| Half of a Yellow Sun |
Book: Half of a Yellow Sun
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Fourth Estate (2006)
Half of a Yellow Sun sealed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s credentials in the canon of great African literature.
The novel is not only a riveting stroke of hindsight but also a compendium of pertinent African questions.
The novel is not only a riveting stroke of hindsight but also a compendium of pertinent African questions.
While most writers mellow with age earning belated recognition in their twilight years, often more for the prolificacy rather than the proficiency of their work, Adichie evaded mediocrity from the outset.
Purple Hibiscus was a promising debut but the standing ovation was to be occasioned by her masterly chronicle of the Nigerian civil war Half of a Yellow Sun.
The historically-themed novel earned Adichie induction into Africa’s literary best of the range, with rave reviews, massive sales and the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
The book swelled Adichie’s cabinet with Nonino Prize (2009) and two joint accolades PEN Beyond Margins Award (2007) and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (2007).
Her debut, Purple Hibiscus faltered a step shy of the Orange Prize, annually bestowed on the best work of fiction by a female author, having been shortlisted in 2004.
“We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers,” Chinua Achebe once said of Adichie. “She is fearless, or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria’s civil war,” he said.
Achebe himself had assumed the daunting assignment with a cross-genre trilogy beginning with “Girls at War,” developing rather discursively with The Trouble with Nigeria and coming full circle with “There was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.”
The last title, which concluded Achebe’s career, earned him posthumous censure as unduly divisive. Soyinka confessed to Sahara Reporters that he wished Achebe had not written the book.
Adichie ventures into the Biafran story which has occupied a series of notables before her chiefly Achebe, his friend, Christopher Okigbo, who a direct casualty of the war, Ken Saro-Wiwa who was hanged during the Abacha’s military dictatorship and Buchi Emecheta.
Okigbo has his own corner as his biography and poetry anthology Labyrinths were Adichie’s fodder in creating her character Okeoma.
However, the novel was not prone to the censure drawn by other works around the subject, possibly because Adichie does not write in activist mode.
Detachment from overt subjectivity helps Adichie engage the reader with a wholesome narrative where the heroes are not glossed effigies but humanised especially by their private indiscretions.
The shady characters which are mostly captured in snap sessions and remote references are not cast in forthright diabolising light but situated within a residual setting of imperially engineered divide and rule.
Adichie’s book does not falter into an advocacy flyer, vindicating or elevating one tribe over another, but turns the war into a literary template on which to dissect the perils of the past, thereby effortlessly reflecting on present challenges.
Like Frantz Fanon, Adichie does not claim to bring timeless truth or an ultimately illuminated conscience but sets out to speak to dispensation in time with due composure. Nevertheless, although the novelist chooses to speak rather than shout the explosive objects under treatment cannot be toned down.
New York Times’ Rob Nixon calls it “a novel about an imploding nation riven by religious strife and bloody wrangling over who controls the military, the civil service, the oil… looting, roadside bombs, killings and reprisal killings.”
Biafran Chronicle
A military coup perceived to be tribally motivated is foiled in the budding to be followed by reprisal killings, flared up by offshore oil in native-on-native bonfire.
The subsequent conflict for the control of government, military, resources and, ultimately, Igbo agitation for autonomy, precipitate heavy casualties on both sides, with religion and tribe used to sniff out rebellion and single out candidates for the massacre.
The novel revolves around the experiences of twin sisters Olanna and Kainene whose parallel quests for self-determination, are tried in the crossfire while they are just beginning to chart out their lives.
The twins are a miniature of the bigger picture whereby the country is a set of heterogeneous entities with an ambiguous relationship of independence and intractability. Both are entangled in paradoxical loyalties which are severely tested as the conflict flares into an all-out long-drawn war.
Olanna is romantically drawn to an assertive, charismatic and fiercely independent Pan-Africanist professor, Odenigbo, while her twin sister is involved with a shy English journalist, Richard Churchill, whose sets out on a somewhat botanical excursion of Nigeria for adventurous, journalistic and literary inclinations only to be confronted by country with real people and real problems.
In the ensuing bloodletting and constant quest for security, relationships are rammed into litmus occasions, and the false wax obsolete whereas the true cement closer.
Condescension, Self-Deprecation
Inter-race relationships are tragic to the effect that the worst form of racial subjugation is not traded prejudice and mistrust but a deep-seated sense of inferiority among blacks. Even after independence, most black suffer the sense of a gnawing void for falling short of European qualities.
Those who have earned points in the colonially imposed meritocracy are accorded greater honour even among their own people. Education and wealth accumulation tends to supplant identity even in the characters in the more heroic characters. The houseboys have mounting resent for their own backgrounds.
In expatriate circles, brazen prejudice towards blacks obtains to a dehumanising scale fed by the mainstream culture and its slanted media which place the native on a subhuman level.
