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Abstract
This paper returns to an often-overlooked moment in international legal history, the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70), and explores the rhetorical strategies that the Biafran government used when struggling to justify its sovereignty. It reads Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel about the war, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), as a prolonged commentary on Biafra's international legal troubles. While Nigeria insisted that Biafra was a rogue state without international legitimacy, Biafra claimed that Nigeria gave up its control over the region because it had violated their “human rights” during the 1966 pogroms. Because there were (and still are) no clear rules as to when sovereignty is to be recognized, Biafrans found themselves in a position with no clear path to recognition. They turned, therefore, to their public relations branch, spearheaded by Chinua Achebe, to help sway international opinion. This paper argues that they redeployed the bildungsroman's tropes as a way of making legible their readiness to rule, and that Adichie's writes Half of a Yellow Sun as a bildungsroman in acknowledgement of this posture. Far from substantiating Biafran sovereignty, however, Biafra's international outreach failed to secure widespread recognition before the ceasefire in 1970. With this failure in tow, Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun adopts the genre of the bildungsroman only to trouble its credibility as an effective administrative tool.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks Deni Kasa, Greig Henderson, Simon Stern, Cheryl Suzack, Elizabeth Anker, Neil ten Korteenar, and Paul Downes for their edits and comments on this paper.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 143.
2. Kurt Vonnegut, “Biafra: A People Betrayed,” in Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (New York: Delacorte, 1974), 139.
3. Renata Adler, “Letter from Biafra,” in After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction, ed. Michael Wolff (New York: Review of Books, 2015), 206.
4. Ibid., 207.
5. The term is not without controversy. In There Was a Country, Achebe uses the phrase “Nigerian–Biafran War” throughout, so as to not erase Biafra’s precarious existence. I use the terms interchangeably to signal the dissensus.
6. For example, Oscar Browning, The Citizen: His Rights and Responsibilities (London: Blackie & Son, 1893), 183–84; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Crime of the Congo (London: Doubleday, 1909), 25.
7. Tekena Tamuno, “British Administration in Nigeria in the Twentieth Century,” in Groundwork of Nigerian History, ed. Obaro Ikeme (New York: Heinemann, 1980), 393–409; J. Isawa Elaigwu, Topical Issues in Nigeria’s Political Development (Abuja: Adonis & Abbey, 2012).
8. C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, “Ahiara Declaration,” in Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook 1966–1970, vol. 2, ed. A. H. M. Kirk-Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 378.
9. Chidi Amuta, “The Nigerian Civil War and the Evolution of Nigerian Literature,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 17, no. 1 (1983): 90–92; Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 128.
10. Eleni Coundouriotis, The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 104.
11. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Toronto: Verso, 2006), 34–49; Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.
12. Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 29.
13. Ojukwu, “Ahiara Declaration,” 378.
14. Wendy Griswold, Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 235.
15. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007).
16. John C. Hawley, “Biafra as Heritage and Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, and Iweala,” Research in African Literatures 39, no. 2 (2008): 22.
17. Coundouriotis, People's Right to the Novel, 235.
18. Imre Szeman, Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), 18.
19. For similar reactions to the ideals of nationhood as they pertain to postcolonial Africa, see also Ogaga Okuyade, “Weaving Memories of Childhood: The New Nigerian Novel and the Genre of the Bildungsroman,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 41, no. 3 (2011): 141; and Françoise Ugochukwu, “A Lingering Nightmare: Achebe, Ofoegbu, and Adichie on Biafra,” Matatu, 39 (2011): 255.
20. Coundouriotis, People's Right to the Novel, 234.
21. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., 29.
22. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, interview with David Pilling, Financial Times, June 30, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/cebd3e6c-3d17-11e6-8716-a4a71e8140b0/.
23. For more information about Ojukwu’s intention to spur other irredentist movements across Africa, see C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, “Divided World,” in Biafra: Selected Speeches and Random Thoughts of C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, General of the People’s Army, with Diaries of Events (London: Harper & Row, 1969), 222.
24. Ojukwu, “Ahiara Declaration,” 383.
25. Ministry of Information, Eastern Nigeria, Nigerian Crisis, 1966 (Ibadan: Enugu, 1966), 12.
26. For contemporaneous claims that the United Nations should assume this role, see Hans Kelsen, “Recent Trends in the Law of the United Nations,” in The Law of the United Nations: A Critical Analysis of its Fundamental Problems (London: Stevens & Sons, 1951), 946–47.
27. James L. Brierly, The Law of Nations: An Introduction to the International Law of Peace, 6th ed., ed. Humphrey Waldock (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 47.
28. Ibid., 138.
29. Philip C. Jessup, A Modern Law of Nations: An Introduction (New York: Archon, 1968), 43.
30. Chukwuemeka Ike, Sunset at Dawn: A Novel about Biafra (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1993 [1976]), 111.
31. “France Supports Biafran Position, Urges End of War on Basis of Self-Determination,” New York Times, August 1, 1968, 3.
32. Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Policy in the 1970s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 77.
33. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010), 219.
34. For other uses of “human rights,” see Michael Reisman and Myres S. McDougall, “Memorandum Upon Humanitarian Intervention to Protect the Ibos,” 1968, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University Library; and Richard B. Lillich, “Intervention to Protect Human Rights,” McGill Law Journal no. 15 (1969): 210–16.
