Cosy sleep-in with the Biafra war

At the beginning of Chimamanda Adichie’s big book, Half of a Yellow Sun, one of the more original creatures in African literature makes his first appearance disguised as a hackneyed staple of the genre — upcountry lad come to the big city under the suspicious watch of a reluctant relative.

He is attached to a cranky upper-class gentleman — himself a recognisable type — as a domestic help. The gentleman is an intellectual; the lad is bewitched by his books.

But the essential narrative bump appears not too deep into the book. Before he has spent a single night as house servant, the boy pockets a chicken wing.

Ah! Stories of this kind — the poor villager coming to better himself in the metropolis — have populated the novel for ages. But not even Thomas Hardy, Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka ever had a character pocket a greasy piece of chicken.

The early signs are that we are in for something sumptuous. So the eyes move faster over the printed lines.

Because of the chicken alone, you think you know Ugwu, the upcountry boy.

You start to like Chimamanda Adichie, his creator, warm up to the book and when in later pages, the narrative is not all about purloined chicken parts, you start to take in the scale on which this novel is set.

It is an ambitious one: The engaging university intellectuals’ chatter comes to pass; the central character is described as “illogically pretty” — and suddenly we find that we are immersed in a theatre of horror, that baffling conflict central to modern Nigerian history — the Biafran war.

Henceforth, one settles down to the kind of book we have not had much of on the continent since Wole Soyinka’s novel, The Interpreters back in 1965.

Her second published novel behind her, this young Nigerian is arguably the first of the new generation of African writers to break with the 1960s structure and sketch a new diagram of how the continent’s complex story can be constructed:

Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus was something of a curiosity: A precocious, perceptive girl-narrator centred that family novel about religion, class, corruption and oppression. But the story of Purple Hibiscus was passive, potentially inchoate.

Its more urgent themes were set at a distance and only through the family telescope could we sense the gravitational pull of corruption and oppression as they orbited beyond the outer reaches of the pages. We knew them only by how their gravitational force dimmed the family lights in and out.

But the real star of Purple Hibiscus was the writer herself.

This foundling book, more beautifully written in its opening pages than the rest of it manages to live up to, introduced the real gifts of Chimamanda — her authorial distinction, her ability to notice the scarcely anticipated, gifts that keep even the worst books afloat.

In Half of a Yellow Sun, she is once more the star, except it is not always a good thing.