Digging into the Palimpsest: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Nigerian tradition in literature

Posted by admin Headlines Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

Saturday, December 03, 2011

Chimamanda
Photo: Sun News Publishing

Juxtaposed with Chinua Achebe’s Aristotle-like praise of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s accomplishment as a historical/war novelist, Joyce Carol Oates’ description of Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun as “a major successor to such twentieth-century classics as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart” (Half blurb) is significant enough to draw attention to what Adichie has made of her inheritance of that which can be discerned as the Nigerian tradition in literature.

Thus, despite a near-bazaar tinge that approximates the product endorsement fever associated with the corporate world, coming in the wake of the remarkable and infectious reception given her kinsmen, Chinua Achebe and T. Obinkaram Echewa, author of The Land’s Lord (1976 winner of the English-speaking Union Prize), The Crippled Dancer (1986 regional finalist for the Commonwealth Book Prize) and I Saw the Sky Catch Fire (1993), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie can be said to be a major inheritor of an engaging literary tradition. It is the panache with which she has extended the tradition of Nigerian literature that has earned Adichie no less than 604 entries made up of 1 book, 54 essays, 9 Encyclopedia entries, 2 Study Guides, 9 Dissertations (5 MA and 4 PhD), 99 profiles, 68 news clips, 1 review each of For Love of Biafra and Decisions, 105 reviews of Purple Hibiscus, 129 reviews of Half of a Yellow Sun, 108 reviews of The Thing around Your Neck and 18 miscellaneous comments. In this regard, there is no doubt that Chimamanda Adichie has become one major Nigerian writer who has attained the type of celebrity status and profile thought exclusive to footballers and film stars.

And when one considers that Daria Tunca’s Adichie website, despite its relative comprehensiveness marked by the inclusion of entries that range across the five continents of the world is not complete, one can then begin to fathom how in less than eight years the critical reception of Chimamanda Adichie has seized the global imagination. If notwithstanding the privilege of a diaspora location Adichie has earned such a massive and intimidating critical industry around her works, one must begin to appreciate the relevance of Charles Nnolim’s thesis that since “critics never meet to create canons”, there is no doubt that “a good literary work will not only attract attention, it will compel it” (Akpuda “Interview” 55).

The Chimamanda Adichie canon that ranges across Decisions (1997 poetry); For Love of Biafra (1998, drama); Purple Hibiscus (2003, novel), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006 novel) and The Thing Around Your Neck (2009, short stories) is a peculiarly Nigerian brand. In order to contextualize how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s works fit and extend the Nigerian tradition in Literature, it would be difficult to dispense with opinions expressed by the triad of Bernth Lindfors, Bruce King and Charles Nnolim in matters related to the issue at hand. Even when often times the trio have been focussing on the Nigerian novel as a good exemplar of the Nigerian Tradition in Literature, they have never lost sight of the cross-generic essence in the panoramic ambience of this national heritage in imaginative Literature. For instance, in what constitutes a very significant engagement with T. S. Eliot’s programmatic essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Bernth Lindfors demonstrates to what extent “the debate concerning what is original and what is derivative in an individual author’s work is an important one in African literary studies” (23). Before asserting that Chinua Achebe is “probably the only one alive who will have established a living literary tradition in his own lifetime”, Bernth Lindfors while reacting to the Eliotian axiom about the idea of invoking the “historical sense” volunteers that “Achebe is a ‘traditional’ writer, because he knows what to do with the traditions he inherited” (48).

No doubt, Bruce King alludes to the above in his introduction to Introduction to Nigerian Literature when he affirms that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart inaugurates “the real tradition of Nigerian literature in English” (qtd in Emenyonu xvi).King deliberates on the perspectives from which Achebe’s first novel can be said to have displayed such trail-blazing character. According to King it begins a tradition not only because its influence can be detected on subsequent Nigerian novelists… but also because it was the first solid achievement upon which others could build. Achebe was the first Nigerian writer to successfully transmute the conventions of the novel, a European art form, into African literature. His craftsmanship can be seen in the way he creates a totally Nigerian texture for his fiction: Ibo idioms translated into English are used freely… European economy of form is replaced by an aesthetic appropriate to the rhythms of traditional tribal life. (qtd in Emenyonu (xvi-xvii)

