Half of a Yellow Sun: Satire 4 key examples

At these exclusive parties, money-hungry parents like the Ozobias exploit their children in exchange for contract deals, and diamond-garlanded women pose for Lagos Life. Mohammed drives imported luxury cars while houseless people squat outside the gates of his home. Apart from wealth, about the only other topic that Mrs. Ozobia speaks of is imported lace. Adichie caricatures the folly and vanity of the country’s nouveaux riches.

This streak of corruption continues even during the war. Biafra’s secession does little to actually solve the country’s stark wealth inequalities. After Major Nzeogwu’s coup, the Ozobias simply ingratiate themselves with the emboldened “Big Men of the new regime.” The attempts at political reform replicate the same shallow, gilded elite. In fact, the war exacerbates the social inequalities that existed before. It creates a new class that profits off the destruction and civil investment. Special Julius is rumored to sell forged passes in exchange for sex. Relief center directors such as Okoromadu pilfer from the supplies and give special favors to people like Olanna. Professor Ezeka’s family lives in a lavish mansion replete with concrete bunkers, eating afternoon cake while millions of other Biafrans die of starvation. With a grim, cynical eye, the novel criticizes the country’s troubling inequalities.

The secessionist movement begins with worthy-enough aspirations: Major Nzeogwu promises rapt listeners that every citizen will be free “from all forms of oppression,” “general inefficiency,” and have the opportunity to “live and strive in every field of human endeavor.” Odenigbo frames the new government as an assertion of self-determination—“what matters is whatever will make our people move forward,” he explains in celebration.

But Biafran secession breaks apart the moment rubber hits the road. As the former revolutionaries become the establishment, the novel merely points to a new class of incompetent elites who preside over a succession of wartime failures. Madu’s discouraging updates to Kainene and Richard reveal that the Biafran military trains with “wooden guns” and has no arms at all. The Biafran government’s failures show in the declining rations and degrading living conditions. The people and politicians find themselves grasping at ever more far-fetched praise or rumors. They invent their own bogeymen and conspiracies to account for their struggles. Vandals are afoot; Satan has possessed the Nigerians. Down the hallway, residents fret that Alice is secretly a saboteur. News of imminent victory saturates the air waves, and Special Julius exclaims that “Biafra is the land of genius!” Running on fumes, the war effort has less the feel of liberation than a massive delusion.

The self-deception continues even as Biafra effectively surrenders to Nigeria. Colonel Ojukwo dresses up his surrender negotiations as part of a longstanding desire to “secure peace and security for my people” before his listeners. Richard observes how the Biafrans pass the blame onto others after their defeat, “oiling their own faces with a valor they had never had.” Through satire, the novel chronicles how an independence movement turns in on itself.

There is Aunt Elizabeth, who says “Africa in the tone of one repressing a shudder.” There is also Susan, Richard’s ex-girlfriend, who hardly conceals her racial prejudices—she only allows him to chat with Black women because she thinks they “were not threatening her, were not equal rivals." The novel’s White characters are thus presented as insular and insecure.

No one escapes the novel’s sly smirk—a scathing portrait that extends to Western news coverage as well. The novel gestures repeatedly at the ignorance and “hollow of unreality” that inform the West’s perception of Nigeria. BBC broadcasters comment, spectator-like, on the “astonishing move by Biafra” while other outlets, such as the Herald, sensationalize the civil war as “ancient tribal hatreds.” Few characters come off as irritatingly smug as the two “Chucks,” the American journalists who stink, chew chocolate bars, and grumble broadly about the conditions in Biafra. “It’s ridiculous that they still follow this protocol in this shithole,” they complain to each other while waiting for their plane and taking swigs of brandy. As if the conversation could not get any more banal, they proceed to ask about the fate of the soldiers who accidentally walked into the plane propellers.

This episode—like many others—points to the perils of overthinking. Connecting the Herero massacre to the Holocaust, Odenigbo pushes the envelope until his theories verge on the absurd. He stretches intellectual frameworks to the point where he loses touch with practical reality. What seems like laughable intellectual contrarianism grows increasingly less humorous as the political violence escalates.

The novel shows how easily Odenigbo’s contentiousness lapses into arrogance as he dismisses Mr. Ovoko’s claims of declining donations and condones Biafra’s secession. “How is your opinion relevant?” he yells at Miss Adebayo during another debate after the coup. Caught up in his ideologies, he overlooks the gap between theory and war’s more complex realities. “Everything will be normal!” he assures Olanna and Ugwu as they flee for Umuahia, only to be proven terribly wrong as starvation wracks the country and the military loses ground. Odenigbo fails to see what Ugwu realizes for himself—that “in Nsukka, life was insular and the news was unreal, functioning only as fodder for the evening talk.” Half of a Yellow Sun cautions against abstract theories displacing common sense.