The paper deals with the Nigerian Civil War 1967-70 and its representation in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) and other texts.
The first part of the paper aims to look at Adichie’s text in the light of earlier texts by, amongst others, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and Chinua Achebe. The novel offers an imaginative insight into the psychological responses to the war, influenced by the intervening thirty years, particularly in the field of feminist writing. The analysis will concentrate on trying to situate the texts in a local (Biafran or Nigerian) context.
When Adichie recalls Biafra she not only makes a statement about memory in Nigeria. Biafra, when the war lasted, has a central place in the shaping of images of Africa. Starving children became the representation of the war, and by extension of Africa. It took many years for NGOs like the Red Cross and Save the Children to begin to correct this image of helplessness. Interestingly, while the rest of the world probably thinks it started to help Africa with emergency aid in a big way with the aid to Biafra, Adichie describes the aid as being too little too late. There were Biafra committees in several Western countries working for increased aid and, politically, for the recognition of Biafra. Their political colour was liberal. For the left Biafra was at best confusing, at worst uninteresting because of the humanitarian aid syndrome. These issues are discussed as a contribution to the discourse on the complex making of memory and the discussion on changing images of Africa, inside Africa and in the West.