Although Charles Nnolim does not necessarily contest the supposed European origin of the novel, he draws attention to the subtle interaction that has brought about such attachment to imagined European patrimony of African (Nigerian) literature in English. Thus, in at least three separate essays, namely, “The Nigerian Tradition in the Novel,” “Trends in the Nigerian Novel” and “Chinua Achebe: writer as Nigerian”, Charles Nnolim amplifies our understanding of what can be discerned as the Nigerian tradition in literature. A brief recap of the kernel of Nnolim’s arguments and postulations in these essays would guide us to better appreciate and contextualize in what sense his epigraph at the beginning of this essay can be said to apply to Chimamanda Adichie as much as it does to Ben Okri. Once we accommodate the restriction to and use of the novel genre and novelists in contextualizing the Nigerian tradition in Literature we can agree with Nnolim that
I do not mean by “tradition” what our novelists have borrowed from Europe or the West. I rather mean, what our novelists have made their own, different from any other, in spite of the circumambient presence of European and the West on our literary endeavours. My overall aim is to stress what is indigenous in our novels. (27 emphasis supplied)

Apart from rejecting the idea of ‘tradition’ being considered as ‘a period’ or a phase in the Nigerian novel, Charles Nnolim emphasizes its enduring quality as a literary phenomenon. For him, therefore, within the context of the Nigerian novel, tradition would mean
the literary conventions and habits of expression used by the Nigerian novelist in the practice of his art, plus the observable narrative techniques employed by the Nigerian novelist to highlight the Nigerian world-view in literature and by the Nigerian tradition in the novel, I mean that tradition which takes its roots from our oral literature. (26)

Here, it is in the second and more definitive sense that Nnolim addresses that which gives the works of a Nigerian novelist a special regional colouration. Furthermore, he recognizes that the Nigerian tradition in literature is that artistic conduct and gesture which maintains a continuity with our folk literature.
Additionally, Nnolim has documented for us in his essay “Trends in the Nigerian Novel” how aspects of the Nigerian tradition in literature have been realized in different novels. Beyond identifying to what extent Achebe’s inauguration of the great tradition of the Nigerian novel consists and projects the trend of cultural assertion or cultural nationalism (Nnolim ‘‘Trends’’ 53), copied by John Munonye , Elechi Amadi, Flora Nwapa, Onuora Nzekwu and T.M. Aluko, Nnolim goes ahead to isolate and describe such tendencies as ‘urban novel’ (Nnolim “Trends” 56), the ideological novel, the feminist novel (moderate and radical), the war novel and the experimental or modernist temper novel. Elsewhere, he urges that the contemporary female novel is centred on the hearth and the family (see “Contemporary” 237). No doubt, the foregoing are part of the palimpsest which Adichie digs into, expands, modifies and solidifies.

One look at Chinua Achebe’s “The African Writer and the Biafran Cause” (1969), Kole Omotoso’s “The Nigerian Civil War: The Most Important Theme in Post War Nigerian Writing” (1981) and Chidi Amuta’s “The Nigerian Civil War and the Evolution of Nigerian Literature” (1983) would perhaps underscore why very early in the day Chimamanda Adichie bought into the argument of the most important issue in Nigerian politics and literature. Although the signal is announced in at least two poems in her poetry collection Decisions (1997) namely” May Massacre” and “To my fatherland now and then”, she advances such literary manifesto by publishing the highly partisan drama entitled For Love of Biafra (1998). There is no doubt that in accounting for the justification for the proliferation of Nigerian civil war literature, we have to agree with Chidi Amuta that ‘‘despite the geographical re-assembling of the Nigerian nation in 1970, the social and political behaviour that caused the war is still very much with us’’ (“Evolution” 89). Elsewhere in “Literature of the Nigerian Civil War”, Amuta reminds us that to be familiar with Nigerian literature in the period between 1970 and the present is to be conversant with one dominant and recurrent area of social concern: the Nigerian civil war (1967-70). The dominance is so pronounced that it can safely be said that in the growing body of Nigerian national literature, works, directly based on or indirectly deriving from the war experience constitute the largest number of literary products on any single aspect of Nigerian history to date. (85)

