Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
✣ Key Facts OVERVIEW
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian writer whose
Conflict: parents lived through the Nigerian civil war (1967–70),
Nigerian Civil War
re-creates her own national and cultural history in Half of
Time Period: a Yellow Sun (2006), a novel set against the backdrop of
Late 20th Century the fighting. At the heart of the civil war was the attempt
Genre: of the Igbo (Ibo) to secede from newly independent
Novel Nigeria and establish a separate independent state, Bia-
fra. Adichie’s novel describes the volatile atmosphere of
Awards:
David T. Wong the years just after Nigeria gained its independence from
International Short Britain in 1960. Through her characters she explores
Story Prize, PEN Center, what it was like to be an Igbo during this period, when
2002; Anisfield-Wolf
Book Award, 2007;
the people endured the terrors of war and persecution,
Beyond Margins Award, took pride in standing up to those who wanted to anni-
International Pen, 2007; hilate them, and suffered the pain of Biafra’s final defeat.
Orange Broadband Prize
Adichie follows a group of intertwined characters
for fiction, 2007
through the war: the twin sisters Olanna and Kainene,
members of the Igbo upper class, who differ both in
appearance and in the choices they make in their lives;
Odenigbo, a Pan-Africanist teaching at the local uni-
versity and Olanna’s lover; Richard, Kainene’s lover, a
shy, obstinately principled Englishman who supports
the Biafran cause; and Ugwu, who comes from a poor
village and works as Odenigbo’s houseboy. Narrated
from the viewpoints of Olanna, Richard, and Ugwu,
the novel depicts the drastic alterations in the charac-
ters’ daily lives as postindependence prosperity gives
way to the deprivations and violence of wartime.
HISTORICAL AND LITERARY CONTEXT
The Nigerian civil war, or Nigerian-Biafran War,
began in 1967 when the southeastern province of
Biafra, where the Igbo were the dominant ethnic
group, seceded from Nigeria to form the Republic of
Biafra. The British government had created Nigeria
and defined its borders in the early twentieth century
without regard for the fact that the people belonged
to different ethnic groups. In 1960 Nigeria gained its
independence from Britain. The new Nigerian con-
stitution attempted to unify the country politically
by balancing bureaucratic responsibilities among the
three sectors defined by the major ethnic divisions in
the country—the Hausa and Fulani in the north, the
Yoruba in the southwest, and the Igbo in the south-
east. The strategy was not effective, however. Tensions
between the groups led to a series of armed conflicts
and coups, ending in the ascension of a military dicta-
150 THE LITERATURE OF WAR ✣ VOLUME 3 ✣ IMPACTS
(c) 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
torship with General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo,
at its head. A countercoup by officers from the north
left Major General Yakubu Gowon in charge. Despite
attempts by the new military government to alleviate
the ethnic tensions in the country, over a period of
several months in 1966 thousands of Igbos living in
northern Nigeria were massacred, leading to the rise of
a secessionist movement in Biafra. Biafra’s three-year
war of secession was ultimately unsuccessful, however.
According to John Hawley in “Biafra as Heritage
and Symbol,” the Nigerian civil war exemplifies the
postcolonial problem in Africa. Hawley describes how
“the ‘nation’ that follows colonialism” is often “a prob-
lematic assemblage of peoples who frequently enough
have little more in common than proximity … The injus-
tices of pitting one ethnic group against another that
became a modus operandi of colonial government …
continue to undermine the chances for stability and
healing in a newly colonializing world.” Adichie takes
this position when she says that colonial policy man-
ufactured hatred “by the informal divide-and-rule
policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies
manipulated the differences between the tribes and
ensured that unity would not exist.”
Adichie belongs to what is known as the “third
generation” of Nigerian writers. After Chinua Achebe
brought Nigerian writing to the international stage in
the 1950s, particularly with his 1958 novel Things Fall
Apart, second-generation writers such as Niyi Osun-
dare and Tess Onwueme wrote strongly nationalis-
tic novels in the 1980s. Authors and activists, these
writers attempted to help the country heal from the
civil war by constructing a unified Nigerian identity.
In contrast, third-generation Nigerian writers, includ-
ing Chris Abani, Helen Habila, and Helen Oyeyemi,
see themselves as part of a global culture and there-
fore tend to raise questions about ethnic and national
identities and about the relationship between narrative
forms and these identities. These novelists, including
Adichie, often depict the war at a micro level, focusing
on the conflict’s impact on a few individuals. Adichie is
distinguished within the third generation by her abil-
ity to capture aspects of Nigeria’s past that are relevant
to the country’s modern culture. For example, Hugh
Hodges points out in Postcolonial Text the ways in
which “the legacy of the Biafran War (itself the legacy
of colonial policy) continues to shape life in Nigeria.”
 HALF OF A YELLOW SUN

Adichie’s novel also differs from other literature of the

Nigerian civil war, Hodges argues, in that she does not
attempt to provide closure. Rather, her novel “drama-
tizes its own incompleteness, its inability to compre-
hend (in both senses of the word) the Biafran War,”
showing the way that the day-to-day difficulties of the
characters prevent them from seeing the larger histori-
cal and political issues surrounding the war.

