Half of a Yellow Sun

  “Look at their dirty English mouths. ‘Astonishing move by Biafra’ indeed!”

  “They are surprised because the arms Harold Wilson gave those Muslim cattle-rearers have not killed us off as quickly as they had hoped!”

  “It is Russia you should blame, not Britain.”

  “Definitely Britain. Our boys brought us some Nigerian shell cases from the Nsukka sector for analysis. Every single one had UK WAR DEPARTMENT on it.”

  “We keep intercepting British accents on their radio messages too.”

  “Britain and Russia, then. That unholy alliance will not succeed.”

  The voices rose higher and higher, and Ugwu stopped listening. He got up and went out through the back and sat on the mound of cement blocks beside the house. Some little boys in the Biafran Boys Brigade were practicing on the street, with sticks shaped like guns, doing frog jumps, calling one another captain! and adjutant! in high voices.

  A hawker with a tray balanced on her head ambled past. “Buy garri! Buy garri!”

  She stopped when a young woman from the opposite house called out to her. They bargained for a while and then the young woman shouted, “If you want to rob people, then do so. Don’t say you are selling garri for that price.”

  The hawker hissed and walked off.

  Ugwu knew the young woman. He had first noticed her because of how perfectly rounded her buttocks were, how they rolled rhythmically, from side to side, as she walked. Her name was Eberechi. He had heard the neighbors talking about her; the story was that her parents had given her to a visiting army officer, as one would give kola nut to a guest. They had knocked on his door at night, opened it, and gently pushed her in. The next morning, the beaming officer thanked her beaming parents while Eberechi stood by.

  Ugwu watched her go back indoors and wondered how she had felt about being offered to a stranger and what had happened after she was pushed into his room and who was to blame more, her parents or the officer. He didn’t want to think too much about blame, though, because it would remind him of Master and Olanna during those weeks before Baby’s birth, weeks he preferred to forget.

  Master found a rain-holder on the wedding day. The elderly man arrived early and dug a shallow pit at the back of the house, made a bonfire in it, and then sat in the thick of the bluish smoke, feeding dried leaves to the fire.

  “No rain will come, nothing will happen until the wedding is over,” he said, when Ugwu took him a plate of rice and meat. Ugwu smelled the harsh gin on his breath. He turned and went back indoors so the smoke would not soak into his carefully ironed shirt. Olanna’s cousins Odinchezo and Ekene were sitting out on the veranda in their militia uniforms. The photographer was fiddling with his camera. Some guests were in the living room, talking and laughing, waiting for Olanna, and once in a while somebody went over and placed something—a pot, a stool, an electric fan—in the pile of presents.

  Ugwu knocked on her door and opened it.

  “Professor Achara is ready to take you to the church, mah,” he said.

  “Okay.” Olanna looked away from the mirror. “Where is Baby? She hasn’t gone out to play, has she? I don’t want any dirt on that dress.”

  “She is in the living room.”

  Olanna sat in front of the crooked mirror. Her hair was held up so that all of her radiant, flawlessly smooth face was exposed. Ugwu had never seen her look so beautiful, and yet there was a sad reluctance in the way she patted the ivory and pink hat on one side of her head to make sure the pins were secure.

  “We’ll do the wine-carrying later, when our troops recover Umunnachi,” she said, as though Ugwu did not know.

  “Yes, mah.”

  “I sent a message to Kainene in Port Harcourt. She won’t come, but I wanted her to know.”

  Ugwu paused. “They are waiting, mah.”

  Olanna got up and surveyed herself. She ran a hand over the sides of her pink and ivory dress, which flared from the waist and stopped just below her knees. “The stitches are so uneven. Arize could have done this better.”

  Ugwu said nothing. If only he could reach out and tug at her lips to remove the sad smile on her face. If only it took that little.

  Professor Achara knocked on the half-open door. “Olanna? Are you ready? They say Odenigbo and Special Julius are already at the church.”

  “I’m ready; please come in,” Olanna said. “Did you bring the flowers?”

