Death of a Typewriter
“Dele Giwa’s journalism began where that of less skilled practioners ended. The why and who after the when and how, agitated his professional curiousity and challenged his unquenchable energy and investigative gifts.”
In the grim, bleak mosaic of carnage wrought by the as yet Unkknown Bomber in Dele Giwa’s study, did you notice one haunting image? A survivor, albeit mangled remnant. It was Dele’s now silent typewriter. There is something both symbolic and significant, but above all defiant, about Dele’s typewriter, depreciated as it was. Its keyboard bearing the indelible blood of the martyr that wielded it with such fearsome power and competence, somehow managed to grimace through the bleakness. Dele Giwa’s typewriter bears the scars of a brutal, mortal assault. It stands out in the grimness in enormous silence, the void that was created by this silence penetrates into the heart of the bewildered onlooker. But you feel you are aware of its unspoken words as if they were palpable. As a journalist’s implement, the typewriter is a sickle, a hammer, a hoe, an axe. In the hands of a master craftsman, such as Dele was, the typewriter is more than a mechanical instrument. It is an oracle. It had, of course, long come to symbolize the pen which journalists insists, in their pleasurable self-delusion, was “mightier than the sword.” Just as the sword had long become a bullet, an armoured car, an assault riffle, and perhaps a parcel bomb.
But it is as a pen, an oracle, that the wrecked, mangled, decapitated silent yet defiant typewriter in Dele Giwa’s study becomes not just one of the causalities of that inexplicable mid-day of lunacy. The decapitated typewriter stands in cold, silent, singularly obscence symbol of the most brutal form of censorship that this nation has been forced to witness. In retrospect, the days of Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor seem like a celebration of freedom. The dead typewriter, mangled and silenced like the great man who died beside it, was journalist Dele Giwa’s voice. It was his town-crier’s song, his talking drum. On those keyboards, especially in his “Seminal Season of Summer,” his “period of creative germination,” when his thoughts ran “faster than my fingers on the typewriter.”
That this symbol of the journalist’s freedom to express, to report, analyse, to warm, to comment as his spirit and conviction move him, was bombled along with Dele Giwa has more than a surrealistic significance. As we mourn, with pain of unfathomable intensity, the loss of s friend,a brother, a colleague, a consummate journalist, take another look at the silenced gong that lay broken, bleeding, bearing its own unspoken and unspeakable pain and agony. Is it some coincidence that the journalist’s typewriter should die on the journalist’s side on that mad day? I see in the mangled typewriter a remote, yet resonant analogy with the Luddites of the 19th century industrial revolution. They were organized band of craftsmen who rioted and carried out the destruction of machinery, new technology, that they feared was trying to displace them. The Luddites were generally masked men who operated at night, though they claimed to eschew.
In many ways, Dele’s brand of journalism, the journalism that asked the questions behind the answers, like new technology, represented a threat, not to some modern day Luddite but some yet unknown vested interests. The central purpose of Dele Giwa’s assassins, the un-masked men who operated in the un-secrecy of high noon, the desperadoes who as much brave bombers as they were cowards, was clear as much in the act of assassination as in the silent message of the bombed typewriter. That haunting, taunting legacy of brutal censorship etches on our memory that Dele Giwa was murdered because he was Dele Giwa the journalist, the sort of journalist that represented “new technology.” It was not a new technology whose purpose was to replace, dethrone, to assume the mantle of an existing order. It was the new technology of the quintessence of the journalism that asked the hard questions. It was a journalism of conscience and social responsibility, the journalism of relevance. In the immortal words of the man who died – “journalism has gone past the stage in which all a reporter does is to report what a man says.”
Dele Giwa’s journalism began where that of less skilled practioners ended. The why and who after the when and how, agitated his professional curiosity and challenged his unquenchable energy and investigative gifts. And it is when why and who become the dominant question that vested interests become worried, feel threatened, become desperate. We are thus faced with the tragic paradox that Dele Giwa was the sort of journalist who would have investigated his won death with a determination and tirelessness that few of us can match. It is here that I begim to see why the typewriter had to die in more than a symbolic, sordid ritual. It had to Dele Giwa, the best of the breed of investigative reporters. If it happened to someone else, the perpetrators would not have a piece of peace as long as there was a Dele Giwa on the rail of the story. If they could buy him off they would have. But the man had a prize that no high noon bomber could pay – his freedom to express, to use his typewriter, his town-crier’s gong. Hence the sight of a journalist’s bombed, broken and decapitated typewriter becomes more than a mere wreckage in a carnage. It is the debris of an imperiled freedom, a collective freedom in chains.
To anyone of us still with a sense of mission, the sight of Dele’s typewriter must remain a sacrilegious sight, and abomination. This attempt to spite Dele Giwa’s typewriter, brutally silence the oracle in this supposedly open society, poses a crucial question for us: can we continue now that Dele has been so violently felled? Can we draw strength from the defiance of the bombed typewriter? When John Kennedy, a man whose courage I liken to Dele Giwa’s was equally violently feeled at high noon in 1963, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, remembered Kennedy’s inaugural promise of “a new beginning.” Johnson turned to Kennedy’s grief-stricken aides and charged: “Let us continue.” Can we continue? Does the bombed and mangled typewriter that somehow manages to convey defiance amidst carnage tellus something, rally us to new challenges? The Dele Giwas, Bob Woodwards and Carl Bernsteins of the “new technology” of journalism have shown us that today’s journalist is a fa more efficient investigator than the men who are trained and paid by the state to practice investigation.
Beyond Dele Giwa’s life and death is a parallax view presented by the bomb, the bomber and the bombed typewriter.
©The Guardian, November 2, 1986
(Pp.291-293)
