The Media And Achebe’s Death

Hours after he passed on, the name Chinua Achebe became the buzz on traditional and social media around the world

In life, Professor Chinua Achebe was retiring personality. As a literary celebrity, he had no appetite for media publicity. But his interventions in national discourses never failed to arrest national attention. As a scholar, his favoured means of reaching his audience were talkshops, workshops, colloquia, conferences and seminars. In death, however, he had no choice than to be a headline fodder. The media swooped, launching a wall-to-wall coverage of his life and times.

The international media broke the news of his death. The New York Times simply said: “Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author and towering man of letters whose internationally acclaimed fiction helped to revive African literature and to rewrite the story of a continent that had long been told by western voices, died on Thursday in Boston. He was 82.” It went on to quote his agent as confirming the death.

Huffington Post relied on a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, to announce the obituary. According to the news item on the paper’s website, Achebe is identified by his epoch-making novel, Things Fall Apart: “Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart, is dead according to a report published by the BBC. Born in 1930, he was a prominent writer and academic, and also a vocal critic of corruption in Nigerian politics. His final book, There Was A Country, was published last year and detailed his participation in the failed state of Biafra, which ended in 1970.” Apart from recognising him as a groundbreaking writer, who introduced Africa in fictional form to the west in indigenous narrative, NYT also recalled that his 1975 lecture titled “Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, generated massive  controversy for Achebe’s description of Joseph Conrad as “a thoroughgoing racist”.

CBS was first to call him a ‘statesman and dissident, who gave literary birth to modern Africa with Things Fall Apart”. The medium quoted Achebe’s London agent, Andrew Wylie, as describing the deceased as “a beloved husband, father, uncle and grandfather, whose wisdom and courage are an inspiration to all who knew him”.

The BBC gave the announcement a more African coloration. Bilkisu Labaran, who discussed the significance of Achebe’s works and death, noted that Achebe’s home state, Anambra, first announced his death in fulfilment of tradition, which stipulates that only a person in authority must report the death of a prominent son. The BBC report explained that Mike Udah, spokesman to Peter Obi, Governor of Anambra State, said Achebe’s home state was in mourning for the death of “the illustrious son of the state, Nigeria and Africa”. It further quoted profusely from statements issued by those who responded early to the literary icon’s demise. Such statements came from the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, which paid tribute to the writer’s genius.

Another major international broadcaster that gave breadth to the news of Achebe’s passage is Sky News. It did an abridged biography of the man, his works and battles with governments in Nigeria.  CNN, Al-jazeera, Wall Street Journal and the major media organs in the western world ran various stories of the death.

It was not only the established media that fell over one another for a slice of the reportage of Achebe’s death. The new media, including Facebook, the micro-blogging site, Twitter, and other platforms reverberated with the news of the death. As information trickled in, it went viral as many people tried to keep abreast of events. Instantly, bloggers began to post extended essays and memories they have of the author.

Having been beaten to the news by foreign press and social media, the Nigerian traditional media did more of follow-up to the announcement. THE NATION, for instance, served its readers the headline, “World Mourns As Chinua Achebe Dies at 82.” It went on to give an overview of the Nigerian literary patriarch’s life and times. In Kenya, Daily Nation, wrote: “Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, the revered author of Things Fall Apart who has been called the father of modern African literature, has died aged 82, his publisher said on Friday.”

Newspapers like Vanguard, THE PUNCH, THISDAY, Daily Independent and P.M. NEWS devoted reams to tributes. The extensive coverage of the subject extends to daily news reports on the waiting game for the burial announcements, features on his creative prowess, his politics, successes and controversies. Others reported the death, lamentations of his passage, and the legacy he has bequeathed to the country and the continent. Examples of such fond recollections have come from government officials, politicians and many other people across the literary, academic and other spheres of endeavour. The Federal House of Representatives, for example, is pushing for the National Library to be named after him. Elsewhere, there have been campaigns to name a university after him in the eastern part of the country.

—Nkrumah Bankong-Obi