35. Morton Yarmon, “Jewish Efforts on Behalf of Nigerian–Biafran Relief,” American Jewish Archives, October 12, 1969, http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/662.PDF/.
36. Arikpo Okoi, “Arikpo’s Address to United Nations,” in Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria, 334.
37. Ibid., 331–34.
38. Arua Oko Omaka, The Biafran Humanitarian Crisis, 1967–1970: International Human Rights and Joint Church Aid (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), 69.
39. Ojukwu, “Ahiara Declaration,” 378–79.
40. Ibid., 382.
41. Ibid., 377.
42. Charles Goodell, “Biafra and the American Conscience,” Saturday Review, April 12, 1969, 26–27.
43. Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Chinua Achebe: A Biography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 140.
44. Ojukwu, “Ahiara Declaration,” 386.
45. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., 116.
46. Ibid., 181.
47. Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom of Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 239.
48. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 152.
49. Craig J. Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 12–18; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism and the Mind: Essays on Modern Culture (New York: Oneworld, 2006), 204.
50. Ojukwu, “Ahiara Declaration,” 388.
51. Yarimar Bonilla, Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
52. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 179.
53. Arthur Agwuncha Nwanko, Nigeria: The Challenge of Biafra (Enugu: R. Collings, 1972), 82.
54. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 26.
55. Zoe Norridge, “Sex as Synecdoche: Intimate Languages of Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love,” Research in African Literatures 43, no. 2 (2015): 18–39.
56. Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 141.
57. Ibid.
58. Coundouriotis, People's Right to the Novel, 225.
59. Ibid., 11.
60. Susan Z. Andrade, The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 20–21.
61. Frederick Forsyth, Making of an African Legend: The Biafra Story (New York: Penguin, 1969).
62. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, interview with Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News, October 23, 2006, http://www.themorningnews.org/article/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/.
63. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest/Harcourt, 1979 [1951]), 297–302.
64. Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 211.
65. Ibid., 210.
66. Ibid., 211.
67. Ibid., 284 (added emphasis).
68. Ibid., 384.
69. Ibid., 384–85.
70. Ibid., 385–86.
71. Arthur Rimbaud, “Á George Izambard,” in Rimbaud Complete, ed. Seth Whidden, trans. Wallace Fowlie (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 571.
72. Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 103.
73. Michael Mok, “Biafra: A War of Extinction and Starvation: A Tiny Breakaway African Country Fights to Stay Alive. And No Protein Food,” Life 65, no. 2 (July 12, 1968): 20–29; Forsyth, Making of an African Legend; Peter Schwab, ed., Biafra (New York: Facts on File, 1971).
74. Ogechi E. Anyanwu, “Connecting Theory and Reality: Understanding the Causes of the Nigerian–Biafran War,” in Writing the Nigeria–Biafra War, ed. Toyin Falola and Ogechukwu Ezekwem (Rochester: James Currey, 2016), 54.
75. Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 469.
76. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, interview with Harriett Gilbert, BBC World Service, June 12, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01b9nqd/.
77. Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 6.
78. Ibid., 11.
79. Ibid., 8.
80. Griswold, Bearing Witness, 124.
81. Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 61.
82. Craig W. McLuckie, Nigerian Civil War Literature: Seeking an “Imagined Community” (Lewiston: Mellen, 1990), 16.
83. John Marx, Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–2011 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 72.
84. Tierno Monénembo, L'Aîné des orphelins (Paris: Seuil, 2000); Chris Abani, Song for the Night (London: Telegram, 2016 [2007]). Marx, Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 78.
85. Ibid., 76.
86. Griswold, Bearing Witness, 232.
87. Marx, Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 75.
88. Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 499.
89. Ibid., 457.
90. Marx, Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 74.
91. Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 458.
92. Chile Eboe-Osuji, International Law and Sexual Violence in Armed Conflicts (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2012), 93.
93. Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 263.
94. Ibid., 526.
95. Ibid.
96. Ruth Harris, “‘The Child of the Barbarian’: Rape, Race and Nationalism in France during the First World War,” Past & Present 141 (1993): 179.
97. Ike, Sunset at Dawn, 159.
98. Nick Mdika Tembo, “Ethnic Conflict and the Politics of Greed: Rethinking Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,” in Focus on Nigeria: Literature and Culture, ed. Gordon Collier (London: Rodopi, 2012), 181–82; Dennis Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory (New York: Routledge, 2012), 132.
99. John Masterson, “Posing, Exposing, Opposing: Accounting for Contested (Corpo)Realities in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,” in Expressions of the Body: Representations in African Text and Image, ed. Charlotte Baker (London: Peter Lang, 2009), 154; Daria Tunca, Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 96.
100. Brenda Cooper, “An Abnormal Ordinary: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,” in A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture, and Language (Oxford: James Currey, 2008), 141.
101. Coundouriotis, People's Right to the Novel, 232.
102. Ibid., 233.
103. Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, 177.
104. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Toronto: Anchor, 2009 [1958]).
105. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Hiding from Our Past,” The New Yorker, May 1, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/hiding-from-our-past/.
106. Ibid.
107. Adichie Olanna, supra n. 76.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Michael A. Donnelly
Michael A. Donnelly recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, Department of English.