn’t had the education. He gets conscripted into this horrific war and has to undergo terrible things. You see what it’s like from a boy soldier’s point of view. If you stuck with Olanna, you’d never see any of this stuff at all. I thought the author did a really fine job of taking us into the heart of darkness with poor Ugwu, who has the most hellish time. I think with these big subjects, you need to splinter off your narrative because you can’t show it all from one person’s point of view. It’s very difficult to give a big, rounded picture of your epic subject. It’s a really immersive book. You feel the landscape, you can smell the food, you can see the war, you can see the people being brutalized, and you can feel the visceral fear. If you were in that situation and there was really no way out of it, what would you do? She did an amazingly powerful job of giving you the novelist’s view of that war, but at the same time, underpinning it with all the historical facts. All the primary sources and people’s oral accounts of what had happened to them has all gone into this book, and you feel the veracity of it. It’s a remarkable piece of work."

"Chimamanda Adichie broke the ice in writing about the Biafran war. There was a kind of whispering on the subject in public life but no one ever talked about it that much and I’d been wanting for a long time to read something about that conflict, because it underpins some of what is happening in modern-day Nigeria, in particular the way people in the east relate to the rest of the country. It also played into this much bigger idea of regionalism and the tensions between different parts. Here’s someone who was not alive when the Biafran war took place – maybe it had to be someone like that to draw out the effect and impact of that conflict. Biafra is one of those conflicts that was massive at the time but is pretty much forgotten today in the West. She evokes well this notion of a nation that flared and died and the passion that went into that and why this was something which had this very deep appeal for a part of the nation which, depending on your point of view, was either marginalised or saw itself as special. Unless you travel in the east, you don’t realise how resonant that still is today. Biafra will be mentioned by the guy in the roadside Coke stall and the chap you chat to outside the church. The unanswered question, because the nation collapsed so quickly, is how homelands created in response to genuine suffering – in this case the pogroms against the Igbo people – can become over time states which are quite hostile to outsiders. The flip side of being a safe haven, a sanctuary, if you’re not from that group, is that it can seem a very hostile and forbidding place. You have people in the Niger Delta who are very glad Biafra didn’t come to pass because they would have been the minority group in this new state and their argument is: ‘From what we could see, the oppressed Igbos were going to turn into the next oppressors.’ The idea is only hinted at in Half of a Yellow Sun, but as a species we sometimes struggle to grasp the obvious point that oppressed people can become oppressors. Liberia is a classic example. I haven’t studied this closely but I think a mix of nobility and realpolitik probably brought this about. The journalist Kaye Whiteman, who was around at the time, told me: ‘There was a chemistry arising from the evolution of the war that somehow seemed to diminish the lust for revenge.’ I think that had an international dimension in that, rightly or wrongly, the Biafrans succeeded in creating a sense that they were the victims, involved in an honourable attempt to create a safe homeland, up against an evil dictatorship that would stop at nothing. I suspect the sensible people in the Nigerian government realised they would become world-wide pariahs if they went on a pogrom against Biafra. On the Biafran side, they were losing the war and if they continued to resist, they would have been destroyed. I think there was a certain element of pragmatism under duress. There is something called MASSOB, The Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, and its members get arrested from time to time, but you’re right, there’s nothing like the EPLF. Maybe. The oil was just being tapped, things were on the up and everyone thought, ‘Rather than destroy this through fighting, maybe we can all get a piece of the pie.’"

"Half of a Yellow Sun centres around a family as they transition from a position of influence and privilege to being just regular citizens of the newly formed Republic of Biafra. I don’t know how much I need to tell you, but, basically, about six years after Nigerian independence there was a civil war known as the Biafran War. Thirteen months later, over a million had died due to the fighting and famine. In January 1970, Biafra surrendered and was reabsorbed into Nigeria. In the book, you have a 13-year-old houseboy employed by a university professor; the professor’s beautiful mistress Olanna, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a new lover and a university town; and Richard, a shy young Englishman who is in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister. As Nigerian troops advance, the three run for their lives. Their ideals are tested as well as their loyalties to one another. It’s a beautifully written, big swing of a novel with lots of themes: moral responsibility, ethnic allegiances, class, race. And it’s all set against the backdrop of this pivotal time in Nigerian history. I definitely did. As a Nigerian, you are made aware of your history. But this is one of the things that made it real for me—that’s the beauty of fiction. Rather than ingesting facts and stats and not quite understanding, I can read a book that really humanises that experience. By following the stories of these characters, you really do get a sense of that time. Adichie’s storytelling is so impressive. She brilliantly evokes the promise and disappointments many people held at that time in the country’s history, while giving us such vivid, well drawn characters that really stay with you. In a way, I hoped to do the same with Water Baby : to write a book that is educational and informational, but steeped in fiction."