Half of a Yellow Sun

Eastern Nigeria on either side of the Biafran war. The story begins in the university town of Nsukka, in the quiet of a campus household, then follows the short life of Biafra as its capital falls back from Enugu to Umuahia and the region shrinks under blockade and hunger. The map runs south through the Igbo heartland, with the far northern city of Kano at its edge as the place the killing began.

Olanna

University of Nigeria, Nsukka

Early sixties

The novel opens on the campus of the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, where a mathematics lecturer holds forth on independence and pan-African politics with a circle of academic friends. Olanna leaves a comfortable life in Lagos to lecture here and share his house. The university is real, founded in 1960 as the country's first fully indigenous one, and Nsukka becomes an early casualty when federal troops overrun the town in 1967.

Part 1, the early sixties

explicit Named in the book.

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Ugwu

Odenigbo's house, Odim Street

Early sixties

Most of the book's domestic life happens inside one house in the university's staff quarters, seen largely through the eyes of Ugwu, the teenage houseboy who arrives from a nearby village to cook and clean. The kitchen, the garden and the sitting-room debates make the house a small world that the war will later tear apart. The street name is the author's; the setting is the campus housing itself.

Part 1, the early sixties

inferred Adichie gives the household a campus address, Odim Street, that does not match a mapped road; this marks the senior-staff residential quarter of the Nsukka campus, where such a lecturer's house would stand.

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Ugwu

Opi, Ugwu's home village

Early sixties

Ugwu is brought to the campus from Opi, a farming village a short walk from Nsukka, and he carries its customs and its people with him through the book. He returns there between the household's crises, and the village stands for the ordinary rural life the war overturns. Opi is a real place; the particular family and compound are the author's.

Part 1, the early sixties

inferred Adichie names Opi as the village Ugwu comes from, a real settlement just southeast of Nsukka; his family compound within it is invented, so this marks the village centre.

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