Half of a Yellow Sun starts off being the story of some young people, for the most part privileged and educated, enjoying their lives and loves in the Nigeria of the early sixties.

Odenigbo is a university lecturer and intellectual, who wins the heart of the gorgeous Olanna, a woman whose beauty turns heads.

In contrast, her twin, Kainene, is "the ugly one". Their father is a man from the country, one of the nouveau riche, making money hand over fist via a combination of good luck, scheming, and ruthlessness which enables him to exploit a network of bribery and corruption. He is one of the fat cats of the post-independence era.

Shocking though it sounds, at one point, Olanna is offered to a fat old government minister as part of one of her father's business deals, and Kainene, realizing this, is glad she is not pretty. As she says, baldly: "the benefit of being the ugly daughter is that nobody uses you as sex bait."

Most of the characters in the book belong to an ethnic group called the Igbos. (In English, the 'g' is not pronounced, so it is often rendered Ibo). The other big language groups in the country are called the Hausas, (mainly Moslem), and the Yoruba, (some Moslem, some Christian). There are of course a whole lot of other tribal groups and languages.

This book concerns the domestic affairs of the protagonists, set against the backdrop of the political events taking place at that time. In this sense it could be compared to Ikram Seth's "A suitable boy."

So, while making no pretence of being any kind of authority on Nigerian history, I feel the need to insert something of the historical events as I understand them....and I hope this synopsis will not offend anyone.

The Igbo, for the most part, were Catholic, and had a tendency to be successful, especially in commerce. Some officers in the army became disillusioned with how the government was mis-managing affairs of state, and overthrew it in a coup. Most of those officers were Igbo.

Before long, rumours were spreading and the non-Igbo people began to take fright. It seemed as though the Igbos were trying to control everything, the best jobs, the highest posts in government, and the officer class of the army.

Unexpectedly, the non-Igbo soldiery of the Nigerian army rose up and massacred as many Igbos as they could... like the pogroms against the Jews in European cities, the violence spread amongst the civilian population; mobs ran amok, and many Igbos were victims of murders, lynchings and shootings, in many cases a cover for looting and theft. No one really knows how many died in this outbreak of violence ... some sources quote the figure of 30,000.

One of the central characters of the novel is the humble houseboy, servant to Odenigbo, and then to Odenigbo and Olanna. Ogwu is just a boy when he is taken from his village by his aunt to work in the house of Odenigbo.

Initially, Ogwu is amazed at everything.... he has never before seen running water, or a refrigerator. And he is so overcome by the sight of a whole chicken sitting there on the top shelf that he takes some of it back to his room in his trouser pocket, hoping to find a way of delivering it to his sister.

Odenigbo, Ogwu's "Master", being a liberal intellectual... (who has also come from a small village like Ogwu's), he treats his servant much better than most people would treat a mere houseboy, and undertakes to educate him, stating that: "Education is a priority. How can we resist exploitation if we don't understand the tools of exploitation?" So Ogwu goes to school and tries to improve himself, and to understand the conversations of Odenigbo's little group of friends, mostly university staff like himself, as they conduct intellectual discussions and talk about current affairs around the world.

Ogwu lies awake at night, reading works like The Mayor of Casterbridge, in an endeavour to educate himself. Much later in the book, and in Ugwu's life, he comes across the memoir of Frederick Douglass, and is inspired by the idea that a black man and ex-slave has written this eloquent condemnation of slavery.

War comes like a whirlwind after the charismatic leader of the Igbos, General Ojukwo, declares Igbo land to be the independent Republic of Biafra.

The response of the Nigerian government was to launch a war which has been called genocidal, against the rebel state. When I was growing up in the sixties, this war featured on our TV screens, and we were vicarious witnesses to wholesale deaths of civilians, a very high proportion of whom were infants. The world had not seen so many people intentionally starved to death since the liberation of Belsen. Protesters marched on Downing Street, then home to Mr Harold Wilson, and were largely ignored. To our great shame, Britain supported and armed the Federal Government of Nigeria even when they declared a total embargo, with the objective of starving Biafra into submission.

Even though the story of the conflict is told from the Igbo point of view, the Igbos are not idealized. The Igbo soldiery can be just as barbaric as the enemy... the conscription methods just as arbitrary, and the refugees can be as cruel to one another as the enemy can be towards them.

This is a very human story, of complex human relationships tested in the fire of warfare and slow starvation, displacement, loss and mourning. All the characters who start off having only admirable qualities, are later seen to fail, like the central characters in Shakespeare's tragedies. All flesh is weak.

Ogwu, with all his faults, becomes the hero, but a flawed hero, deeply ashamed of how soldiering dehumanized him. But there is a certain optimism to be found in the account of Ogwu's education and development. As a result of the help and influence of the family, he too becomes a wise and eloquent observer of his era.

An excellent book....recalling a tragic war we had almost forgotten, and indeed most British people of my generation would prefer to forget our government's ignoble role in that conflict. The ending brought a tear to my eye.