Revisiting Fanon’s Reading of National Consciousness through Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

By examining variances between middle-class Nigerian characters especially by contrasting men and women, this paper argues that, unlike Frantz Fanon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), does not believe all members of the middle class are identical and exemplify Fanon's notion of "intellectual laziness." In particular, Adichie exempt middle-class female characters from Fanon's assumption as they are depicted as fully engaged actors in their daily life and for the purpose of building national consciousness. Focusing on the novel's main characters—Olanna and Kainene, two twin sisters from an established middle-class family; and Odenigbo and Ugwu, respectively a man who recently climbed to the middle-class and a middle-class aspirant—, this paper investigates Fanon's theory of "intellectual laziness" and the struggle for national consciousness among the middle class through the lens of class and gender as it applies to Adichie's disparate representations of middle-class characters.