Necropolitics and The Biafran War in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun
Necropolitics and The Biafran War in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun

Summary/Abstract: After Nigeria became independent in 1960, the divisions engendered by the long history of colonialism as well as the artificiality of borders imposed by the British led to a three-year civil war following the Igbo-led military coup in 1966. In her novel Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie depicts the events leading to the Biafran war and the horrors of the "war of starvation" through a polyphony of voices from different social backgrounds as well as through a metatext, a book called The World Was Silent When We Died, excerpts from which are inserted at the end of certain chapters as a comment on colonial and postcolonial politics. Thus, the novel turns into a large-scale historiographic metafiction that documents the transition from the early postcolonial state to what philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe called “necropolitical” systems of domination.

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