It is such a reasoning that contextualizes and justifies the performance on September 2011 in far away United States of America at the Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island of Chinua Achebe’s “Refugee Mother and Child” and Gabriel Okara’s “Waiting for A Son”, all Biafran poems.
As with the several other Nigerians who share this same sensibility about the unfinished business of nationhood which the secession sought to tackle, Chimamanda Adichie also subscribes to Wole Soyinka’s thesis about the fundamental reality, metaphor and symbolism that Biafra represents as expressed by Wole Soyinka and Akachi Ezeigbo. Such explains why in his The Open Sore of a Continent, Wole Soyinka insists that the spirit of Biafra cannot be exorcised. In Soyinka’s words,

There are of course those dissenting biographers and historians, the establishment who insist on writing and speaking of Biafra in inverted commas, in a coy, sanctimonious denial of reality. We should even encourage them to write it B—-ra or invent any other childish contrivances, like a literary talisman programmed to create a lacuna in a history that dogs our conscience and memory; every day still reminds us that the factors that led to Biafran neither were ephemeral nor can be held to be permanently exorcised. (32)
Akachi Ezeigbo also harps on issues related to the last segment of Soyinka’s statement when, in her study of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta and Eddie Iroh in a work entitled “Biafran War Literature and Africa’s Search for Social Justice”, she insists that granted that “the injustices thrown up by the civil war and the crisis before it have not been addressed” we must contend with a situation where “the ghost of Biafra continues to haunt Nigeria” (65).

The decade within which Chimamanda Adichie was born can be said to represent, to a great degree, the flowering of Biafran war literature. Just as she rightly acknowledges in her Half of a Yellow Sun, there cannot be but a spectacular indebtedness to the tradition of Nigerian civil war literature in her work. And without doubt the prominence of Nsukka, Adichie’s place of infancy and adolescence and setting of her works, either in the production or promotion of the war literature is quite phenomenal. For instance, among the major poetry texts of the period are Okogbule Wonodi’s Dusts of Exile (1971), Chinua Achebe’s Beware Soul Brother (1971/1972), Chukwuma Azuonye (ed) Nsukka Harvest (1972), Pol Ndu’s Songs for Seers (1974), Michael Echeruo’s Distanced (1975), Thomas Chigbo’s Images and Damages (1977), Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Civil War Soliloquies (1977) and Ossie Enekwe’s Broken Pots (1977). Of the prominent Biafran novels produced in the 1970s we have S. O. Mezu’s Behind the Rising Sun (1971) John Munonye’s A Wreath for the Maidens (1973), I.N.C. Aniebo’s The Anonymity of Sacrifice (1974), Eddie Iroh’s Forty-Eight Guns for the General (1976), Cyprian Ekwensi’s Survive the Peace (1976), Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn (1976), Kalu Uka’s Colonel Ben Brim (1978) and Eddie Iroh’s Toads of War (1979). Roughly the same can be said for the 1980s during which time of the not less than 18 war novels produced at least, 14 were by Igbo speakers, former citizens of the Biafran enclave. The four non-Biafran novels of the 1980s include Ken Saro Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1985/1986), Festus Iyayi’s Heroes (1986), Elechi Amadi’s Estragement (1989). Thus, despite Adichie’s testimony that her parents, James N. Adichie and Grace I. Adichie, “broke down the walls around their painful war memories” (For Love viii), it would be difficult to imagine how she could have started writing stories about the Nigerian-Biafran war without relying on Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn, Flora Nwapa’s Never Again and so on. Her orientation to reading and the four years research that went into developing Half of a Yellow Sun should be enough to demonstrate how the library complemented the oral testimonies from her relations. Furthermore, whether it represents a partial or preferred list or not, there is no doubt that Chimamanda Adichie’s indebtedness to the existence of a Nigerian literary tradition of war literature can be seen in the fairly comprehensive list of 7 Biafran war novels, 4 short story collections, and at least 19 other texts ranging across memoirs, historical and socio-political commentaries. It is the selective and sensitive Chimamanda Adichie who does not cite Chinua Achebe’s Beware Soul Brother (1971), that prefers adopting as an epigraph to part one of Half of a Yellow Sun, an excerpt from ‘Mango Seedling’, a poem in the pro-Biafran title of Achebe’s Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems (1969). In other words, Adichie anticipates and answers the poser by Hodges about the comprehensiveness or otherwise of Adichie’s list (see Hodges 1).

