Half of a Yellow Sun

"Can't they leave?" she murmured.

"Come, nkem," Odenigbo said. "I can't wait for them to meet you."

"Let's stay here just a little longer." She ran her hand over the curly hair on his chest, but he kissed her and got up to look for his underwear.

Ola

"My friends, my friends," Odenigbo a

The woman, who was tuning the radiogram, turned and took Ola

"I'm well," Ola

"Yes," Miss Adebayo said. "He did not tell us that you were illogically pretty."

Ola

"And what a proper English accent," Miss Adebayo murmured, with a pitying smile, before turning back to the radiogram. She had a compact body, a straight back that looked straighter in her stiff orange-print dress, the body of a questioner whom one dared not question back.

"I'm Okeoma," the man with the tangled mop of uncombed hair said. "I thought Odenigbo's girlfriend was a human being; he didn't say you were a water mermaid."

Ola

After Ugwu served drinks, Ola

"Did not that great thinker Hegel call Africa a land of childhood?" Professor Ezeka asked, in an affected tone.

"Maybe the people who put up those no children and Africans signs in the cinemas in Mombasa had read Hegel, then," Dr. Patel said, and chuckled.

"Nobody can take Hegel seriously. Have you read him closely? He's fu

"What people fail to see is this: If Europe had cared more about Africa, the Jewish Holocaust would not have happened," Odenigbo said. "In short, the World War would not have happened!"

"What do you mean?" Miss Adebayo asked. She held her glass to her lips.

"How can you ask what I mean? It's self-evident, starting with the Herero people." Odenigbo was shifting on his seat, his voice raised, and Ola

"You've come again, Odenigbo," Miss Adebayo said. "You're saying that if white people had not murdered the Herero, the Jewish Holocaust would not have happened? I don't see a co

"Don't you see?" Odenigbo asked. "They started their race studies with the Herero and concluded with the Jews. Of course there's a co

"Your argument doesn't hold water at all, you sophist," Miss Adebayo said, and dismissively downed what was in her glass.

"But the World War was a bad thing that was also good, as our people say," Okeoma said. "My father's brother fought in Burma and came back filled with one burning question: How come nobody told him before that the white man was not immortal?"

They all laughed. There was something habitual about it, as if they had had different variations of this conversation so many times that they knew just when to laugh. Ola

The following weeks, when she started teaching a course in introductory sociology, when she joined the staff club and played te

Ola

Still, when Ola