The Republic of Biafra was a secessionist state in south-eastern Nigeria. Biafra was inhabited mostly by the Igbo people and existed from 30 May 1967, to 15 January 1970

- Wikipedia.

In the late 1960’s, shortly after gaining their independence from Britain, Nigeria was a collection of diverse regional fragments held together in a fragile clasp. All sections of the country were left competing fiercely for central control and political rights. Soon, several parts of Nigeria began to massacre their Northern Igbo people - those who dominated most of the country’s civil service. And what happened – The victimized Igbo people retaliated and formed their own independent state of Biafra; the bloodthirsty massacres had made fervent Biafrans of former Nigerians. Next, the Nigerians attempted to annex and regain the lost region (the new Biafra was after all economically prolific and full of oils), and this led to a devastating three year civil war in Nigeria. The war ended in 1970, when Biafra was forced to surrender. They had endured horrific violence and severe famine, and more than one million people had died of starvation.

Chidamamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun based on these Igbo people at the time of the Nigerian-Biafran war. The book starts with the early 1960’s, a reasonably peaceful period, when the main characters are introduced. Ugwu at age of 13 leaves his village for Nsukka to work as a houseboy for Odenigbo, an intellectual in spirit and mathematician by mind. Life for him goes well with master Odenigbo, who meets with his scholarly friends in their dimly lit living room every night. Observant and intelligent, Ugwu serves them keenly as they drink brandy and beer and drench their tongues with pepper soup, having heated discussions about the state of affairs in the Nigerian country. Soon to join the household is Olanna, a beautiful young woman with a university diploma and immaculate English. Enchanted by Odenighbo’s self assured eccentricities and fierce moralities, she moves to Nsukka to live with her “revolutionary lover.” Interspersing with the three lives in Nsukka, is the life of the withdrawn and handsome Englishman Richard Churchill, who moves to Nigeria for the love of its local art, and Olanna’s distant, sardonic and smart sister Kainene.

Shift to late 1960’s - The Nigerian Civil War has begun. People are slain to death as bombs roll out of planes, and fall onto the hungry land of Biafra. Massacres loom on large, with the thick sad smoke of destruction spreading like wild fire. Even so, the Biafrans fight against their oppressors with a deep, unyielding faith in their cause. Classrooms are set up as refugee camps, and volunteers run about shoving food and hope down people’s throats. Education is imparted in the neighborhoods, where Olanna forms her class and teaches the famished children about Biafra - Unfurling Odenigbo’s cloth flag she tells them what their flag’s symbols mean. Red for the blood of their brethren massacred in the North, Black for mourning them, Green for the prosperity Biafra would have, and finally, the Half of a Yellow Sun for their glorious future. Each day passes with the Biafrans fighting tough as tigers to live upto the ideals of their flag; they instill in themselves a will to live by believing in their imminent victory as a gospel truth. But the atrocities of war are soon to engulf all traces of hope, and their optimistic song “If the sun refuses to rise, we will make it rise” is finally muted. Death, despair and destruction make the Biafran people cry and shout and beat themselves. Grown men suck their thumbs, mothers roll out and shout in mourning, masters like Odenigbo become unmasterly and undignified; women like Olanna are benumbed and wounded. Love is tested, dreams are broken, war remains war, but people are changed. And even in the midst of their horrific adversities, when the Biafrans decayed in desperate need of justice and of salt, life went on and women wore the latest lace in Lagos - the world was silent, unfeeling and untouched when they died.

Adichie’s Half of a yellow Sun is a story about war, and of love. The writer deftly gives out the most intricate details of war, without getting too stifled by its facts. She successfully puts us in the thick of battle, where bullets whiz by heads, the stench of dead fouls the air, and starvation rots out stomachs. But where she truly conquers, is at portraying human emotions – she never loses track of the personal, the human story. With a firm grasp on imagination and reality, Adichie is true to both, the history of the country, as well as her creative image of it. Her story is of the gratifying kind that shows and not merely explains. It gives a gist of Nigerian history in the form of an engaging tale, without ever seeming like a classroom lecture. Most of war time is accounted for accurately, but minor details are played around with – she stuffs a train station in a town that has none; places towns closer to each other than they really are; and changes the chronology of conquered towns.

They say “The real war can never get in the books” – not so true, for sometimes a book that encloses within it such heartrending volumes of emotional truth, is all that it really takes. Half of A Yellow Sun won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction in Britain and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s incandescent talent was first seen in Purple Hibiscus, her 2004 novel about a childhood devastated by religious patriarchs. The writer’s 2nd novel is magnificent enough to smoothly persuade one to explore her first. This book is no literary idol, and it doesn’t try to be. Nor is it an insistent stance against injustice or violence (Adichie’s own family was subjected to the terrors of the Nigerian civil war). It’s merely a soulful, moving story that shows how war can set fire to the spirit of people. A humanity in print, Half of a Yellow Sun is treasured wealth for the absent country; a precious inheritance of the deceased nation and a fit legacy of its departed generation.

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