Read It In Books:Half Of A Yellow Sun.

Bougainvillea, orange trees, breadfruit, yams, kola nuts, the music of Rex Lawson and Bobby Benson (or even Sir Victor Uwaifo), copies of Lagos Life, "small boys carrying large loads on their heads" in the markets, geckos, Peugeot 404s - the Nigeria, and the Biafra, of the mid-sixties seems vivid and wholly alive in Chimamanda's Ngozie Adichie's 2006 novel Half Of A Yellow Sun.

By the end of the war in 1970, it is a wholly different place and the characters in the book are wholly different people. Changed forever by their experiences of the brutality of war, by its sheer horror. There are three chief protagonists, Ugwu, Olanna, and Richard, and Adichie skillfully tells the story of these times and these events from each of their perspectives. 

Uneducated Ugwu has moved away from his village to work as a houseboy for a strange man named Odenigbo and is amazed at the streets, the colour of the bungalows, the walls made from cement rather than mud, the running water, and even the fridges (fridges!) full of food in the big city of Nsukka. A teenager, he fantasises, late at night, over Nnesinachi and her breasts. But Ugwu also believes in evil spirits that are capable of all sorts. From causing illness to forcing him to iron socks. 

Ugwu's master, Odenigbo, talks of resisting exploitation, the importance of education, colonialism of the continent and the African mind by Europeans. He reads and keeps an orderly house and he treats Ugwu far better than other masters do their houseboys. He lets him sleep in a bed and recommends books to him. Ugwu, in turn, idolises him and wishes to be like him even if, most of the time, he doesn't understand what he's talking about. It's more the way he talks, the way he carries himself, the life he has.

Olanna speaks both perfect English and perfect Igbo. She is a guest, a lover Ugwu soon discovers, of Odenigbo's and is kind, also, to Ugwu. She is the daughter of a chief, Chief Ozobia, and he disapproves of her moving to Nsukka to be with Odenigbo. Her youth had been spent on verandas and in polo clubs and Chief Ozobia believes she's throwing that away to be with a revolutionary minded person like Odenigbo. 

Richard, a shy white Englishman, is the lover of Olanna's supposedly plainer sister Kainene and they, too, are planning to move to Nsukka. Richard is kind, cultured, interested in African art, and, perhaps, just a little bit cowardly. Or, more truthfully, he's overly sensitive, afraid of hurting other's feelings and this rubs up against his passion for life and his passion for taking control over his own life.

Kainene is patient with Richard's initial failures and disappointments in the bedroom but there are some things she cannot be so patient with and no amount of knowledge of Moliere will help Richard there. The Biafran War, or The Nigerian Civil War, is, at first, just news reports on the radio about the Nigerian government being handed over to the military. 

There's heated debate but, at first, no actual affect on our protagonists' lives. Even when the airports are closed and towns are declared too dangerous to visit, and even when the bodies start to appear - some of them decapitated, it is felt that actual war is unlikely. The Nigerian state will surely just let the freedom seeking Biafrans go. They'd be glad to get rid of them.

But war does start and some of the victims of the war are family members of our chief protagonists. There's a brutal series of killings at an airport that caught me completely off guard as only a sentence or two earlier I'd been reading about a reasonably unremarkable, bordering on almost mundane, exchange of pleasantries between a traveller and a trainee customs official.

The disasters of war pile up as men are forced to eat their own shit or tied to iron crosses and left to die and the corpses of police are left on the street to be feasted upon by vultures. All the while, a disinterested wider world dismisses all this as normality. As something that happens all the time in Africa.

Adichie writes brilliantly about racism (Brits, of course, joking about Africans being monkeys), colonialism (it is held that British universities are "proper" and rich young Nigerians are sent to Britain to study), and on who controls both women's bodies and women's desires. At one point, Olanna is grabbed by men who Adichie describes as walking around in a "cloud of cologne-drenched entitlement"

It's just one of her very brilliant turns of phrases. Others include such gems as "her oval face was smooth like an egg", "she enjoyed dwelling on the things they did not do and would never do", "her skin was the colour of a Belgian chocolate", and "theirs was a relationship consumed in sips". She describes fruit from mango trees "drooping down like heavy earrings", a family in disarray are, quite simply, "all strangers who shared the same last name", and, Richard, observes Olanna, wears his vulnerabilities "openly knotted at the throat like a tie".

When she writes of how a lover's smile made a man feel taller she writes with a beautiful economy of language that brings to life to the most simple of exchanges and events and also to the most complicated emotions. Small details underline the pain that conflict brings:- a mostly uneaten wedding cake, a discarded sandal, a secret kept for the sake of a person's sanity, and the first time a child shows that it will not always need the care of its mother.

All of this is set against the wider world of Nigerian, and African, politics of the time. You learn about Yakubu Gowon, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and the Katanga crisis in the Congo as well as the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa and the Herero genocide in then German occupied Namibia

The story pans out to take in the American civil rights movement, the role of Cuba in the era's geopolitics, and even the trial and execution of Nazi lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann. Equally, historical events are called upon to illustrate the thinking behind some of the people involved. From philosophers like Hegel, Hume, Locke, and Voltaire to the explorer Mungo Park.

You may wish to learn about these people to have a greater understanding of both the book and the deadly war it is set against but it's not entgirely necessary. You can simply read Half Of A Yellow Sun as an epic and touching drama about a relatively small group of people forced by circumstances out of their control to live in the most hellish times imaginable. Many times I was half a page in before I even realised the horror of what I was reading and that's because Adichie never forgets to paint Ugwu, Olanna, Richard, and others as humans rather than pawns in a game.

The most touching relationship for me, ultimately, is the one between the two sisters, Olanna and Kainene. It doesn't pass the Bechdel test because they do, of course, talk about the men in their lives but that would be a mean metric to measure it by. Half Of A Yellow Sun is such an all encompassing novel that to exclude those conversations would be plain daft and when a phone call between the two of them sees Kainene give Olanna her rare approval for a brave course of action you can almost feel Olanna beam within - and you beam with her. That's the true joy of this book. That, as you get to know these characters, you feel not just for them but with them. That's credit to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's writing. A writing that manages to find humanity in the most desperate of scenarios.