32   Nigeria – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Half of a yellow sun – February 2016 (Score 9.25)

Ugwu’s aunty is taking him to a new home where he will learn to be the house-boy for Master. It is a distance from their small village in Eastern Nigeria since they had to talk a lorry part way and have now been walking for a considerable time. His sister Analika also lives in the village. His new Master works in the mathematics department of the university in Nsukku. They speak Igbo.

Master tells him to call him by his name, Odenigbo. He tries, but is uncomfortable and slips quickly back to Master.

Olanna and her family are from west of Nsukku, and are clearly very wealthy. She has met Odenigbo. Kainene is Olanna’s sister. They are growing distant. Olanna is going to Kano in the north.

There are several hints of racism among the people whom we meet. Olanna’s cousins would never marry a man from another tribe. Mohammad’s mother did not want him to marry Olanna since “this Igbo woman would “taint the lineage with infidel blood”, though I am not sure whether that is racism, religious hatred or both. There is an interesting statement on page 72 that Igbo were a people who “deposed gods when they had outlived their usefulness”. Odenigbo’s mother would never allow Odenigbo to marry Olanna.

There is a military coup. Igbo are assaulted on the streets because locals think that they are behind the coup. In a later coup Hausa officers in the Nigerian army kill Igbo officers. The horror builds up. Igbo refugees are arriving from the north to escape the massacres.

Richard, who takes a role in the later parts of the book breaks with his fiancée since she says dreadful things about the Igbo like “they are uncivilised, just like the Jews (!!!!!)”, and “they had it coming” even though she clearly knew about the massacres.

Independence is finally declared for Eastern Nigeria under the name of “Biafra”, their flag being as described in the name of the book. A great sense of hope and relief sweeps through the people of Biafra. I, as the reader, know very well the horrors yet to come since I was a young man in my last year at university at the time of the start of the Biafran war in 1967, and read, listened and watched the news of what was happening right up till the end in 1970 when Biafra had been pummelled into submission. The Biafran engineer who worked in my office showed us newspapers and magazines from overseas which clearly demonstrated (assuming they had no reason to lie) that the British media were biased and misleading (assuming that the foreign media were not lying).

Adichie tells of bombers and fighters from UK, Europe and elsewhere bombing hospitals and refugee camps and strafing fleeing refugees from each city as it fell to the Nigerians. Food aid was prevented to the extent that kwashiorkor was given a new name – Harold Wilson Syndrome. Public libraries are burned, and even people’s individual book collections are destroyed. The war stops, but petty violence, theft and bullying by the Nigerian soldiers continues.

I felt very emotional when I reached the end of the book and read the dedication which finished it.

This is a harrowing story, but I think it is a story which had to be told. Once again we can see that much of the problem between the various tribes was caused by the divide and rule policies of the colonial masters in their greed for oil and raw materials. I scored it at 10.0.