Emily Turnbull
posted 19 April 2007

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel describes the outbreak of the 1967 Biafran War, and tells the story of those caught up in the conflict. The novel traces the political and social forces that triggered the war - the religious strife between the Muslim-dominated north and the Christian Igbo of the south, their mutual suspicion and wrangling over control of national resources. The eventual massacre of the Igbo by Muslim forces in 1967 engendered an attempt at secession on the part of the south, and a consequent besiegement of the new Biafran state by Nigeria. The conflict lasted three years and serves in the novel first as the broader background against which the lives of the main characters are set, and then as a source of all-encompassing and entirely inescapable turbulence which tears these lives apart.

Privileged twin sisters Olanna and Kainene hold the story together, their fractious relationship, fraught with mistrust and misunderstanding, used by Adichie to examine the shifts of loyalties and loves in times of peace and then of war. Olanna and Kainene, in many respects polar opposites, are eventually united by their common suffering; when they do speak, it is of the horrors they have witnessed and the torments suffered by their people. Their reunification is finally brought about only in part by love; Adichie suggests that communicating shared experience or heritage can also be crucial in bringing a fractured people together, and in rebuilding a broken nation.

Olanna and Kainene, different in physicality and temperament, are attracted to very different men: Odenigbo, the intellectual and pan-Africanist for whom Olanna abandons her life with the Igbo elite in Lagos, teaches at a provincial university and holds stimulating after-hours discussions in his living-room. Inspired by the end of colonialism and initially hopeful for the newly seceded Biafran state, his ideals become tarnished as the war progresses. Kainene’s lover, Richard, a shy British writer who takes up the Biafran cause, similarly finds himself, by the end of the novel, having to come to terms with the loss of what he had reckoned indestructible.

Most intriguing of all is Ugwu, the conscientious adolescent who leaves his rural village to take up a position as Odenigbo’s houseboy, and who is consequently catapulted into a world of education and informed opinions. As Ugwu gradually acclimatises to his new position, Adichie is able to lever open the cracks between the Nigerian social classes, highlighting the gap between university life and rural poverty. Soon immersed in his new surroundings, the outbreak of war troubles Ugwu less than the rifts he can see appearing in Olanna and Odenigbo’s relationship. His forced conscription into the Biafran army reveals the brutalising effects of war on the young - the cruelty perpetrated by the fearful; the way in which Ugwu is by the end of the novel the unofficial scribe of the conflict is perhaps a comment on the inability of any but the survivors to fully comprehend the war, or to do justice to its telling.

In telling of the forces which combined to instigate and perpetuate the war, Adichie’s characters are never sacrificed for advocacy’s sake. Instead, an explanatory thread runs through the novel, at times somewhat stilted, but rarely heavy-handed. Insights into the political turmoil are gained from snatches of conversation; behind the text lurk Western governments, their presence casting a shadow over the speech of the Biafran soldiers. In this way meddling foreign foes, whose interests impact on the lives of ordinary people in the most disastrous way, are criticised for their arrogance and ignorance in sustaining the conflict.

Adichie tells of both the political and the personal, in a way that leaves the reader feeling that neither has been diminished. The first quarter of the novel, for example, at times has the feel of a social comedy: the politics with which the characters are most often concerned those of family feuds and love interests. As the novel progresses, the focus shifts onto the various masculine forces which, in both public and private, are shown to be most destructive and destabilising, with male irresponsibilities and inconsistencies bridging the gap between the personal lives of the main characters and the fate of Biafra as a whole. Time and again it is the female characters who are caught up in the fallout from male weakness and betrayal, forced to climb out of the emotional wreckage, dust themselves off, and endure.

Yet none of Adichie’s characters are free of humanising flaws, and in this, perhaps, lies her greatest strength as an author. She is merciless in pinpointing the prejudices that can divide not only whole nations, but classes, villages, and even families, and she creates characters that are superbly human in their biases and cruelties. Adichie may not always be poetic in her prose, but in detailing the inner lives of the people who populate her novel, she creates characters who stay with the reader long after the final page has turned.