“Death is…the
absence of presence…the endless time of never coming back…a gap you can’t see,
and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound”. – Tom Stopard, German
playwright.
*Giwa
In the morning of Monday,
October 20, 1986, I was preparing to go to work when a major item on the
Anambra Broadcasting Service (ABS) 6.30 news bulletin hit me like a hard
object. Mr. Dele Giwa, the founding editor-in-chief of Newswatch magazine, had
the previous day been killed and shattered by a letter bomb in his Lagos home.
My scream was so loud that my neighbour barged into my room to inquire what it
was that could have made me to let out such an ear-splitting bellow.
We were three young men who
had a couple of months earlier been posted from Enugu to Abakaliki to work in
the old Anambra State public service, and we had hired a flat in a newly
erected two-storey building at the end of Water Works Road, which we shared. My
flat-mate, clearly, was not familiar with Giwa’s name and work, and so had
wondered why his death could elicit such a reaction from me. But later that
day, as he interacted with people, he realised that Giwa’s death was such big
news, and by the next couple of days, he had become an expert on Giwa and his
truncated life and career. Across the country, Giwa’s brutal death dominated
the news not just because of the pride of place he occupied in Nigerian
journalism practice and but more because of the totally novel way his killers
had chosen to end his life.
