Half of a Yellow Sun

Ugwu arranged three benches on the veranda for Olanna’s class and two by the compound entrance for Mrs. Muokelu’s; for his own class with the youngest pupils, he placed two benches near the pile of cement blocks.

“We will teach mathematics, English, and civics every day,” Olanna said to Ugwu and Mrs. Muokelu a day before the classes began. “We have to make sure that when the war is over, they will all fit back easily into regular school. We will teach them to speak perfect English and perfect Igbo, like His Excellency. We will teach them pride in our great nation.”

Ugwu watched her and wondered if she had tears in her eyes or if it was simply the glare of the sun. He wanted to learn all he could from her and Mrs. Muokelu, to excel at teaching, to show her that he could do it. He was arranging his blackboard against a tree stump on the first day of classes when a woman, some relative of Special Julius’s, brought her daughter. She stared at Ugwu.

“Is this one a teacher?” she asked Olanna.

“Yes.”

“Is he not your houseboy?” Her voice was shrill. “Since when has a servant started to teach, bikokwa?”

“If you do not want your child to learn, take her home,” Olanna said.

The woman pulled her daughter by the hand and left. Ugwu was certain that Olanna would look at him with a sympathy that would annoy him more than the woman had. But she shrugged and said, “Good riddance. Her daughter has lice. I saw the eggs in her hair.”

Other parents were different. They looked at Olanna, her beautiful face, her undemanding fees, and her perfect English, with awe-filled respect. They brought palm oil and yams and garri. A woman who traded across enemy lines brought a chicken. An army contractor brought two of his children and a carton of books—early readers, six copies of Chike and the River, eight simplified editions of Pride and Prejudice; when Olanna opened the carton and threw her arms around him, Ugwu resented the startled leering pleasure on the man’s face.

After the first week, Ugwu became quietly convinced that Mrs. Muokelu knew very little. She calculated simple divisions with uncertainty, spoke in a low mumble when she read, as though she was afraid of the sentences, and scolded her pupils for getting something wrong without telling them what the correct thing was. And so he watched only Olanna. “Enunciate! Enunciate!” Olanna would say to her students, her voice rising. “Set-tle. Set-tle. The word has no R!” Because she made each of her students read aloud every day, Ugwu made his own class recite simple words aloud. Baby often went first. She was the youngest, not yet six in a class of seven-year-olds, but she flawlessly read cat, pan, bed in an accent that was like Olanna’s. She did not remember, though, to call him teacher like everyone else and Ugwu hid his amusement when she said, “Ugwu!”

At the end of the second week, after the children left, Mrs. Muokelu asked Olanna to sit down with her in the living room. She pulled the edges of her too-long boubou together and tucked them between her legs.

“I have twelve people to feed,” she said. “And that is not counting my husband’s relatives who have just come from Abakaliki. My husband has returned from the war front with one leg. What can he do? I am going to start afia attack and see if I can buy salt. I can no longer teach.”

“I understand,” Olanna said. “But must you join them in buying from enemy territory?”

“What is there to buy in Biafra? They have blockaded us kpam-kpam.”

“But how will you go?”

“There is a woman I know. She supplies garri to the army, so they give her lorry a military escort. The lorry will take us to Ufuma and then we will walk across to where the border is porous in Nkwerre-Inyi.”

“How long is the walk?”

“About fifteen or twenty miles, nothing a determined person cannot do. We will carry our Nigerian coins and buy salt and garri and then walk back to the lorry.”

“Please be careful, my sister.”

“Many are doing it and nothing has happened to them.” She got up. “Ugwu will have to handle my class. But I know he can manage.”

From the dining table where he was giving Baby her garri and soup, Ugwu pretended not to have heard them.

He took over her class the next day. He loved the light of recognition in the older children’s eyes when he explained the meaning of a word, loved the loud w

ay Master said to Special Julius, “My wife and Ugwu are changing the face of the next generation of Biafrans with their Socratic pedagogy!” and loved, most of all, the teasing way Eberechi called him teacher. She was impressed. When he saw her standing by her house and watching him teach, he would raise his voice and pronounce his words more carefully. She began to come over after classes. She would sit in the backyard with him, or play with Baby, or watch him weed the vegetable patch. Sometimes Olanna asked her to take some corn down to the grinding station down the road.

Ugwu stole some of the milk and sugar that Master brought home from the directorate and put them in old tins and gave them to her. She said thank you but she looked unimpressed, and so, in the middle of a searing afternoon, he sneaked into Olanna’s room and poured some scented talcum powder into a folded piece of paper. He had to impress her. Eberechi sniffed it and dabbed a little on her neck before she said, “I did not ask you for powder.”

Ugwu laughed. He felt, for the first time, completely at ease in her presence. She told him about her parents’ pushing her into the army officer’s room, and he listened as if he had not heard it before.

“He had a big belly,” she said, in a detached tone. “He did it quickly and then told me to lie on top of him. He fell asleep and I wanted to move away and he woke up and told me to stay there. I could not sleep so the whole night I looked at the saliva coming down the side of his mouth.” She paused. “He helped us. He put my brother in essential services in the army.”

Ugwu looked away. He felt angry that she had gone through what she had, and he felt angry with himself because the story had involved imagining her naked and had aroused him. He thought, in the following days, about him and Eberechi in bed, how different it would be from her experience with the colonel. He would treat her with the respect she deserved and do only what she liked, only what she wanted him to do. He would show her the positions he had seen in Master’s Concise Couples Handbook in Nsukka. The slender book had been squashed into a dusty corner of the study shelf, and the first time Ugwu saw it while he was cleaning, he looked through it hurriedly, sweeping past the pencil-sketched diagrams that somehow became more exciting because they were unreal. Later, he realized that Master probably didn’t remember that the book existed so he took it to the Boys’ Quarters to study over a few nights. He had thought about trying some of the positions out with Chinyere but never did: there was something about the methodical silence of her night visits that made any novelty impossible. He wished so much that he had brought the book from Nsukka. He wanted to remember some finer details, what the woman had done with her hands in the sideways-from-behind position, for example. He searched in Master’s bedroom and felt foolish because he knew there was no way the Concise Couples Handbook would be there. Then he felt a deep sadness at how few books there were on the table, in the whole house.

Ugwu was making Baby’s breakfast and Master was taking a bath when Olanna began to shout from the living room. The radio was turned on very loud. She ran out to the back, to the outhouse, carrying it in her hand. “Odenigbo! Odenigbo! Tanzania has recognized us!”

Master came out with his moist wrapper barely tied around his waist, his chest covered in lustrous wet hair. His smiling face without the thick glasses looked funny. “Gini? What?”

“Tanzania has recognized us!” Olanna said.