THEMES AND STYLE

Adichie has acknowledged the influence of Chinua
Achebe on her work. Perhaps most crucial is her appre-
ciation of the way in which Achebe relates individual
characters to a linguistic and narrative history. This
produces work with what she describes in an introduc-
tion to a collection of his novels—quoted in “The Man
Who Rediscovered Africa”—as “strong communitarian
values” that emphasize the role of storytelling and lit-
erature in creating and maintaining communities. Half
of a Yellow Sun is similarly concerned with the act of
storytelling as one of the building blocks of communi-
ties and families. In an author’s note Adichie also cites
the inspiration of her parents, who taught her that what
they experienced during the war was less important than
the fact that they survived it. Adichie thus signals that
her intent in Half of a Yellow Sun is not to provide a con-
clusive account of the war but to convey its relevance for
Nigerian culture and the Nigerian diaspora. Her novel
shows the war through the eyes of her characters, focus-
ing as much on the way it affects domestic life and the
relationships between sisters, lovers, and friends as it
does on larger historical events. Within this two-level
plot structure, the personal stories parallel the history
of Nigeria from independence to the war’s end. As the the question of whose story is recorded as history, reveal-
characters are forced to leave their home for a refugee ing the prejudices in international media accounts of the August 8, 1968, a Nigerian
camp at Umuahia, the war comes to life through their refugee from a refugee
war and, by implication, of Nigeria and Africa. In Stud-
daily struggle for food and water and their attempts to camp near Owerri during
ies in the Novel, Amy Novak notes that Adichie’s novel the Biafra war, which killed
maintain family ties in the context of terror and violence. “actively questions the objective authority of the Western between 1 and 2 million
The novel’s title, which refers to a symbol on the observer to know Nigeria,” pointing to occasions when people, most from hunger
flag of the Biafran rebellion, indicates Adichie’s inter- Richard tries to get his journalistic writings published and disease, between
est in the future. According to Olanna’s explanation only to be told that his pieces are “bland and pedantic,” 1967 to 1970. 
of the flag’s symbolism, “Red was the blood of the as he is pressed for such details as “tribal incantations” or © OFF / AFP /
siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourn- “anecdotes in which the soldiers ate body parts.” Richard GETTY IMAGES
ing them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would also seems to be writing the book-within-the-book titled
have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the The World Was Silent When We Died, which is excerpted
glorious future.” The reference to the “glorious future” throughout the novel. In the end, however, it becomes
suggests that the novel returns to Nigeria’s violent past clear that the houseboy Ugwu, in a symbolic develop-
not to demand vengeance, mourn the dead, or place ment, is the book’s author. The last lines of the novel
blame for the war; rather, it attempts to understand include a dedication from the writer of The World Was
the human side of the war in order to create a cultural Silent When We Died that reads, “For Master, my good
heritage that will allow for a such a future. man,” indicating that Ugwu is in fact the one whose nar-
Another theme of the novel is the difficulty of talk- ration of the war will survive. His work reclaims the role
ing and writing about war. For example, when Olanna of storytelling that records history in the African voice.
witnesses a massacre in the streets, she finds that she is
unable to talk about it: “Her lips were heavy. Speaking CRITICAL DISCUSSION
was a labor.” When Richard sees Igbos murdered while Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie’s second novel, has been
waiting in the airport, he later says that he could not praised for its treatment of the Nigerian civil war from
write about it because “the words were too risible. They the point of view of individuals caught up in the tides
were too melodramatic.” Moreover, the novel addresses of history. Critics have commended the author for her

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(c) 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

