Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Three-Book Collection

Ugwu heard the sound just before they cut their cake in the living room, the swift wah-wah-wah roar in the sky. At first it was thunderous, and then it receded for a moment and came back again, louder and swifter. From somewhere close by, chickens began to squawk wildly.

Somebody said, ‘Enemy plane! Air raid!’

‘Outside!’ Master shouted, but some guests were running into the bedroom, screaming, ‘Jesus! Jesus!’

The sounds were louder now, overhead.

They ran – Master, Olanna holding Baby, Ugwu, some guests – to the cassava patch beside the house and lay on their bellies. Ugwu looked up and saw the planes, gliding low beneath the blue sky like two birds of prey. They spurted hundreds of scattered bullets before dark balls rolled out from underneath, as if the planes were laying large eggs. The first explosion was so loud that Ugwu’s ear popped and his body shivered alongside the vibrating ground. A woman from the opposite house tugged at Olanna’s dress. ‘Remove it! Remove that white dress! They will see it and target us!’

Okeoma yanked off his uniform shirt, buttons flying off, and wrapped it around Olanna. Baby began to cry. Master held his hand loosely over her mouth, as if the pilots might hear her. The second explosion followed and then the third and fourth and fifth, until Ugwu felt the warm wetness of urine on his shorts and was convinced that the bombs would never end; they would continue to fall until everything was destroyed and everyone died. But they stopped. The planes moved farther away in the sky. Nobody moved or spoke for a long time, until Special Julius got up and said, ‘They have gone.’

‘The planes were so low,’ a boy said excitedly. ‘I saw the pilot!’

Master and Okeoma were first to walk out to the road. Okeoma looked smaller wearing only a singlet and trousers. Olanna continued to sit on the ground holding Baby, the camouflage-print army shirt wrapped around her wedding dress. Ugwu got up and headed down the road. He heard Dr Nwala say to Olanna, ‘Let me help you up. The dirt will stain your dress.’

Smoke rose from a compound near the corn-grinding station a street away. Two houses had collapsed into dusty rubble and some men were digging frantically through the jumbled cement, saying, ‘Did you hear that cry? Did you?’ A fine haze of silvery dust covered their entire bodies so that they looked like limbless ghosts with open eyes.

‘The child is alive, I heard the cry, I heard it,’ somebody said. Men and women had gathered to help and to stare; some dug through the rubble too, others stood and looked and still others shrieked and snapped their fingers. A car was on fire; the body of a woman lay next to it, her clothes burnt off, flecks of pink all over her blackened skin, and when somebody covered it with a torn jute sack, Ugwu could still see the stiff, charcoal-black legs. The sky was overcast. The wet smell of coming rain mixed with the smoky smell of burning. Okeoma and Master had joined in digging through the rubble. ‘I heard the child,’ somebody said again. ‘I heard the child.’

Ugwu turned to leave. A stylish sandal lay on the ground and he picked it up and looked at the leather straps, the thick wedge heel, before he left it where it had been. He imagined the chic young woman who had been wearing it, who had discarded it to run to safety. He wondered where the other sandal was.

When Master came back home, Ugwu was sitting on the floor of the living room, his back against the wall. Olanna was picking at a piece of cake on a saucer. She was still wearing her wedding dress; Okeoma’s uniform shirt was neatly folded on a chair. The guests had all left slowly, saying little, their faces shadowed with guilt, as if embarrassed that they had allowed the air raid to ruin the wedding.

Master poured himself a glass of palm wine. ‘Did you listen to the news?’

‘No,’ Olanna said.

‘Our troops have lost all the captured territory in the midwest and the march to Lagos is over. Nigeria now says this is war, no longer a police action.’ He shook his head. ‘We were sabotaged.’

‘Would you like some cake?’ Olanna asked. The cake sat on the centre table, whole but for the thin slice she had cut off.

‘Not now.’ He drank his palm wine and poured another. ‘We will build a bunker in case of another air raid.’ His tone was normal, calm, as if air raids were benign, as if it were not death that had come so close moments ago. He turned to Ugwu. ‘Do you know what a bunker is, my good man?’

‘Yes, sah,’ Ugwu said. ‘Like the one Hitler had.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose.’

‘But, sah, people are saying that bunkers are mass graves,’ Ugwu said.

‘Absolute nonsense. Bunkers are safer than lying in a cassava patch.’

Outside, darkness had fallen and the sky was lit once in a while by lightning. Olanna suddenly jumped up from a chair and screamed, ‘Where is Baby? Ke Baby?’ and started to run into the bedroom.

‘Nkem!’ Master went after her.

‘Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear them bombing us again?’

‘It’s thunder.’ Master grabbed Olanna from behind and held her. ‘It’s only the thunder. What our rain-holder kept back is finally unleashing itself. It’s only the thunder.’

He held her for a while longer until, finally, Olanna sat down and cut another slice of cake for herself.

