Childhood in contemporary nigerian fiction

92 goes about the daily culinary chores assigned to him. Indeed, taking the idea of an academic sodality as representative of the consciousness of this new nation-state-in-the- making at Nsukka, at face value is problematic. One could even argue, in light of Amuta
(1984) that Adichie‟s Half of a Yellow Sun depicts the bourgeoisie anxieties that were behind the war, because academics form part of this particular class as intellectual stakeholders. JP O‟Flinn‟s article also traces the sociology of the Nigerian novel through the elitist alliances of the military, businessmen and politicians that resulted in what Olalare Oladitan called The Nigerian Crisis in the Nigerian Novel – the strings of coups and the civil war- and collapse in post-independence Nigeria. However, the idea of Ugwu the houseboy represents a self-critique to the one-sided colonial/patriarchal consciousness of the Biafran war. Ugwu‟s role in the kitchen as a servant, allows for his construction as a reliable voice who takes part in the war from a different point of view. He is scarred by the war, and through the epistemological evolution he goes through as a servant, then as pupil/student, a teacher during the war and eventually an authorial voice, he embodies a composite ideological vision of Adichie – as the previously marginal subject who eventually finds a voice and becomes central to the history being constructed in the novel.
Ugwu starts as a nave subject facing anew and rapidly advancing post-independent modernity. He is confronted by an anti-colonial consciousness, through his masters conversations with his visitors. He has come into an academic sodality as an observer from the margins of society. Yet he is confronted by historical discourses and epistemological debates, in a manner that has him listen and watch in nave bewilderment There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers. I will give you books, excellent books Master stopped to sip his tea. They Refer to JP. O‟Flint Towards a Sociology of the Nigerian Novel in African Literature Today no. 7 and
Olalare Oladitan The Nigerian Crisis in the Nigerian Novel in Kolawole Ogungbesan (ed) New West
African Literature.

93 will teach you that a white man called Mungo Park discovered River Niger. That is rubbish. Our people fished in the Niger long before Mungo Parks grandfather was born. But in your exam, write that it was Mungo Park Yes, sah.‟ Ugwu wished that this person called Mungo Park had not offended master so much. (11) Thus begins Ugwu‟s epistemological journey, through a baptism of fire by an employer who is an academic and a revolutionary at University of Nigeria Nsukka. While these discourses are meta-critical in relation to Ugwu‟s mental position as a semi-literate village boy, they begin a buildup to the controversial counter-discourse of the Biafran war in the wake of a history of nationalism within the intellectual class at Nsukka. Ugwu begins to witness the dialogues between Odenigbo, his master, and a host of other academics of different races, cultures and ethnicities. The everyday life for Ugwu, apart from preparing the food, is listening to the clink of glasses and laughter, as well as the highly charged topics of nation-state and national identities between Odenigbo, Miss
Adebayo the Yoruba Academic, Dr. Patel the Indian, Mr. Johnson the Caribbean, Professor Lehman the American, Okeoma the poet (modeled after Christopher Okigbo) and Professor Ezeka (18-20). Adichie takes this opportunity to construct, through the daily conversations of this academic sodality a discourse around ethnic and national identities and subjectivities around the ideas of Pan-Africanism and Pan-Igboism (18-21). The everyday is therefore fraught, already, with verbal-ideological fractures of differing ideas of identity. Ugwu‟s role is to listen, from his marginal position and status to the different accents of English or Igbo, ethnicities, like Miss Adebayo‟s Yoruba accent and to slowly witness how fragile the national identity texture is. Nsukka becomes a microcosm of the already existing tensions that are part of uneasy coexistence of colonial occupation.
Anderson‟s (1991) idea of an imagined community is interrogated by the intellectuals here. Odenigbo, Ugwu‟s Master, is already being constructed as a revolutionary, even a vernacular intellectual, championing Igbo nationalism

94 Of course, of course, but my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe Master said. I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man


came.‟ (20. Emphasis retained)
Ugwu listens to these polemical debates that foreground the underlying tensions within the nationalist history of Nigeria that the novel is reconstructing. Within the discourse of daily life for these academic society at Nsukka, is encrusted identity tensions. As a university town, it has a cosmopolitan demographic, indicated by the diversity of ethnicities and races that form Odenigbo‟s regular interlocutors. The collective experience of colonialism provides a locus on shared history for the intellectuals here, but they soon realise that the practice of everyday life – language and culture, as well as shared communal origins are different and that the post-independent political unit – the nation-state – seems not to provide enough platform for dialogue among these disparate nationalities. Nation-state tensions are brought to the level of the everyday in Half of a
Yellow Sun. The Home Front as Ugwu witnesses becomes a War Front of verbal- ideological warfare. The early sixties the period depicted in the novel as tranquil at the University is ideologically simmering with identity tensions. Adichie‟s structuring of the novel as periods of juxtaposed history with early sixties alternating with late sixties is aesthetically similar to her engagement with the memory of Palm Sunday in Purple
Hibiscus, in which events that happen before Palm Sunday are also alternated, with
Nsukka and Enugu becoming trajectories of memory-places embodied in red and purple hibiscus flowers. In Half of a Yellow Sun, history is engaged with through the migration of memories across time, essentially between these two periods of years, early and late sixties. These two periods are alternate trajectories of history that leave an indelible collective memory of an Igbo nation and which are times when heritages and legacies are created and destroyed. The domestic front remains a veritable battleground in Half of a
Yellow Sun, where the memory of the everyday is reconstructed by Adichie, as a significant part of the archive of the memory of war.

95 As a novel dealing with historical events, domestic histories and memories provide a critique to many assumptions of heroism and patriotism. Moreover, Adichie is aware of the need to provide a composite yet microcosmic account of the war, with an array of protagonists and voices, even though there is always the underlying subjectivity of her own genealogical heritage of the war. Hence Ugwu, the houseboy modeled after an actual houseboy called Mellitus is admitted into the genealogy of the Adichie family, through his voice in Half of a Yellow Sun, as part of the narratives construction of the genealogy of the Biafran war. Ugwu‟s position in relation to other houseboys in Nsukka, as he realises, is different his Master Odenigbo insists he should refer to him as Odenigbo and not “sah” as Ugwu has been instructed by his aunt. Odenigbo also enrolls him at the staff primary school, and allocates him a room in the main house rather than the Boys Quarters. These, Ugwu realises, are privileges that other houseboys in Nsukka do not enjoy.

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