Back to Utopia: Retrieving the Past to Reclaim the Future

After looking forward to utopian possibility in GraceLand, the penultimate chapter goes backwards to reclaim the possibility of utopian thought: the apparently ‘missed opportunity’ of the nationalist era. Although set in the late 1960s, I read Half of a Yellow Sun as challenging ongoing external preconceptions about Africa. Undoubtedly, the Biafran war is a defining moment in the perception of postcolonial Africa’s ‘tragic’ narrative: occurring less than ten years after independence, the events of the conflict—and the fate of those in Biafra in particular—attracted widespread attention at the time. Returning to the events of the civil conflict and Biafra itself, Half of a Yellow Sun interrogates the complex geopolitical circumstances behind the conflict. Rather than reinforcing the narrative of the tragic continent, the temporally complicated form of Adichie’s novel emphasises that the future of Africa always was, is, and will continue to be ongoing and available, despite an ongoing assumption of stasis and inevitability. By returning to a defining event in Africa’s (not simply Nigeria’s) post-independence history, Half of a Yellow Sun presents the continent’s narrative as one of ongoing decolonisation, as opposed to a cycle of repeated failure and underdevelopment.