The Campus as War Zone: Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, Post-Independence Civil War, and the African University

ABSTRACT This article explores how a set of contemporary Anglophone African novels critically engage the relationship between universities and war. Dinaw Mengestu’s 2014 All Our Names, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2006 Half of a Yellow Sun, and Aminatta Forna’s 2010 The Memory of Love are war novels that chronicle the collapse of the postcolonial state in the face of military coups and authoritarian rule in the late 1960s; in all three texts, the university takes on a stealthy significance as the institutional backdrop for that collapse. The transformation of university campuses into war zones in these novels occasions material devastation and both individual and collective trauma. It also exposes deep and longstanding entanglements between war, education, and knowledge production in the postcolony, and invites nuanced reflection on the ambivalent legacy of the 1960s for the present. Beyond these novels’ sober and bleak assessments of post-independence conflict lies an invitation to imagine how war might also serve as a source of knowledge, a means of building and improving upon the anticolonial aspirations that were never fully achieved in the era of independence.