Now the books are arranged according to which characters I believe ought to be talking to each other. - Sarah Ladipo Manyika

What is done is done and I’ll wait until I get home to see how bad things really are. Consider the birds in the sky, I remind myself. Consider the birds in the sky.

I’m so grateful to Adichie for having written Half of a Yellow Sun with its focus on the Nigerian civil war. Her novel, alongside other books with the war at its core, including Soyinka’s memoir The Man Died, Chris Abani’s novella-in-verse Daphne’s Lot, and Chinelo Okparanta’s novel Under the Udala Trees, all give us a greater sense of the events and conditions of that horrific war. While the civil war is not the central focus of In Dependence, it forms part of the tragic backdrop to the story. In Dependence is deeply personal for me in that I am writing about my parents’ generation. This is not my parents’ story, but it could have been their story.

Negritude is an ideology of the elite, completely devoid of meaning for the masses ... Negritude is an ideology suggesting that Africans are blessed with a soul and not reason. They would have us believe that Africans can sing, dance and feel, but not think.