By Claire
Armitstead
The title of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s
award-winning novel comes from the flag of Biafra, embodying the breakaway
state’s hopes during the brief three years of its existence in the Nigerian
civil war. As one of her central characters, Olanna, explains to a group of
schoolchildren: “Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the north,
black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have,
and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future.”
For me, growing up in the north of Nigeria, the
symbolism seemed very different: it showed one half of a wilfully bisected
country, and I was living in the half that the insurrection had rendered
invisible. The shocking revelation of this extraordinary novel was the extent
to which invisibility was indeed the issue, but not in the way that I had
believed.
I was born just as Nigeria became independent, and have
always found it hard to explain my relationship with it. My primary school, in
the northern (predominantly Muslim) city of Kaduna, had posters of President Yakubu
Gowon on the wall. We drove to school along Tafawa Balewa Way, named after
Nigeria’s first and only prime minister, whose assassination in 1966 was one of
the triggers for the war.The country was postcolonial, in that expatriates (at
least the ones I knew) didn’t own land but were part of an international
business, academic and diplomatic community.
In so far as one can talk of belonging, in a
society where people blew in for three or four years and then blew out again,
we belonged to a global middle class. For the first 14 years of my life we were
the stayers, with Nigerian friends who had servants, as we did, some of whom
had to be smuggled south when the war began.
I had looked in vain for my story in fiction.
But most Nigerian novels, understandably, have no time for the expatriate
experience, while the literature of white writers from other parts of Africa describes
an entirely different social and economic set-up. I had also devoured
histories of Nigeria, which spelled out the facts of the civil war. But it took
Adichie’s novel to shock me into a truer and profoundly different understanding
of the conflict – and, by extension, my own identity.
Half of a Yellow Sun opens in a bungalow full
of academics who sit around drinking beer, listening to music on a gleaming new
radiogram and arguing about politics. Twin sisters Olanna and Kainene are from
a wealthy family, and it’s not long before their mother is scuttling off to
England with a bra stuffed full of jewellery.Kainene’s lover Richard is an
English academic who, in the language of the day, has “gone native”: he’s
writing a book about “roped pots”, which made me smile, because I knew lots of
Richards, and the north at the time was crawling with ethnographers and bargain
hunters who were obsessed with the distinctive grey earthenware produced by a
small town called Abuja.
This intimate portrayal of a particular
society at a particular time both matched my experience and challenged every
presumption I had ever held. Words I grew up with – “assassination”, “coup” and
“reprisal killings” – are scrupulously dismantled and exposed as the nuts and
bolts of a well-oiled propaganda machine. In the alternative propaganda of the
Biafrans, federal soldiers are “vandals”; what we regarded as “tribal killings”
are reframed as a “pogrom”.
Finally, someone had articulated my situation
The idea that I could have been living a
normal life in a country where children were dying in their millions of the
malnutrition disease kwashiorkor is both unsurprising, because the images were
plastered around the world as part of a huge publicity offensive, and shocking,
because in some deeply programmed part of myself I still believed them to be
simply advertising (pot-bellied, skinny-limbed children were all around us in a
provincial capital that was a magnet for the rural poor).
The reason I could so closely identify with
Adichie’s Igbo Nigeria is that she observes it through the eyes of
insider-outsiders. The first is Ugwu, a bright young village boy brought in as
a servant, whose inquisitive eyes pick over every nuance of class and place,
and whose education from his “master” Odenigbo gives the novel its political
underpinning: “They will teach you that a white man called Mungo Park
discovered River Niger. That is rubbish. Our people fished in the Niger long
before Mungo Park’s grandfather was born. But in your exam, write that it was
Mungo Park,” says Odenigbo.
In the pantheon of my own early education,
Park stood alongside Lord Lugard, who established British control in northern
Nigeria in the early years of the 20th century. The house of assembly for
Kaduna state still, extraordinarily, bears his name.
In later chapters, Richard’s awkward
perspective – as a white man married to a black woman, who forsakes his
academic work to become Biafra’s director of propaganda – illuminates the
colonial fantasy that underpins the whole mess.
“I want to see the real Biafrans,” says a
sweaty American journalist, faced with the reality of starving children in a refugee
camp. “Richard knew his type,” writes Adichie. “He was like president Nixon’s
fact-finders from Washington or prime minister Wilson’s commission members from
London who arrived with their firm protein tablets and their firmer
conclusions: that Nigeria was not bombing civilians, that the starvation was
overflogged, that all was as well as it should be in the war.”
These were the stories that we believed in
Kaduna, along with the radio bulletins that belted out of our shiny new
radiogram. Richard himself is not innocent of twisting facts into fictions to
serve an ideology – there are no saints in this novel – but the final pages see
him passing the storytelling baton over to Ugwu. “The war isn’t my story to
tell, really,” he says. “Ugwu nodded. He had never thought that it was.”
Finally, someone had articulated my
situation. By challenging my understanding of my history, and explaining why I
felt so blocked, this book changed me more than any other I have read. It gave
me the other half of a yellow sun.
Culled from The Guardian. The author, Claire Armitstead is books
editor for the Guardian and Observer. She presents the weekly Guardian books
podcast and is a regular commentator on radio, and at live events across the UK
and internationally
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