Although oral African literature has been sung and recited for thousands of years, the African novel is a relatively recent phenomenon that emerged in the 20th century with the spread of education and literacy. The classic modern African novel is Chinua Achebe's tragic Things Fall Apart (1958), which, however iconic, can not lay claim to the title of the first African novel. That honor most likely belongs to Sol Plaatje, whose Mhudi: An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago (1930) was the first novel in English published by a black South African. As for West African authors, Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town (1952) gained an international readership several years before Achebe's first novel. Both Tutuola and Achebe came from a geographical location that we now call "Nigeria," but when their books were published, Nigeria did not exist as an independent political state.

The "Big Three" of black African literature, however, are unquestionably Achebe, often acclaimed as "the father of the African novel," fellow Nigerian dramatist and essayist Wole Soyinka, and Kenya's prolific Ngugi Wa'Thiong. With the publication of her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, the prize-winning young novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has advanced her claim to inherit their mantle and, in so doing, is pointing to important new directions for African literature.

While the latest work of the Big Three has turned toward satirical political allegory—see for example Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Soyinka's King Baabu (2002), and Ngugi's Wizard of the Crow (2006)—Adichie has opted instead to employ a sprawling Dickensian narrative to depict the all-too-common post-independence African cycle of cynicism, coups, and corruption. Her epic exploration of the themes of authentic identity, love, and sacrifice employs realism rather than the strategies more commonly found in African fiction today: self-conscious metafiction, broad allegory, or magic realism.

Half of a Yellow Sun chronicles the new nation of Nigeria in the Sixties, culminating with the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1971), a cataclysmic event that still scars Nigerian memory today much as Vietnam sears the American conscience. Both of Adichie's grandfathers died in the Biafran War, and the book is dedicated, in part, to them. Born in Nigeria, the 29-year-old Adichie now divides her time between there and the United States. Half of a Yellow Sun represents a significant advance from her promising first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2004), which features a typical coming-of-age scenario but delivers that story with lyrical prose and lush metaphors. Adichie's account, in that book, of competing visions of Christianity in contemporary Nigeria is both respectful and insightful.

The far more complex Half of a Yellow Sun moves among three central characters: an uneducated but intelligent village boy named Ugwu; the luminously beautiful and privileged Olanna; and the British expatriate and would-be writer Richard Churchill, drawn to Nigeria by the magnificence of Igbo art. Skillfully employing the third-person limited perspective, Adichie depicts events from the contrasting viewpoints of each of these three characters.

The novel opens in the early Sixties with a superbly assured and engaging narrative voice: "Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair. Ugwu's aunt said this in a low voice as they walked along the path." Although the reader might initially suspect that "Master" is a British colonial, we soon learn that Ugwu has come to the university town of Nsukka to become the houseboy for Odenigbo, an Igbo mathematics professor and passionate revolutionary. Chapter 2 is centered in the consciousness and vocabulary of Olanna, a well-educated young woman from a wealthy and influential Igbo family, who loves Odenigbo and moves in with him despite her family's disapproval. In Chapter 3 we enter the world of shy, awkward, red-faced Richard Churchill, who falls in love with Olanna's physically and emotionally angular twin sister, Kainene.

The novel cycles through these three perspectives, with the occasional insertion, in a different typeface, of passages titled "The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died." These sections describe a book that an unnamed author is writing about the Biafran War. "The Book" succinctly supplies the history that forms the background for the intellectual and emotional human drama. It is a brilliant narrative strategy.

Less successful is the movement back and forth between two time periods: the early Sixties and the personal and political events leading up to the war, and the late Sixties and the horrors of the war and famine. I'm not sure what Adichie gains by this ruptured chronology other than the obvious sense of chaos and confusion. However, it does function to create narrative suspense about a key incident in the complicated personal relationships of Olanna, Kainene, Odenigbo, and Richard. Since we already know the outcome of the war—an inevitable problem with the genre of the historical novel—perhaps such a strategy is useful.

The novel's complex structure and psychological realism are supported by an elegant prose sparingly spiced with metaphors and sensual detail. Adichie captures the sights, smells, and texture of Nigerian life, with vivid accounts of intricately embroidered agbadas, pepper soup, chicken boiled in bitter herbs, armpit powder, and the melodious sounds of High Life, the popular Nigerian dance music of the Sixties that was one of first contemporary fusions of African and Western music.

The novel's sprawl captures the diversity of people who make up Nigeria: the wealthy élite, feisty and brutal soldiers, simple village people, intellectual nationalists, corrupt politicians, well-meaning but ineffective priests, and British and American expatriates who have come to this slice of west Africa for differing complicated reasons. Who among this cast deserves to be called a Nigerian? Who deserves to be called Biafran? What is Nigeria? And what is Biafra? Does loving a place and devoting your life to it earn one the right of belonging? Or does place of birth or tribal identity take precedent?

Such questions of identity arise in uniquely African fashion because of Nigeria's colonial past. At the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884, where European statesmen divided up the African goodies, drawing what Joseph Conrad describes in Heart of Darkness as "a large shining map marked with all the colours of a rainbow," Britain triumphed over France by grabbing two protectorates around the Niger River: The North and the South. The North was primarily made up of Hausa-Fulani, who were Muslim and hierarchically ruled by a system of emirs collecting taxes for the British. The South was full of many tribes, with the Yoruba dominating the southwest and the Igbo the southeast. The Igbo, whose colonial downfall is so movingly told in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, lived in small republican communities, were hard-working traders, and dangerously ambitious. They were quickly Christianized, recognizing the practical and spiritual value in the life promoted by the missionaries. But the British had to create an artificial and quickly corrupted system of "warrant chiefs" to administer the Igbo, since, as Adichie writes, "they did not have the good sense to have kings." In 1914, the British governor-general joined all of these religiously, socially, and culturally disparate people into a single protectorate, and Nigeria was born.

The arbitrary lines drawn around the Niger by cigar-smoking politicians in Brussels had long-lasting, violent ramifications that we still see played out daily in world news. Nigeria gained its independence in 1960, but before the British left, they wrote a constitution favoring the Muslim North. There were many problems in the early years of independence—heavy foreign debt, overly ambitious development projects, and corrupt governmental officials—but the fragile unity was violently destroyed in 1966 when thousands of Igbo living in the North were brutally massacred by Hausas. A large portion of the remaining Igbo fled to the South, and in less than a year, the Igbo declared independence from Nigeria and formed Biafra, with a new flag featuring half of a yellow sun. Yet because the southeast had significant oil reserves that Nigeria did not want to lose, it set about starving the Igbo into submission.

Perhaps as many as two million Biafrans died in the conflict, many of them women and children. (The toll taken by atrocities committed on both sides prompted the creation of Doctors Without Borders.) Such difficult political issues both inform and parallel the moral complexities with which the characters struggle in their private lives, keeping the novel realistic and readable without succumbing to the pull of the national allegory that Frederick Jameson claims is the fate of all African novels.

Spoiler alert! On the final page, we learn who wrote "The Book": "Ugwu writes his dedication last: For Master, my good man." The span of Ugwu's life—naive village youth, houseboy provided with an education through the charity of his employer, unwilling and dehumanized conscript in the Biafran army, and finally author of The Book, a testimonial to the suffering of his people—epitomizes the heights and depths of Igbo history and identity.

Susan VanZanten Gallagher is professor of English and Director of the Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development at Seattle Pacific University.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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