My phone could not stop ringing.
It was the same message from far and near: “Please confirm if Chinua Achebe has truly died.”
The news had been broken to me by a “strategic source”.
There was a call from Channels TV on sending a car to bring me to the station’s studio for a live interview on the death of Chinua Achebe as the lead broadcast of the prime news.
Things moved all so frenetically.
Chinua Achebe died at exactly 11:51pm (US time), that is 4.51am (Nigerian time), on Thursday, March 21, 2013, at the Harvard University Teaching Hospital, Massachusetts, USA. He was aged 82.
Achebe’s interment on Thursday, May 23 in his native Ikenga village of Ogidi town in Idemili LGA, Anambra State pulled the world.
The one-storey home of Chinua Achebe looks quite modest from the outside but it has a lift inside and captures the Achebean essence of the quality of what is within being greater than any showiness outside.
Achebe was interred at 4.30pm.
The mausoleum constructed to the side of the frontage of the building bears the heavy burden of the memory of Mother Africa in the buried remains of the author of Things Fall Apart.
Achebe was given an elaborate Christian funeral service at St. Philips Anglican Church, Ogidi, as opposed to the African mores he championed in his novels.
The then President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan was present even though Achebe had rejected his award of the Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR). Jonathan was in the company of the then Ghana President John Dramani Mahama. Former Anambra State Governor Peter Obi served as chief host and somewhat doubled as the Master of Ceremonies.
The politicians actually dominated the scene with the writers dwarfed out of sight. President Jonathan sang the praises of Achebe as a philosophical writer whose insight pierced through the heart of Nigeria’s national problems. Ghana President Mahama stressed that with the death of Achebe “writers in the African continent and the Diaspora have lost a mentor and literary godfather.”
South African President Jacob Zuma’s condolence message was read at the funeral thus: “Chinua Achebe was indeed Africa’s greatest literary export and a legend of African Literature.”
Jonathan in a second speech announced that both the Nigerian and Ghanaian governments will completely reconstruct St Philip’s Primary School in Ogidi which Achebe had attended.
The church service started at a few minutes after 11am with Presidents Jonathan and Mahama, former Vice-President Dr Alex Ekwueme, former Commonwealth Secretary-General Chief Emeka Anyaoku, Minister of Finance Dr. Okonjo-Iweala etc. in attendance.
Crowd control proved difficult with security operatives meting out brutality to the ordinary people. Achebe’s first son, Dr Ikechukwu Achebe, gave the vote of thanks on behalf of the family.
The burial programme for Achebe began on Sunday, May 19, with a day of prayers and religious worship at the National Christian Centre, Abuja.
Then the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) which Achebe founded held a symposium on the life and times of the author at the International Conference Centre, Abuja in the morning of Monday, May 20 which was followed by an evening of tributes, with many cultural troupes performing.
Achebe’s remains arrived at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja on Tuesday, May 21, draped in the Green-White-Green flag of Nigeria and accompanied by his wife Prof Christie Achebe and children Dr Chinelo Ejeiyutche, Dr Ike Achebe, Dr Chidi Achebe and Prof Nwando Achebe.
The University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where Achebe was Emeritus Professor, held a Special Senate Session at its Enugu Campus.
In the trademark tradition of University Senate meetings, the University Registrar Ogbueshi Anthony Okonta called out names of members of Senate. Everyone present answered his name.
When he called Emeritus Professor Chinua Achebe three times and there was no answer the Vice-Chancellor of UNN Prof Bartho Okolo stated that it was “unusual for Achebe not to answer to his name.”
The VC then called Achebe, while staring at his remains in the casket in the middle of the Main Hall of the institution.
As Achebe still did not answer, VC Okolo said: “Truly, this is a solemn confirmation that the earthly sojourn of our revered colleague, Emeritus Professor Chinualumogu Albert Achebe, our compatriot who rose to become a citizen of the world, has come to an end. It is therefore with profound grief and regret that I preside over this special Senate in his honour.”
It was the renowned Jamaican scholar Professor Ekwueme Michael Thelwell who delivered the four-hour burial lecture entitled “Ikejemba: He Had In Him The Elements So Mixed”.
After the burial, Achebe’s second son, Dr Chidi Achebe, while directing me to the tent in which dignitaries were feted, said: “My father is not a saint but he indeed lived a remarkable life as nobody has come here to tell us that he had a love child for my father!”
According to The Economist of March 30, 2013, “Mr Achebe was widely hailed as the father of African literature; but, smiling over his heavy bifocals, he rejected that. Instead, he repeated his favourite proverb: ‘Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.’ Small though he was, he turned out to be the African lions’ earliest and most important historian.”
For Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “Achebe bestrides generations and geographies. Every country in Africa claims him as their own.”
Nelson Mandela depicted Achebe as “The writer in whose company the prison walls fell down.”
American President Barack Obama declared: “A revolutionary author, educator, and cultural ambassador, Chinua shattered the conventions of literature and shaped the collective identity of Nigerians throughout the world. With a dream of taking on misperceptions of his homeland, he gave voice to perspectives that cultivated understanding and drew our world closer together. His legacy will endure in the hearts of all whose lives he touched with the everlasting power of his art.”