It is such scenario that Adichie responds to in her civil war literature, hinted at in Decisions (1997), her first collection of poetry, projected in her drama For Love of Biafra (1998), her short stories , “Half of a Yellow Sun”, “Ghosts” and “Chinasa” before her novel Half of a Yellow Sun. This way, Adichie follows Wole Soyinka’s trail-blazing career of writing about the civil war multi-generically, in his poetry, A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), his prison memoir, The Man Died (1972), his drama, Madmen and Specialists (1971), among others. She is also following in the footsteps of I.N.C. Aniebo’s and Ossie Enekwe’s war novels and short stories about the war. For Aniebo we have the novel The Anonymity of Sacrifice and the war stories’ collection, Rearguard Actions (1998). With Enekwe, the war poet of Broken Pots, we also have the war novel, Come Thunder (1980) which Adichie lists in her references and the collection of short stories on the war, The Last Battle and Other Stories (1996).

However, beyond the foregoing, it is interesting to know that long before the proliferation of pro-Biafran war films such as Hollywood’s Tears of the Sun, Nollywood’s The Battle of Love, Across the Niger and Turning Point (2003), Chimamanda Adichie would publish her first major war literature, a drama, For Love of Biafra in 1998. The text which shares certain features with James Ene Henshaw’s Enough is Enough (1976), Elechi Amadi’s The Road to Ibadan (1977) and Catherine Acholonu’s Into the Heart of Biafra (1985) is also very significant because of how it anticipates the themes that would engage Adichie in Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. Some of these include filial and non-filial love, growing up, leadership problems, wars, ethnicity, and so on.

No study of Chimamanda Adichie’s later works from Purple Hibiscus to the present can be deemed complete without references to her first poetry collection, Decisions (1997) and her first published drama For Love of Biafra (1998). Thus, despite the bad press that For Love of Biafra has received at the hands of the author, and even if these first works are considered as juvenilia, they cannot possibly be dismissed. After all, as Derek Wright has noted, “the juvenilia of authors is of interest partly because of whatever independent merit it may have, but mainly in its embryonic foreshadowing of the main body of their works” (478). This is not only true of Ayi Kwei Armah, the subject of Wright’s essay but also of Chimamanda Adichie . We not only espy in Decisions and For Love of Biafra the germ of what would be further developed in Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and the short stories, but also the deep passion with which Adichie grapples with the main thematic preoccupations of her earlier works.
Decisions, Adichie’s poetry collection and first published book, introduces themes and issues that are as cross-generational as they are basically generational. Thus, beyond the broad frame of politics, religion and emotional love, Adichie’s Decisions addresses the problems of dictatorship, civil rights struggles, ethnicity and the Nigerian civil war issues that would resonate not only in For Love of Biafra but also her novels and short stories. For instance, it is right from Adichie’s 1995 poem “May Massacre” that we begin to encounter the making of a strong female voice on the war. Apart from reacting to one of the crucial incidents that precipitate the Biafra secession and the civil war, this poet persona would give birth first to Adaobi the ideological Biafran in For Love of Biafra and who no doubt prepares us for the equally seemingly hyper-active pro-Igbo and pro-Biafran Olanna in Half of a Yellow Sun. Perhaps, a look at Adichie’s January 27, 1995 poem “May Massacre” will prepare our minds to appreciate her personal attachment to the experience of Biafra as would preoccupy her in her other creative works and justify the forcefulness of her defense of this passion in her interview with Nduka Otiono. As the twelve line, three stanza poem reads:
They suffered the senseless killing
And their women painful rape.
They, who for unity were willing
Unprepared for their tribe scrape.

