Half of a Yellow Sun
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Alfred A. Knopf, Hardcove
September 2006, $24.95

Reviewed by Richard Stack

First novels have a habit of being autobiographical: stories of coming-of-age. Second novels are more varied, but often represent the effort to come to terms with the lives and the world of the parents, in the period, perhaps, before the writer was born. Instead of a fictionalized self, then, we have a fictionalized family history, and if one gets going on this project early enough, parents and their friends will still be available, as they were to our author, to talk about their experiences.
Half of a Yellow Sun is such a book. It recounts the early married life of twin sisters, the beautiful one with a great figure whom everyone falls in love with, and the skinny one, tart and skeptical, who gets things done. It covers a period of some six or seven years, between 1962 or so, to 1969, ending about eight years before the author's birth.
The twins, both well-educated, have grown up in an affluent world in the capital, their father a wealthy, politically connected businessman. When we first meet them they are in the middle of falling in love and beginning a family. They have moved from the capital to a university town where the two men work, one as a brilliant and charismatic mathematics professor with a strongly political bent, the other as a writer, a rather romantic foreigner who has abandoned his career at home as a journalist and has come to settle in their country in the hope of turning himself into a writer, and who naturally falls in with the university crowd. For the first years, the two sisters are rather wary of each other, but as time goes by they move closer and closer together.
The structure of the book is rather unusual. It is divided into four parts: "The Early Sixties", then, "The Late Sixties", then "The Early Sixties" again, and then "The Late Sixties" again. There is no single narrator, so we move fluidly, from chapter to chapter, from one focal character to the next, gradually filling out our understanding of them and their families and the contexts in which they live. Each of main figures is richly drawn, three-dimensional, idiosyncratic, and we develop great sympathy and affection for them as the story moves along, and come to care very much about what is in store for them, as all the very best novels make us do. Not for a moment is there a sense that they are mere "characters", standing in for a certain array of attributes which might, in the hands of a lesser writer, be used merely as a means of illustrating the history in which they are embedded.
There is one further central character, with whom the novel begins and ends. He is about 13 when we first meet him, and is being brought into town from his native village by his mother, who has heard that the Maths Professor is looking for someone to work in his house. He is an extremely clever, adept boy who has had almost no schooling, and his slogan is: "can learn very fast." His adolescence provides a counterpoint to the lives of the others, and we stay very close to him in his tentative explorations of his new sexuality and growing skills, as cook, nurse and general housekeeper. As with the other figures in the story we become very fond of him, as do his employers, and anxious about what is to become of him in the tumultuous and tragic events soon to engulf them all. In fact, he finally emerges as himself a writer, committed to telling the story of this time.
The novel is set in the recently independent Nigeria, and a couple of background notes may be in order for those unfamiliar with the history of this country. A product of the Berlin conference of 1885 which carved up the African continent among the European powers, in what is generally referred to as the "Scramble for Africa," Nigeria was initially divided into two British protectorates, one in the North, where the principal tribal group was the Hausa, who ruled a Muslim Kingdom, and the southern, in which the two principal groupings were the Yoruba in the West, and in the East a non-monarchical tribal grouping mostly speaking the Igbo language (formerly referred to, incorrectly, as "Ibo"). The Igbo, who had had contact with the Europeans for some time, had, for the most part, become Christian.
Britain made the fateful decision, in 1914, to incorporate its two protectorates into a single country, leading to endless trouble between the two quite distinct parts of the country, particularly in the period following independence in 1960, a chaotic time, with things coming to a head in a coup in January of 1966. It was thought that those leading the coup had been Igbo officers, and there followed a widespread massacre of Igbos in regions other than the Southeast, sometimes called Igboland. By the late summer, the military commander in the East had proclaimed the region an independent Republic, which he called Biafra. The central government imposed a blockade, and waged a bombing war on the Biafrans for the next several years, causing widespread death, mostly through starvation, until the seccessionist state finally capitulated at the end of the decade.
It is this series of events which form the context for the novel, set almost entirely in Igboland, and dealing with the fate of the little group I have described earlier.They all become deeply involved with the fight to maintain Biafran independence, but gradually their resistance is worn down, as they become refugees moving further and further to the East, as the Nigerian federal troops gradually conquer the land. One becomes almost unbearably anxious about them as things get worse and worse, so I will give away the fact that almost all of the characters do manage, somehow, to survive the horrors of bombing and near-starvation.
But I want to lay stress on the fact that this is not primarily a political novel, but a novel about a group of people undergoing a catastrophe and somehow enduring. The political events are generally outside their purview, even though they are from the intellectual class. The information they receive is totally unreliable radio propaganda from both sides, and they desperately cling to their belief that somehow they will prevail.

The one non-Igbo character, Richard, has come to Nigeria because he has, as he repeatedly says, fallen in love with a beautiful bronze vase, which had been excavated some years earlier at a site called Igbo-Ukwu and dated from a period some thousand years ealier. The Igbo are of very ancient lineage, and are great craftsmen, but how such an ambitious piece could have come to be cast, using such refined and elaborate techniques, in a rainforest in South-eastern Nigeria has caused enormous perplexity, even the suggestion that it may have been as a result of the influence of bronze-casters from Indonesia. In any case, this beautiful vase, now in the museum at Lagos, serves as a continued reminder of the great antiquity of Igbo civilization, of the extraordinary resourcefulness of its people, and of the vigorous local tribal culture.
And this, ultimately, is the message of this moving tribute to her people which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has composed. Our sense of the canon of Great Novels is, of course, the product of their reception over a long period, but I suspect it will not be long before Half of a Yellow Sun (the title is a description of the hopeful flag of the short-lived Biafran republic) becomes a classic, and not just of Nigerian literature, in the Igbo tradition inaugurated by her illustrious Igbo predessor, Chinua Achebe, best known for his extraordinary novel, Things Fall Apart, dealing with the travails of his country as it was taken over by the British in the late nineteenth-century, but will, like Achebe's book, come to take its place in world literature, alongside the masterpieces of the post-colonial world.

Achichie has recently enrolled in the African Studies department at Yale, and gave a reading a few weeks ago, at the Yale Bookstore. For those (like myself) who missed it, and who are prepared to drive a bit, there will be another at South Hadley in Massachussets, half an hour or so north of Hartford. Wednesday, Oct. 11, at 7 p.m., Odyssey Bookshop, 9 College St. South Hadley, MA. Reading and Signing. Tel: 413.534.7307.