The Bildungsroman and Biafran Sovereignty in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun

This paper returns to an often-overlooked moment in international legal history, the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), and explores the rhetorical strategies that the Biafran government used when struggling to justify its sovereignty. It reads Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel about the war, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), as a prolonged commentary on Biafra's international legal troubles. While Nigeria insisted that Biafra was a rogue state without international legitimacy, Biafra claimed that Nigeria gave up its control over the region because it had violated their "human rights" during the 1966 pogroms. Because there were (and still are) no clear rules as to when sovereignty is to be recognized, Biafrans found themselves in a position with no clear path to recognition. They turned, therefore, to their public relations branch, spearheaded by Chinua Achebe, to help sway international opinion. This paper argues that they redeployed the bildungsroman's tropes as a way of making legible their readiness to rule, and that Adichie's writes Half of a Yellow Sun as a bildungsroman in acknowledgement of this posture. Far from substantiating Biafran sovereignty, however, Biafra's international outreach failed to secure widespread recognition before the ceasefire in 1970. With this failure in tow, Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun adopts the genre of the bildungsroman only to trouble its credibility as an effective administrative tool.