The ‘Sabon Garis’ were looted
And death awaited them still in awe
At their race’s slaughter they were muted,
Their killers disregarding all law.

The slaughter of innocents of one race,
By another defying unity.
They suffered for country’s grace,
And to their blessed memories great compassion, greatest pity. (Decisions 22)
“May Massacre” is Chimamanda Adichie’s style of making what can be regarded as an audacious entry in a major aspect of Nigeria’s literary heritage. It is this poem which marks what she describes in a footnote as “in memory of the May 1966 massacre of about three thousand Igbos in northern Nigeria” (Decisions 22) that anticipates what would engage Adichie’s attention in her subsequent writings. Here, it is instructive to note that outside the “slave trade of the period c. 1450 – c. 1850” and “British colonialism from c. 1850 to 1960” A.E Afigbo considers “the pogroms of 1966, the savage war against Biafra” as instances of “deliberate evil” (1). Any wonder then that Afigbo considers these developments as a demonstration of “the tears of a nation”? (1). Concerning the significance of the May pogrom, Sydney Emezue reminds us that “May 29, 1966, the day the first orgy of violence was unleashed on the Igbo in the North was a Sunday and many people were attacked while in Churches or returning therefrom” (59). In response to two questions posed by Nduka Otiono about the place of the Igbo in Nigeria, Adichie came out in what is probably her most hortatory best. For a lady who believes that “Biafra was about the inalienable right of human beings to be alive” (“I Connect” 19), one can understand the brain behind the creation of the strong-willed Adaobi the Biafran in For Love of Biafra and Olanna, Kainene and so on in Half of a Yellow Sun. As a way to query those who would render Biafra apologetically in inverted commas, Adichie while situating the perilous position of the Igbo in Nigeria notes as follows:
I find it curious, though that Biafra is nearly always a divided issue. I wonder too, why Biafra still seems to be taboo and to carry a stigma. I think it says something about the place of the Igbo in Nigeria today that BIAFRA has become an ‘Igbo issue’. If one claims to believe in Nigeria, and in the unity of diversity idea, then one must embrace the study and investigation of Biafra because, Nigeria would not be today as it is if Biafra had not been. (“I Connect’’ 19)
Earlier in her response to the talks about the significance of the Biafran encounter in history and literature, Adichie volunteers as follows;
It frustrates me that we choose, in Nigeria, to ignore our recent history. I am often asked why I wrote about the Biafra, as though it is something I have to justify. Imagine asking somebody to justify writing about the Holocaust. We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present. I was never taught about the war when I was in primary or secondary school…(“I Connect” 19)

It is instructive that the above remark is made in response to Nduka Otiono’s observation about Adichie’s “awarding-winning story suggesting a deep involvement with the Biafran experience” (19).
For an appreciation of the backdrop against which Purple Hibiscus is written, especially as they relate to the scaffolding atmosphere of domestic and national levels, the problem of fuel scarcity, doctors being on strike and other anomalies congruent with social anomie, one needs to acquaint oneself with such Adichie poems as “To the Dictator”, “My Sinking Land”, “He’s Coming”, “Are We Tired”, “State of Fear”, “Fuel” and “Our Man”. These are all poems Adichie wrote between 12th November and 10th December, 1994. They equally help us to anticipate and contextualize the pluming of Nigeria’s recent history in Purple Hibiscus which beyond reminding us of Helon Habila’s Prison Stories extends the historicization by alluding to the killing of Bartholomew Owoh and others for drug trafficking. Here, we are taken down memory lane to the beginnings of laws interpreted retroactively in Nigeria.
As already hinted, although Amanda N. Adichie’s For Love of Biafra is a civil war drama that reminds one of aspects of the war drama written by Charles Umeh, James Ene Henshaw, Elechi Amadi, Catherine Acholonu and Chris Nwamuo, a memorable thing about Adichie’s text is that it has an indistinguishable link with Purple Hibiscus and Half of the Yellow Sun. Invariably, the themes, setting and characterization that would be developed in the later works (especially the novels) are first tried out in For Love of Biafra. Thus, what approximate quasi-biographical issues and thematic and stylistic concerns we encounter in Adichie’s short stories and novels are first outlined in her drama text.

