Half of a Yellow Sun

"I knew that parents would keep their children at home."

"Who wouldn't? What kind of nonstop bombing campaign is this?"

"It is because Harold Wilson came." Mrs. Muokelu snorted. "They want to impress him so he will bring in the British army."

"Special Julius said that too, but it's impossible."

"Impossible?" Mrs. Muokelu smiled as though Ola

"He is an army contractor."

"I am not saying he does not do small-small contracts with the army, but he sells forged passes. His brother is a director and they do it together. It is because of them that all sorts of crooks are ru

Ola

"Plane, kwa?" Mrs. Muokelu laughed. "Somebody closed their door in the next house and you say it is a plane?"

Ola

"Did you hear that we shot down their bomber around IkotEkpene?" Mrs. Muokelu asked.

"I didn't hear."

"And this was done by a common civilian with his hunting gun! You know, it is as if the Nigerians are so stupid that whoever works for them becomes stupid too. They are too stupid to fly the planes that Russia and Britain gave them, so they brought in white people, and even those white people can't hit any target. Ha! Half their bombs don't even explode."

"The half that explodes is enough to kill us," Ola

Mrs. Muokelu kept speaking as though she had not heard Ola

"I hear that our ogbunigwe is putting the fear of God into them. In Afikpo, it killed only a few hundred men, but the entire Nigerian battalion withdrew from fear. They have never seen a weapon like that. They don't know what we still have for them." She chuckled and shook her head and tugged at the half of a yellow sun around her neck. "Gowon sent them to bomb Awgu Market in the middle of the afternoon while women were buying and selling. He has refused to let the Red Cross bring us food, refused kpam-kpam, so that we will starve to death. But he will not succeed. If we had people pouring guns and planes into our hands as they pour into Nigeria, this thing would have ended a long time ago and everybody would be in his own house now. But we will conquer them. Is God sleeping? No!" Mrs. Muokelu laughed. The siren went off. Ola

As they climbed out of the bunker later, somebody said, "They targeted the primary school!"

"Those heathens have bombed our school," Mrs. Muokelu said.

"Look! Another bomber!" a young man said, laughing, and pointed at a vulture flying overhead.

They joined the crowd hurrying toward Akwakuma Primary School. Two men walked past, in the opposite direction, carrying a blackened corpse. A bomb crater, wide enough to swallow a lorry, had split the road at the school entrance in two. The roof of the classroom block was crushed into a jumble of wood and metal and dust. Ola

The siren did not go off early in the morning, and so when the fierce wah-wah-wah sounds of the bombers appeared from nowhere, as Ola

She was first to climb out of the bunker. A woman had thrown herself down near the body of a child and was rolling around in the dirt, crying. "Gowon, what have I done to you? Gowon, olee the m mere gi?" A few women gathered around and helped her up. "Stop crying, it is enough," they said. "What do you want your other children to do?"

Ola

Ugwu was watching her. "Mah? Do you want me to do it?"

"No." She dissolved the ash in a basin of cold water, stirring with a force that made the water splatter on her legs. She put the drippings on the fire and ignored Ugwu. He must have sensed the anger that was rising up her body and making her light-headed because he went back indoors silently. From the street, the crying woman's voice rose again and again, hoarser and thi

Ola

Nkiruka, her brightest student, shaded contours into the faces and, with a few strokes of her pencil, gave Gowon a snarl and His Excellency a grin.