“There were jokes to illustrate each African trait… An African was walking with a dog and an Englishman asked, ‘What are you doing with that monkey?’ and the African answered, ‘It’s a dog not a monkey’ – as if the Englishman had been talking to him.”
If the Negro was indeed a monkey in the eyes of his master, it little beggars imagination why the dog was closer to the master as a pet of choice. A native persona in a Zimbabwean revolutionary song, “Mukoma Takanyi” complains: “When there is an accident, the police demand a statement from me, yet I was only sitting in the rear. Why not ask the dog which was privy to the changing of gears?”
The classification of blacks as apes is, however, not an isolated relic of humour in bad taste, but an institutional creed legitimised and popularised by atheistic evolution, whereby creative design is ostensibly refuted the development of species attributed to natural selection, hence effacing the inherent equality of mankind.
Founding Pan-African authorities including Patrice Lumumba dispel the notion of colonialism ushering in Christianity and civilisation. While the imperial conquest gave lip-service to religion as a cosmetic drape for unmitigated atrocities, atheism was, in fact, the ideological engine of colonialism.
Zimbabwean novelist Stanelake Samkange laments the deliberate creation of an impression that the paternity God and fraternity of man were intangible abstracts to be deferred to life after death, itself insolent subversion of the dictates of Christianity.
As in mainstream Europe and America, the colonialists spurned the dictates of a faith they professed to facilitate legal and social instruments for the disenfranchisement of the Negro.
Racism is obviously not a trait that disappeared with the stroke of a pen at independence but a persistent problem which both whites and blacks are guilty of. Even in sports, where the principal dynamic is to create a cosmopolitan sphere devoid of frontiers, reports are rife of monkeys and bananas being used to depict African and Latino athletes.
Western Education
Western education also comes with mixed blessings in “Half of a Yellow Sun.” On the one hand, the educated elite utilise education into an instrument for decolonisation. On the other hand, education comes with stereotype-laden baggage, inculcating naïve recipients with self-doubt and self-hate.
Odenigbo is described as a little crazy as he having spent too many years reading overseas, he talked to himself and did not always return greetings.
Western education comes with aloofness and anti-social tendencies. Despite showing philanthropy, Odenigbo is at home with fellow academics who he hosts for political debates but the ordinary villagers find him inaccessible.
Odenigbo is, however, not indiscriminate when it comes to what to imbibe and reproduce for conventional advancement and what to retain from self-consciousness.
“There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give to in school to pass…They will teach you that a white man called Mungo Park discovered River Niger. That is rubbish. Our people fished in River Niger long before Mungo’s grandfather was born,” Odenigbo said.
Ironically, the book is set in post-colonial Nigeria where an independent nation indiscriminately inherits the system with its untrimmed residues. The problem is not particular with Nigeria.
Such historical fallacies were fraught in colonial education and the new boards have taken huge delays to troubleshoot the menace. David Livingstone is said to have discovered the Victoria Falls when natives obviously escorted him there. Arrogant claims of this nature and their absurd implications must be chlorinated from our curricula in the interest of decolonising African students.
The Matrimonial Question
The family institution also comes under spotlight in the book. The sanctity of family is brought into question in a setting where intimacy is rife outside matrimonial circles.
Olanna cohabits with the professor and bears him a child while her twin sister hops from one bed to another before settling for Richard, whom he snatches from a fellow expatriate he was cohabiting with.
Adichie approaches the matter without a note of moral certainty. The degeneration spreads across the novel, privately denying the central characters the integrity they enjoy publicly.
Is aversion to the convention a reactionary urge against Eurocentric structures or simply motion to decadence? Is marriage still relevant?
Marley, for example, once denied that he was married: “No. You see, I can’t deal with the Western ways of life. If I must live by a law, it must be the laws of His Majesty. If it’s not the laws of His Majesty, then I can make my own law.” As a result of this reasoning, the reggae star was not only prolific with studio jams but illegitimate children, with a total of 11 children with seven women.
In both religious and African cultural circles marriage is, however, a pre-requisite for physical union. Disregard for the institution by those who profess both creeds unhinges a floodgate of vice, including the exposure of subordinates to lasciviousness in the novel.
Political Certainty
Should authors dabble in politics? The question has exercised critics of every age including the successive ages of Johnson, Arnold, Coleridge and Eliot without clear-cut consensus.
Adichie’s answer is an emphatic affirmative: “I don’t think that all writers should have political roles, but I do think that I, as a person who writes realist fiction set in Africa, almost automatically have a political role. In a place of scarce resources made scarcer by artificial means, life is always political. In writing about that life, you assume a political role.”
Adichie pays homage to Zimbabwean writer Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns and Achebe’s “Girls at War” as the some of the closest influences for Half of a Yellow Sun.