Any consideration of the central concerns of Adichie’s For Love of Biafra, would without doubt prepare our minds about the issues presented in Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. The story of Adaobi and her heartthrob, Mohammed, relayed within the context of living with one’s immediate and extended family members is an intense growing-up drama that would preoccupy her in her novels. A sensitivity to the ideas of family relationships is preached in Adichie’s drama. It is there that we first come across affectionate names such as Papa Nnukwu and Mama Nnukwu which echoes we would experience in the design of the nuclear and extended family ties of Eugene Achike in Purple Hibiscus. Moreover, where we meet male and female siblings, Ebuka and Adaobi who are twins with Nduka telling his father that “Adaobi should have been the boy and Ebuka the girl” (For Love 50) in Half of a Yellow Sun we meet two ladies Olanna and Kainene as twins who operate like militants. The place names, Abba and Umunnachi which resonate in Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun are talked about first in For Love of Biafra.

The story of Adaobi and Mohammed in Adichie’s drama is creatively reconstructed in that of Olanna and Mohammed in Half of a Yellow Sun. In For Love of Biafra, the Mohammed that Adaobi “was seriously considering eloping with” (26) and who she even rejects later is nonetheless described as a refined and perfect gentleman. As Adaobi describes him,
He is a good person, such a trusted friend. He almost grieved when I told him we were leaving. He did not understand, he does not understand violence or injustice because he is such a good person. Besides unlike most of his people he is well educated. He went to a very good college…(24)

It is this same type of accomplished man that we encounter in the portrait of Mohammed in Half of a Yellow Sun. Strangely it is this very hyper-sensitive Mohammed in Adichie’s civil war novel who saves Olanna amidst the turbulence in Kano that Olanna like her predecessor Adaobi equally rejects.
Harish, the Biafran loving Indian, who we meet in For Love of Biafra, metamorphoses into Richard, the British researcher in Half of a Yellow Sun. However, unlike Harish who, according to Papa Ona does “not understand our language” (For Love 32), Richard in Half of a Yellow Sun understands and speaks Igbo. Furthermore, he considers himself an Igbo and a Biafran the way that Harish could not have gone.
The notion of saboteurs that we read about in a very denigrating manner in Half of a Yellow Sun:
the only saboteurs we have are the ones Ojukwu invented so he can lock up his wants. Did I ever tell you about the Onitsha man who bought up sll of the cement we had in the factory shortly after the refugees… coming back. Ojukwu is having affair with the man’s wife and has just had the man arrested for nothing. (313)

is anticipated in Adichie’s For Love of Biafra. In Adichie’s drama, we see perspectives about the notion of who are saboteurs in the encounter involving the pessimistic but realistic Ona and the duo of Papa Ona and Nduka as relayed on page 69 of For Love of Biafra. Elsewhere, we have an idea of what Nelson Ottah would describe as Rebels Against Rebels. At the beginning of Act 4, when Papa Nduka protests about how “our fellow Biafrans who are not Ibos are being molested, tortured, even killed by over-zealous Igbos who suspect them of collaboration with the federal troops” (For Love 63), Okoloma justifies the killings and cautions Papa Nduka “not to air these views of yours in public [since] you do not know who will label you a saboteur” (63). Invariably, granted what Okoloma refers to as “the common fate of saboteurs at the hands of irate mobs” (For Love 63), it follows that we are in an era of labeling people saboteurs in order to destroy them. It is the pathetic scenarios that Papa Nduka alludes to in For Love of Biafra that we witness in the scene involving refugees from Ndoni in Half of a Yellow Sun: As the passage in the novel reads.
A group of militia members holding matchetes were pushing two women along. They cried as they staggered down the road; their eyes reddened, what did we do? We are not saboteurs! we are refugees from Ndoni! We are refuges from Ndoni! We have done nothing! Pastor Ambrose ran out to the road and began to pray. ‘father God, destroy the saboteurs that are showing the enemy the way! Holy-spirit fise! (Half 377)

