Half of a Yellow Sun

It's been a long time since a book made me cry. But this weekend I read Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. I cried over the violence and injustice faced by Adichie's characters; then I cried from anger and shame when it became clear that the violence and injustice were a consequence of Britain's callous exploitation of Africa and Africans.

After all that crying, I discovered a few things.

I discovered how little I know about Africa's experience of colonial fuckery. I'm embarrassed to admit my ignorance about the extent of British responsibility for slavery, colonialism and subsequent armed conflict in Africa. I suppose I'm no different to anyone educated in the 80s and 90s: even at university, post-colonial readings of history were only just emerging. This book made me determined to understand more, as a way of recognising that white privilege and first-world advantage were seized by violence. I discovered I WANT to know more.

Adichie's book is about the attempt by the Igbo people, in the late 1960s, to create a Biafran Republic. I learned that when Britain created Nigeria, it combined three different ethnic groups, with different customs, values and language. When tensions between these groups boiled over, the Igbo people became the target of widespread violence.

The Igbo people fled south and claimed independence from a Nigeria comprised of mostly Yoruba and Hausa people. Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun tells the story of the revolutionary idealism that forged Igbo Biafra and, most shockingly, it describes the desperate statelessness, violence, poverty, hunger and disease that ultimately caused the people who dreamed of Biafran freedom to assent to an end to war.

This is not history as written by the victors. It's the story of a family who loses almost everything.

I picked up Half of a Yellow Sun from my local big charity shop, where very good books are $3 apiece. I always wonder how people bring themselves to give away such gems. I knew vaguely that I should read this book: it won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2007 (then called the Orange Broadband Prize) and, in 2020, was voted the best book to have won in the prize's 25 year history.

There was a movie. You KNOW when there's a buzz around a book: this book had it.

Yet with my head currently caught up in quaint cosy murder-mysteries, I bought my copy thinking it might be something to save for later. But this story drew me in immediately. The early chapters are intimate portraits of the characters who become drawn to one another across class and cultural divides. They go on to experience the conflict together. The gentle humour and unhurried pace of these chapters did not prepare me for the taut second half, in which the characters' comfortable and pleasant lives fall apart so fast and so completely, the unravelling reads like freefall. I was gripped; and horrified.

A chapter from the end I had to stop reading, have a nip of whisky and a howl. This is one of those books, I realised, in which main characters die. In fact, EVERYONE might die.

The refugee camp in which main character Olanna ultimately finds herself (with daughter and husband) is portrayed as desolate and void of hope. Families steal from one another. Soldiers and officials are corrupt. Information is withheld by authorities in order to prevent panic, with the result that communities are exposed, helplessly, to the advancing enemy attack. Children are dying of disease and malnutrition. After a neighbour's child succumbs to kwashiorkor, the protein deficiency that causes stick thin arms and distended bellies in children affected by famine, Olanna's daughter Baby also develops the tell-tale signs.

This is hard reading. As I've said, I don't have much more than a basic understanding of the conflict but everything I've read tells me this is a shameful chapter in a longer story of exploitation. In that story, colonial powers act to protect their economic interests (oil, natural mineral wealth). Arbitrary boundaries are drawn to create false nation states. Later, the faction deemed most suitable to carry out rule by proxy in this nation state is armed. Lastly, the colonial power denies responsibility for the human toll of subsequent factional violence.

And what a toll. A Wikipedia entry about the Nigerian-Biafran conflict puts the death toll at two million, with two thirds of the dead being young children. The Nigerian government (supported by Britain) blockaded food supplies when the Biafran land borders were encircled. I'm told that Medecins Sans Frontiers was created by French doctors who first volunteered to support the starving, trapped Biafran people. Civilian and NGO outrage at the treatment of Biafrans was so high, these groups delivered aid by air.

But back to the book. It's beautifully written. The African idioms, written in English, are unlike anything I've read (yet I understood perfectly what they meant). I'll read this again someday. It's is a book that deserves its accolades.

I will urge my friends to read it but will do so with a warning. I'll say: what stays with me is the new knowledge of the Igbo people's terrible suffering. You might be better informed than I am about this. You might not find yourself so shocked and dismayed. But you may discover, like me, that once you've seen it, you can't unsee the line that connects your white comfort to this history of violence.

So go. Read. I'll keep reading too.