  Professor Achara handed her a plastic bouquet of multicolored flowers. Olanna moved back. “What is this? I wanted fresh flowers, Emeka.”

  “But nobody grows flowers in Umuahia. People here grow what they can eat,” Professor Achara said, laughing.

  “I won’t hold flowers, then,” Olanna said.

  For an uncertain moment, neither of them knew what to do with the plastic flowers: Olanna held them half extended while Professor Achara touched but did not grasp them. Finally he took them back and said, “Let me see if we can find anything else,” and left the room.

  The wedding was simple. Olanna didn’t hold flowers. St. Sebastian’s Catholic Church was small and filled only halfway with the friends who had come. Ugwu did not pay close attention to who was there, though, because, as he stared at the shabby white altar cloth, he imagined that he was getting married. At first his bride was Olanna and then she transformed into Nnesinachi and then into Eberechi with the perfectly rounded buttocks, all in the same pink and ivory dress and tiny matching hat.

  It was Okeoma’s appearance, back at the house, that brought Ugwu out of his imagined world. Okeoma looked nothing like Ugwu remembered: the untidy hair and rumpled shirt of the poet were gone. His smart-fitting army uniform made him look straighter, leaner, and the sleeve had a skull-and-bones image next to the half of a yellow sun. Master and Olanna hugged him many times. Ugwu wanted to hug him too, because Okeoma’s laughing face brought back the past with such force that for a moment Ugwu felt as if the room blurred with the rain-holder’s smoke was the living room on Odim Street.

  Okeoma had brought his lanky cousin, Dr. Nwala.

  “He’s a chief medical officer at Albatross Hospital,” Okeoma said, introducing him. Dr. Nwala kept staring at Olanna with such annoyingly open adoration that Ugwu wanted to tell him to keep his froglike eyes away from her, chief medical officer or not. Ugwu felt not just involved in but responsible for Olanna’s happiness. As she and Master danced outside, circled by clapping friends, he thought, They belong to me. It was like a seal of stability, their wedding, because as long as they were married, his world with them was safe. They danced body to body for a while until Special Julius changed the ballroom music to High Life, and they pulled apart and held hands and looked into each other’s faces, moving to the tune of Rex Lawson’s new song, “Hail Biafra, the Land of Freedom.” In her high heels, Olanna was taller than Master. She was smiling and glowing and laughing. When Okeoma started his toast, she wiped her eyes and told the photographer standing behind the tripod, “Wait, wait, don’t take it yet.”

  Ugwu heard the sound just before they cut their cake in the living room, the swift wah-wah-wah roar in the sky. At first it was thunderous, and then it receded for a moment and came back again, louder and swifter. From somewhere close by, chickens began to squawk wildly.

  Somebody said, “Enemy plane! Air raid!”

  “Outside!” Master shouted, but some guests were running into the bedroom, screaming, “Jesus! Jesus!”

  The sounds were louder now, overhead.

  They ran—Master, Olanna, holding Baby, Ugwu, some guests—to the cassava patch beside the house and lay on their bellies. Ugwu looked up and saw the planes, gliding low beneath the blue sky like two birds of prey. They spurted hundreds of scattered bullets before dark balls rolled out from underneath, as if the planes were laying large eggs. The first explosion was so loud that Ugwu’s ear popped and his body shivered alongside the vibrating ground. A woman from the opposite house tugged at Olanna’s dress. “Remove it! Remove that white dress! They will see
it and target us!”

  Okeoma yanked off his uniform shirt, buttons flying off, and wrapped it around Olanna. Baby began to cry. Master held his hand loosely over her mouth, as if the pilots might hear her. The second explosion followed and then the third and fourth and fifth, until Ugwu felt the warm wetness of urine on his shorts and was convinced that the bombs would never end; they would continue to fall until everything was destroyed and everyone died. But they stopped. The planes moved farther away in the sky. Nobody moved or spoke for a long time, until Special Julius got up and said, “They have gone.”

  “The planes were so low,” a boy said excitedly. “I saw the pilot!”