4. The Book: The World Was Silent When We Died

He argues that Nigeria did not have an economy until Independence. The colonial state was authoritarian, a benignly brutal dictatorship designed to benefit Britain. What the economy consisted of in 1960 was potential – raw materials, human beings, high spirits, some money from the marketing board reserves left over from what the British had taken to rebuild their post-war economy. And there was the newly discovered oil. But the new Nigerian leaders were too optimistic, too ambitious with development projects that would win their people’s credibility, too naive in accepting exploitative foreign loans, and too interested in aping the British and in taking over the superior attitudes and better hospitals and better salaries long denied Nigerians. He gestures to complex problems facing the new country but focuses on the 1966 massacres. The ostensible reasons – revenge for the ‘Igbo coup’, protest against a unitary decree that would make Northerners lose out in the civil service – did not matter. Nor did the varying numbers of the dead: three thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand. What mattered was that the massacres frightened and united the Igbo. What mattered was that the massacres made fervent Biafrans of former Nigerians.

PART THREE (#u3c1576f1-c916-57b7-bb43-a63c028a7109)

The Early Sixties (#u3c1576f1-c916-57b7-bb43-a63c028a7109)

19 (#u3c1576f1-c916-57b7-bb43-a63c028a7109)

Ugwu sat on the steps that led to the backyard. Raindrops slid down the leaves, the air smelt of wet soil, and he and Harrison were talking about his upcoming trip with Mr Richard.

‘Tufia! I don’t know why my master wants to see that devilish festival in your village,’ Harrison said. He was a few steps below; Ugwu could see the bald patch on the middle of his head.

‘Maybe Mr Richard wants to write about the devil,’ Ugwu said. Of course the ori-okpa was not a devilish festival, but he would not disagree with Harrison. He needed Harrison to be in a good mood so he could ask him about tear gas. They were silent for a while, watching the vultures hovering overhead; the neighbours had killed a chicken.

‘Ah, those lemons are ripening.’ Harrison gestured to the tree. ‘I’m using the fresh one for meringue pie,’ he added in English.

‘What is meh-rang?’ Ugwu asked. Harrison would like that question.

‘You don’t know what it is?’ Harrison laughed. ‘It is an American food. I will make it for my master to bring here when your madam comes back from London. I know she will like it.’ Harrison turned to glance at Ugwu. He had placed a newspaper before sitting on the step, and it rumpled as he shifted. ‘Even you will like it.’

‘Yes,’ Ugwu said, although he had sworn never to eat Harrison’s food after he dropped by Mr Richard’s house and saw Harrison spooning shredded orange peels into a pot of sauce. He would have been less alarmed if Harrison had cooked with the orange itself, but to cook with the peels was like choosing the hairy skin of a goat rather than the meat.

‘I also use lemons to make cake; lemons are very good for the body,’ Harrison said. ‘The food of white people makes you healthy, it is not like all of the nonsense that our people eat.’

‘Yes, that is so.’ Ugwu cleared his throat. He should ask Harrison about tear gas now, but instead he said, ‘Let me show you my new room in the Boys’ Quarters.’

‘Okay.’ Harrison got up.

When they walked into Ugwu’s room, he pointed to the ceiling, patterned black and white. ‘I did that myself,’ he said. He had held a candle up there for hours, flicking the flame all over the ceiling, stopping often to move the table he was standing on.

‘O maka, it is very nice.’ Harrison looked at the narrow spring bed in the corner, the table and chair, the shirts hanging on nails stuck to the wall, the two pairs of shoes arranged carefully on the floor. ‘Are those new shoes?’

‘My madam bought them for me from Bata.’

Harrison touched the pile of journals on the table. ‘You are reading all of these?’ he asked in English.

‘Yes.’ Ugwu had saved them from the study dustbin; the MathematicalAnnals were incomprehensible, but at least he had read, if not understood, a few pages of Socialist Review.

It had started to rain again. The patter on the zinc roof was loud and grew louder as they stood under the awning outside and watched the water sliding down from the roof in parallel lines.

Ugwu slapped at his arm – he liked the rain-cooled air, but he didn’t like the mosquitoes flying around. Finally he asked the question. ‘Do you know how I can get tear gas?’

‘Tear gas? Why do you ask?’

‘I read about it in my master’s newspaper, and I want to see what it is like.’ He would not tell Harrison that he in fact heard of tear gas when Master talked about the members of the Western House of Assembly, who punched and kicked one another until the police came and sprayed tear gas and they all passed out, leaving orderlies to carry them, limp, to their cars. The tear gas fascinated Ugwu. If it made people pass out, he wanted to get it. He wanted to use it on Nnesinachi when he went home with Mr Richard for the ori-okpa festival. He would lead her to the grove by the stream and tell her the tear gas was a magic spray that would keep her healthy. She would believe him. She would be so impressed to see him arrive in a white man’s car that she would believe anything he said.