Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
The African continent today is laced with some of the most intractable conflicts, most of them based on ethnic nationalism. More often than not, this has led to poor governance, unequal distribution of resources, state collapse, high attrition of human resources, economic decline, and inter-ethnic clashes. This essay seeks to examine Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun through the lens of ethnic conflict. It begins by tracing the history and manifestations of ethnic stereotypes and ethnic cleavage in African imaginaries. The essay then argues that group loyalty in Nigeria led to the creation of 'biafranization' or 'fear of the Igbo factor' in the Hausa-Fulani and the various other ethnic groups that sympathized with them; a fear that crystallized into a thirty-month state-sponsored bulwark campaign aimed at finding a 'final solution' to a 'problem population'. Finally, the essay contends that Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun anatomizes the impact of ethnic cleavage on the civilian Igbo population during the Nigeria-Biafra civil war. Adichie, I argue, participates in an ongoing re-invention of how Africans can extinguish the psychology of fear that they are endangered species when they live side by side with people who do not belong to their 'tribe'.
Introduction
ETHNICITY, POOR GOVERNANCE, BRAZEN CORRUPTION, dictatorships, and endemic poverty are not unusual in Africa. More often than not, these evils have led to conflict and civil strife, leaving millions of people across the continent maimed, mutilated, massively displaced, tortured, starved, and brutally hacked to death. All this, needless to say, has hindered development in many African states. The international community has not minded its own business, though. Western countries and international organizations have poured millions of dollars into Africa. They have also suggested - and in some cases introduced - poverty-reduction strategies, good governance policies, and, of course, material aid to Africa. What remains peculiar, however, is that since the end of colonial rule in Africa these evils have dramatically increased in level and scale, instead of taking the opposite direction. What is more, it appears that the West is all but flogging a dead horse, for Africa has proved to the outside world that she is not ready to respond to the therapy prescribed to her.
Against this background, the present...