  Master and Okeoma were first to walk out to the road. Okeoma looked smaller wearing only a singlet and trousers. Olanna continued to sit on the ground holding Baby, the camouflage-print army shirt wrapped around her wedding dress. Ugwu got up and headed down the road. He heard Dr. Nwala say to Olanna, “Let me help you up. The dirt will stain your dress.”

  Smoke rose from a compound near the corn-grinding station a street away. Two houses had collapsed into dusty rubble and some men were digging frantically through the jumbled cement, saying, “Did you hear that cry? Did you?” A fine haze of silvery dust covered their entire bodies so that they looked like limbless ghosts with open eyes.

  “The child is alive, I heard the cry, I heard it,” somebody said. Men and women had gathered to help and to stare; some dug through the rubble too, others stood and looked and still others shrieked and snapped their fingers. A car was on fire; the body of a woman lay next to it, her clothes burned off, flecks of pink all over her blackened skin, and when somebody covered it with a torn jute sack, Ugwu could still see the stiff charcoal-black legs. The sky was overcast. The wet smell of coming rain mixed with the smoky smell of burning. Okeoma and Master had joined in digging through the rubble. “I heard the child,” somebody said again. “I heard the child.”

  Ugwu turned to leave. A stylish sandal lay on the ground and he picked it up and looked at the leather straps, the thick wedge heel, before he left it where it had been. He imagined the chic young woman who had been wearing it, who had discarded it to run to safety. He wondered where the other sandal was.

  When Master came back home, Ugwu was sitting on the floor of the living room, his back against the wall. Olanna was picking at a piece of cake on a saucer. She was still wearing her wedding dress; Okeoma’s uniform shirt was neatly folded on a chair. The guests had all left slowly, saying little, their faces shadowed with guilt, as if embarrassed that they had allowed the air raid to ruin the wedding.

  Master poured himself a glass of palm wine. “Did you listen to the news?”

  “No,” Olanna said.

  “Our troops have lost all the captured territory in the midwest and the march to Lagos is over. Nigeria now says this is war, no longer a police action.” He shook his head. “We were sabotaged.”

  “Would you like some cake?” Olanna asked. The cake sat on the center table, whole but for the thin slice she had cut off.

  “Not now.” He drank his palm wine and poured another. “We will build a bunker in case of another air raid.” His tone was normal, calm, as if air raids were benign, as if it were not death that had come so close moments ago. He turned to Ugwu. “Do you know what a bunker is, my good man?”

  “Yes, sah,” Ugwu said. “Like the one Hitler had.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose.”

  “But, sah, people are saying that bunkers are mass graves,” Ugwu said.

  “Absolute nonsense. Bunkers are safer than lying in a cassava patch.”

  Outside, darkness had fallen and the sky was lit once in a while by lightning. Olanna suddenly jumped up from a chair and screamed, “Where is Baby? Ke Baby?” and started to run into the bedroom.

  “Nkem!” Master went after her.

  “Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear them bombing us again?”

  “It’s thunder.” Master grabbed Olanna from behind and held her. “It’s only the thunder. What our rain-holder kept back is finally unleashing itself. It’s only the thunder.”

  He held her for a while longer until, finally, Olanna sat down and cut another slice of cake for herself.

  4. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died

  He argues that Nigeria did not have an economy until Independence. The colonial state was authoritarian, a benignly brutal dictatorship designed to benefit Britain. What the economy consisted of in 1960 was potential—raw materials, human beings, high spirits, some money from the marketing board reserves left over from what the British had taken to rebuild their postwar economy. And there was the newly discovered oil. But the new Nigerian leaders were too optimistic, too ambitious with development projects that would win their people’s credibility, too naïve in accepting exploitative foreign loans, and too interested in aping the British and in taking over the superior attitudes and better hospitals and better salaries long denied Nigerians. He gestures to complex problems facing the new country but focuses on the 1966 massacres. The ostensible reasons—revenge for the “Igbo coup,” protest against a unitary decree that would make Northerners lose out in the civil service—did not matter. Nor did the varying numbers of the dead: three thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand. What mattered was that the massacres frightened and united the Igbo. What mattered was that the massacres made fervent Biafrans of former Nigerians.