FAMILIES, COMMUNITIES, COUNTRIES
SPEAKING OUT AGAINST NIGERIA’S
OPPRESSIVE REGIME
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun is widely considered
to be one of the most lucid and authentic portrayals of the Nigerian
civil war of the late 1960s, when the Igbo people made a doomed
attempt to secede from the country. In his searing novella Song for
Night (2007), the Nigerian poet and writer Chris Abani creates another
fictional portrait of a West African nation torn apart by civil war. His
novel revolves around My Luck, a fifteen-year-old soldier traveling
across a ravaged landscape in search of his fellow platoon members.
As he wanders the countryside, Luck reflects on his chilling past, a
device Abani uses to reveal how a society that has descended into
violence transforms its children into cold-blooded killers.
A member of the so-called third generation of Nigerian authors
and of Igbo descent, Abani asserted his radical political and artistic
ideas at a young age. His involvement with guerrilla theater activi-
ties eventually aroused the suspicion of the government, and he was
jailed repeatedly during the 1980s. He then narrowly averted a death
sentence by permanently fleeing his homeland. In his portrait of the
adolescent Igbo soldier, Abani imagines the fate of many of his fellow
citizens who were not fortunate enough to escape Nigeria’s bloody
history.
ability to convey a believable account of the war through
psychologically complex characters. Merle Rubin, for
example, describes Adichie in a review of the novel in
the Los Angeles Times as “engaging this large subject on
the personal level by portraying it vividly and poignantly
through the eyes of well-crafted characters.” Hodges
writes that this focus on characterization, because it dram-
atizes the impossibility of providing a complete account
of the war, enables Adichie to present a vision of the war
that is compelling to readers who have not lived through
it. “What is needed in war fiction,” he concludes, “is the
limited, fragile human perspective.” While most critics
view Adichie’s work in relation to that of other Nigerian
writers, Nathan Oates, writing in the Missouri Review,
sets Half of a Yellow Sun in the larger context of contem-
porary fiction, arguing that it exemplifies a general trend
toward “direct engagement with political events and their
impact on the state of the individual.”
A number of critics have addressed Adichie’s treat-
ment of female characters and her examination of gen-
der politics in postcolonial Nigeria. Susan Z. Andrade
argues in Research in African Literatures that, while ear-
lier Nigerian women writers used allegories to portray
national politics, contemporary writers such as Adichie
focus on female characters, addressing the question
of Nigerian identity through tales of domestic life. In
Research in African Literatures, Jane Bryce also sees a
shift in Nigerian literature between “forms of feminine
identity evident in earlier women’s writing [that were]
152 THE LITERATURE OF WAR ✣ VOLUME 3 ✣ IMPACTS
(c) 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
constrained by nationalist priorities that privileged mas-
culinity” to “a challenging reconfiguration of national
realities in which the feminine is … unapologetically
central to the realist representation of a recognizable
social world.” On the other hand, critics such as Novak
say that while Half of a Yellow Sun helps define a specifi-
cally Nigerian voice, able to hold its own against those
of the Western world, it does not produce the explicitly
female voice mentioned by Andrade and Bryce.
SOURCES
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Half of a Yellow Sun: A
Novel. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print.
———. “The Man Who Rediscovered Africa: How
Achebe’s Novels Captured the Soul of a Continent—
and Helped Me Discover My Own History.” Salon.com.
Salon Media Group, 23 Jan. 2010. Web. 29 June 2011.
Andrade, Susan Z. “Adichie’s Genealogies: National and
Feminine Novels.” Research in African Literatures 42.2
(2011): 91–101. Print.
Bryce, Jane. “Half and Half Children: Third Generation
Women Writers and the New Nigerian Novel.”
Research in African Literatures 39.1 (Summer 2008):
49–67. Print.
Hawley, John. “Biafra as Heritage and Symbol: Adichie,
Mbachu and Iweala. Research in African Literatures
39.2 (2008): 15–26. Print.
Hodges, Hugh. “Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta and
the Dilemmas of Biafran War Fiction.” Postcolonial
Text 5.1 (2009): 1–13. Print.
Novak, Amy. “Who Speaks? Who Listens? The Problem
of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels.” Studies in
the Novel 40: 1–2 (2008): 31–53. Print.
Oates, Nathan. “Political Stories: The Individual in
Contemporary Fiction.” Missouri Review 30.3 (2007):
156–71. Print.
Rubin, Merle. “Nigeria Civil War Seen from Sharpened
Angles.” Rev. of Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie. Los Angeles Times. Tribune Newspapers,
12 Sept. 2006. Web. 8 July 2011.
FURTHER READING
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor,
1994. Print.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus . Chapel
Hill: Algonquin, 2003. Print.
Griswold, Wendy. Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the
Novel in Nigeria. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print.
McLuckie, Craig W. Nigerian Civil War Literature: Seeking
an “Imagined Community.” Lewiston: Mellen, 1990.
Print.
Napwe, Flora. Never Again. Trenton: Africa World, 1992.
Print.
Saro-Wiwa, Ken. On a Darkling Plain: An Account of the
Nigerian Civil War. London: Saros, 1989. Print.
Soyinko, Wole. The Man Died. New York: Noonday,
1988. Print.
Jennifer Ludwig