Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

looked shy as he said, “Very nice to see you finally,” and Professor Ezeka shook her hand and then nodded disdainfully when she said her degree was in sociology and not one of the proper sciences.
    After Ugwu served drinks, Olanna watched Odenigbo raise his glass to his lips and all she could think of was how those lips had fastened around her nipple only minutes ago. She surreptitiously moved so that her inner arm brushed against her breast and closed her eyes at the needles of delicious pain. Sometimes Odenigbo bit too hard. She wanted the guests to leave.
    “Did not that great thinker Hegel call Africa a land of childhood?” Professor Ezeka asked, in an affected tone.
    “Maybe the people who put up those NO CHILDREN AND AFRICANS signs in the cinemas in Mombasa had read Hegel, then,” Dr. Patel said, and chuckled.
    “Nobody can take Hegel seriously. Have you read him closely? He’s funny, very funny. But Hume and Voltaire and Locke felt the same way about Africa,” Odenigbo said. “Greatness depends on where you are coming from. It’s just like the Israelis who were asked what they thought of Eichmann’s trial the other day, and one of them said he did not understand how the Nazis could have been thought great by anyone at any time. But they were, weren’t they? They still are!” Odenigbo gestured with his hand, palm upward, and Olanna remembered that hand grasping her waist.
    “What people fail to see is this: If Europe had cared more about Africa, the Jewish Holocaust would not have happened,” Odenigbo said. “In short, the World War would not have happened!”
    “What do you mean?” Miss Adebayo asked. She held her glass to her lips.
    “How can you ask what I mean? It’s self-evident, starting with the Herero people.” Odenigbo was shifting on his seat, his voice raised, and Olanna wondered if he remembered how loud they had been, how afterward he had said, laughing, “If we go on like this at night, we’ll probably wake Ugwu up, poor chap.”
    “You’ve come again, Odenigbo,” Miss Adebayo said. “You’re saying that if white people had not murdered the Herero, the Jewish Holocaust would not have happened? I don’t see a connection at all!”
    “Don’t you see?” Odenigbo asked. “They started their race studies with the Herero and concluded with the Jews. Of course there’s a connection!”
    “Your argument doesn’t hold water at all, you sophist,” Miss Adebayo said, and dismissively downed what was in her glass.
    “But the World War was a bad thing that was also good, as our people say,” Okeoma said. “My father’s brother fought in Burma and came back filled with one burning question: How come nobody told him before that the white man was not immortal?”
    They all laughed. There was something habitual about it, as if they had had different variations of this conversation so many times that they knew just when to laugh. Olanna laughed too and felt for a moment that her laughter sounded different, more shrill, than theirs.
    The following weeks, when she started teaching a course in introductory sociology, when she joined the staff club and played tennis with other lecturers, when she drove Ugwu to the market and took walks with Odenigbo and joined the St. Vincent dePaul Society at St. Peter’s Church, she slowly began to get used to Odenigbo’s friends. Odenigbo teased her that more people came to visit now that she was here, that both Okeoma and Patel were falling in love with her, because Okeoma was so eager to read poems in which descriptions of goddesses sounded suspiciously like her and Dr. Patel told too many stories of his days at Makerere, where he cast himself as the perfectly chivalrous intellectual.
    Olanna liked Dr. Patel, but it was Okeoma whose visits she most looked forward to. His untidy hair and rumpled clothes and dramatic poetry put her at ease. And she noticed, early on, that it was Okeoma’s opinions that Odenigbo most respected, saying “The voice