  PART THREE

  The Early Sixties

  19

  Ugwu sat on the steps that led to the backyard. Raindrops slid down the leaves, the air smelled of wet soil, and he and Harrison were talking about his upcoming trip with Mr. Richard.

  “Tufia! I don’t know why my master wants to see that devilish festival in your village,” Harrison said. He was a few steps below; Ugwu could see the bald patch on the middle of his head.

  “Maybe Mr. Richard wants to write about the devil,” Ugwu said. Of course the ori-okpa was not a devilish festival, but he would not disagree with Harrison. He needed Harrison to be in a good mood so he could ask him about tear gas. They were silent for a while, watching the vultures hovering overhead; the neighbors had killed a chicken.

  “Ah, those lemons are ripening.” Harrison gestured to the tree. “I’m using the fresh one for meringue pie,” he added in English.

  “What is meh-rang?” Ugwu asked. Harrison would like that question.

  “You don’t know what it is?” Harrison laughed. “It is an American food. I will make it for my master to bring here when your madam comes back from London. I know she will like it.” Harrison turned to glance at Ugwu. He had placed a newspaper before sitting on the step, and it rumpled as he shifted. “Even you will like it.”

  “Yes,” Ugwu said, although he had sworn never to eat Harrison’s food after he dropped by Mr. Richard’s house and saw Harrison spooning shredded orange peels into a pot of sauce. He would have been less alarmed if Harrison had cooked with the orange itself, but to cook with the peels was like choosing the hairy skin of a goat rather than the meat.

  “I also use lemons to make cake; lemons are very good for the body,” Harrison said. “The food of white people makes you healthy, it is not like all of the nonsense that our people eat.”

  “Yes, that is so.” Ugwu cleared his throat. He should ask Harrison about tear gas now, but instead he said, “Let me show you my new room in the Boys’ Quarters.”

  “Okay.” Harrison got up.

  When they walked into Ugwu’s room, he pointed to the ceiling, patterned black and white. “I did that myself,” he said. He had held a candle up there for hours, flicking the flame all over the ceiling, stopping often to move the table he was standing on.

  “O maka, it is very nice.” Harrison looked at the narrow spring bed in the corner, the table and chair, the shirts hanging on nails stuck to the wall, the two pairs of shoes arranged carefully on the floor. “Are those new shoes?”

  “My madam bought them for me from Bata.”

  Harri
son touched the pile of journals on the table. “You are reading all of these?” he asked in English.

  “Yes.” Ugwu had saved them from the study dustbin; the Mathematical Annals were incomprehensible, but at least he had read, if not understood, a few pages of Socialist Review.

  It had started to rain again. The patter on the zinc roof was loud and grew louder as they stood under the awning outside and watched the water sliding down from the roof in parallel lines.

  Ugwu slapped at his arm—he liked the rain-cooled air, but he didn’t like the mosquitoes flying around. Finally he asked the question. “Do you know how I can get tear gas?”

  “Tear gas? Why do you ask?”

  “I read about it in my master’s newspaper, and I want to see what it is like.” He would not tell Harrison that he in fact heard of tear gas when Master talked about the members of the Western House of Assembly, who punched and kicked one another until the police came and sprayed tear gas and they all passed out, leaving orderlies to carry them, limp, to their cars. The tear gas fascinated Ugwu. If it made people pass out, he wanted to get it. He wanted to use it on Nnesinachi when he went home with Mr. Richard for the ori-okpa festival. He would lead her to the grove by the stream and tell her the tear gas was a magic spray that would keep her healthy. She would believe him. She would be so impressed to see him arrive in a white man’s car that she would believe anything he said.

  “It will be very difficult to get tear gas,” Harrison said.

  “Why?”

  “You are too young to know why.” Harrison nodded mysteriously. “When you are a grown man I will tell you.”

  Ugwu was puzzled at first, before he realized that Harrison did not know what tear gas was either but would never admit it. He was disappointed. He would have to ask Jomo.