Granted the larger-than-life projection given the word ‘Sabo’ among the Igbo within the Biafran enclave, one can appreciate why at a time so many young people born in the 1950s and 1960s imagined that rather than being a creative Igbonization of an English word that ‘Sabo’ must have had some sort of autochtonous Igbo Etymology. In a way that is more elaborate than the presentation of saboteur in For Love of Biafra the discussion of saboteur takes centre stage in Half of a Yellow Sun. Thus, apart from the authorial narration conversations such as that between Olanna and Mrs Muokelu on Alice’s profile predominate. And Mama Oji’s insistence that “they should burn every single saboteur” (Half 337) is not unlike Okoloma’s clamour that the so-called saboteurs “deserve to be punished, it is they who are prolonging this war” (For Love 63).

It is in For Love of Biafra that we espy the foundations of what would give birth to the psychologically appealing and reverential song to Caritas in Half of a Yellow Sun namely “Caritas, thank you, / Caritas si anyi taba okporoko/na kwashiorkor ga-anaa” (Half 283). Of course,this is notwithstanding the fact that Olanna never joins the women at the relief centre to sing this song “on the days she came back with nothing” (Half 284). Both Mama Ona and Adaobi herself talk about the role of Caritas and other organizations in handling the problem of hunger during the war. Accordingly to Mama Ona’s testimony in Love of Biafra
I wonder what would have been the fate of our people, especially the young children, if not for the activities of caritas and the world council of churches, distributing food through relief centres, churches and hospitals. I have realized that there are really some of the white people who have hearts. (66)
What Adaobi’s says in Act 3 scene iv of For Love of Biafra and the stage directions thereafter are tactically reproduced in Adichie’s war short story “Half of a Yellow Sun” and equally modified in the novel Half of a Yellow Sun. No study of the making of the Nigerian Biafran civil war, the subject of Chimamanda Adichie’s play For Love of Biafra and her civil war novel, Half of a yellow sun can dispense with the manipulation of the stranger-element policy that characterized and still characterizes the profile of the Igbo in Northern Nigeria. Such explains why in a book entitled Strangers at Our Gate: The Igbo Nationality in Nigeria, Ikenna Nzimiro observes that

The Sabongari is where the strangers live and the Birini is where the indigenes live. We also have the Tudun-Wada, which has mixed population. It was not difficult to identify the “strangers at our gate” in case of any conflict between them and the indigenes. 152)
Adichie’s tempo-spatial stage direction that “it is early May 1966, in a Sabon Gari in Kano, Northern Nigeria” (For Love 1) is in the above context a very strategic handling of setting which is quite unique in drama texts focusing on the civil war. Thus, when Nchedo comes to warn his kinsman Papa Nduka on the need for them to leave Kano for the East, he reports as follows:

a man’s body was found in the Sabon Gari, he was mutilated. He was prominent and rich, a kinsman in your caliber. It is said that a list of prominent nyamilis to be eliminated has been compiled. I have finished. I am going. (19)
Here, one notes that despite Mama Nduka’s reservations about Nchedo who she accuses of having “a strong aversion for the Hausa people” (For Love 19), one can still recall that there were specific historical incidents to warrant the type of opinion held and action taken by Nchedo in Adichie’s drama. Concerning the topicality of the temporal setting, May 1966, which would make some commentators to talk about genocide against the Igbo, one should recall that the experience which gave birth to Adichie’s holocaust poem “May Massacre” is something ingrained in the assaulted psyche of the people of the Eastern region and especially the Igbo. For instance, it is on record that, in a December 22, 1966 submission by the Catholic Bishops of Nigeria, it was stated inter alia that
Mindful of the fact that we are all children of the same father God no matter from what part of the country we come, the Catholic Bishops of Nigeria re-state God’s fundamental commandment of fraternal love: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy self” … violence has been done to Nigeria’s ancient and proud reputation for hospitality towards strangers within her gates. Nigerians have become unwanted strangers in their own land (qtd in Nwosu 359)
In the same document addressed “To the leaders and people of Nigeria”, the group posit that “the Bishops remind all Nigerians of this fundamental commandment and call on all men of goodwill to join in restoring this nation to peace and stability through the practice of the law of God” (qtd inwp_posts

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