Rethinking the Nigerian/Biafran Civil War in Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun: A War Fought to Foster Unity or Genocide Against a Particular People

Abstract The thirty-month civil war fought between the Nigerian federal government and the secessionist Biafra from 1967 to 1970 has widely been justified by non-Igbo Nigerians, the aggressors, and foreigners as “a war fought to keep Nigeria one.” The aim of this article is therefore to examine the remote causes of the Nigerian/Biafran civil war and to ascertain whether or not this general mantra of keeping Nigeria one by wasting more than three million lives with property worth millions of pounds all from one tribe is a genocide. In this article the theory of new historicism and qualitative descriptive research methods are applied to examine this historical event from the perspectives of Chimamanda Adichie’s artistic recreation, but realistic representation of the Nigerian/Biafran war in her award-winning novel Half of a Yellow Sun. This article concludes that one of the causes of the Nigerian/Biafran civil war is the fear of political domination among the three major ethnic groups in Nigeria and that the war is a genocide against the Igbo nation, hence the definition of genocide by the United Nations, as any act committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.