Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood.The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character.As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
Half of a Yellow Sun
Copyright (#udab781e5-e5fc-5b65-8910-40e31f51951d)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2007
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2006
Copyright © Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2006
PS section © Sarah O’Reilly 2007, except ‘The Stories of Africa’ and ‘In the Shadow of Biafra’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie © Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2007
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007200283
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007279289
Version: 2017-04-26
Contents
Title Page (#u16e50500-bffa-5329-b9c1-88bbbf014c03)Copyright (#uc48f97d4-ecb7-59a6-a730-961eca44c87c)Dedication (#u91881386-9302-55e3-be5a-0d673f12e9d6)Epigraph (#u666c3e25-25bb-5a2d-99e1-0e88b48a90d5)Part One: The Early Sixties (#u9d86dba8-dfc0-50ea-be1e-2d31a6d0583e)Chapter One (#u4e82620c-18b8-54d6-9383-e64e4646fed8)Chapter Two (#ue4a48181-6532-5bfe-8116-e8fc981ef6a4)Chapter Three (#u2a71e56b-1fb6-5ede-8dc7-1bc3ab8300f1)Chapter Four (#u08f11867-84de-53fb-8dc6-eb81b4397310)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Part Two: The Late Sixties (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)Part Three: The Early Sixties (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Part Four: The Late Sixties (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)Author's Note (#litres_trial_promo)P.S. Ideas, interviews & features… (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)Reviews (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#udab781e5-e5fc-5b65-8910-40e31f51951d)
My grandfathers, whom I never knew,
Nwoye David Adichie and Aro-Nweke Felix Odigwe,
did not survive the war.
My grandmothers, Nwabuodu Regina Odigwe and Nwamgbafor Agnes Adichie, remarkable women both, did.
This book is dedicated to their memories: ka fa nodu na ndokwa.
And to Mellitus, wherever he may be.
Epigraph (#udab781e5-e5fc-5b65-8910-40e31f51951d)
Today I see it still –
Dry, wire-thin in sun and dust of the dry months –
Headstone on tiny debris of passionate courage.
– Chinua Achebe,
From ‘Mango Seedling’ in Christmasin Biafra and Other Poems
PART ONE (#udab781e5-e5fc-5b65-8910-40e31f51951d)
The Early Sixties (#udab781e5-e5fc-5b65-8910-40e31f51951d)
1 (#udab781e5-e5fc-5b65-8910-40e31f51951d)
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 aunty said this in a low voice as they walked on the path. ‘But he is a good man,’ she added. ‘And as long as you work well, you will eat well. You will even eat meat every day.’ She stopped to spit; the saliva left her mouth with a sucking sound and landed on the grass.
Ugwu did not believe that anybody, not even this master he was going to live with, ate meat every day. He did not disagree with his aunty, though, because he was too choked with expectation, too busy imagining his new life away from the village. They had been walking for a while now, since they got off the lorry at the motor park, and the afternoon sun burned the back of his neck. But he did not mind. He was prepared to walk hours more in even hotter sun. He had never seen anything like the streets that appeared after they went past the university gates, streets so smooth and tarred that he itched to lay his cheek down on them. He would never be able to describe to his sister Anulika how the bungalows here were painted the colour of the sky and sat side by side like polite, well-dressed men, how the hedges separating them were trimmed so flat on top that they looked like tables wrapped with leaves.
His aunty walked faster, her slippers making slap-slap sounds that echoed in the silent street. Ugwu wondered if she, too, could feel the coal tar getting hotter underneath, through her thin soles. They went past a sign, ODIM STREET, and Ugwu mouthed street, as he did whenever he saw an English word that was not too long. He smelt something sweet, heady, as they walked into a compound, and was sure it came from the white flowers clustered on the bushes at the entrance. The bushes were shaped like slender hills. The lawn glistened. Butterflies hovered above.
‘I told Master you will learn everything fast, osiso-osiso,’ his aunty said. Ugwu nodded attentively although she had already told him this many times, as often as she told him the story of how his good fortune came about: While she was sweeping the corridor in the Mathematics Department a week ago, she heard Master say that he needed a houseboy to do his cleaning, and she immediately said she could help, speaking before his typist or office messenger could offer to bring someone.
‘I will learn fast, Aunty,’ Ugwu said. He was staring at the car in the garage; a strip of metal ran around its blue body like a necklace.
‘Remember, what you will answer whenever he calls you is Yes,sah!’
‘Yes, sah!’ Ugwu repeated.
They were standing before the glass door. Ugwu held back from reaching out to touch the cement wall, to see how different it would feel from the mud walls of his mother’s hut that still bore the faint patterns of moulding fingers. For a brief moment, he wished he were back there now, in his mother’s hut, under the dim coolness of the thatch roof; or in his aunty’s hut, the only one in the village with a corrugated-iron roof.
His aunty tapped on the glass. Ugwu could see the white curtains behind the door. A voice said, in English, ‘Yes? Come in.’
They took off their slippers before walking in. Ugwu had never seen a room so wide. Despite the brown sofas arranged in a semicircle, the side tables between them, the shelves crammed with books, and the centre table with a vase of red and white plastic flowers, the room still seemed to have too much space. Master sat in an armchair, wearing a singlet and a pair of shorts. He was not sitting upright but slanted, a book covering his face, as though oblivious that he had just asked people in.
‘Good afternoon, sah! This is the child,’ Ugwu’s aunty said.
Master looked up. His complexion was very dark, like old bark, and the hair that covered his chest and legs was a lustrous, darker shade. He pulled off his glasses. ‘The child?’
