By Onyeka Nwelue

There are journalists who report people, and there are journalists who, almost imperceptibly, leave a part of themselves inside the lives they report. Chuks Nwanne belonged to the latter fraternity. His death has therefore produced in me a peculiar kind of silence; the silence that follows the departure of someone who did not merely write about you, but once looked closely enough to recognise something in you that you had not yet learnt to name. In 2017, Chuks came to see me at Bogobiri House in Ikoyi. I was surrounded by friends, drinking Gulder, laughing, and preparing to leave Nigeria for Ohio. He had come ostensibly to interview me, but what he produced was more than an interview. He made a portrait. He saw the contradictions, the provocations, the ambitions, the vanity, the scholarship, the restlessness, and the absurdities that had begun to constitute my public life. He called me a “literary rebel on a mission to colonise America.” I remember that phrase because Chuks understood something fundamental about me: I have always been suspicious of the comfortable consensus. He understood, too, that beneath my provocations was an appetite for intellectual independence. I was preoccupied with African literature, cultural memory, language, colonial inheritance, and the persistent habit of allowing other people to tell our stories for us. Chuks did not reduce these convictions to the eccentricities of a troublesome young writer. He listened, observed, and allowed the contradictions to remain visible.

That is the most underrated virtue of a journalist: the ability to listen without immediately attempting to domesticate what one has heard. Chuks listened to me speak about Flora Nwapa, Achebe, India, colonialism, and the necessity of recovering our own cultural confidence. He allowed my arguments to stand in their full unruliness. He did not turn me into a saint, nor did he make me a caricature. He understood that a portrait worth reading must contain its contradictions. He also understood that writers are sometimes difficult people. I was young, obstinate, overdressed in my own mythology, convinced that the world needed to hear me and insufficiently concerned about whether the world agreed. Chuks could have written a conventional profile. Instead, he gave me something closer to an x-ray. Years later, I realized how generous that was. Journalism is often treated as an ephemeral profession. Newspapers are read today and forgotten tomorrow, but a journalist writes something that becomes an archive, not merely of the subject, but of an era.

Chuks’ piece became such an archive for me. Reading it again now, after his death, I encounter not only the younger man I was, but the younger journalist Chuks was: observant, curious, irreverent and sufficiently courageous to allow an unconventional subject to remain unconventional. He knew that people were larger than the labels attached to them. This is why his death saddens me so profoundly. I wish I could speak to him again. I wish I could sit with him somewhere and argue with him about Africa, literature, journalism, Nigeria, language, and all the subjects on which neither of us was ever entirely willing to surrender ground. I wish I could tell him that the article he wrote about me survived beyond the Sunday newspaper in which it appeared. It became a document of a particular moment in my life, but also a testament to his generosity as a journalist. Chuks Nwanne has now entered the territory about which writers write, but journalists rarely wish to become subjects: memory. And memory is an unreliable but magnificent country. There, Chuks will remain for me as the man who came to Bogobiri House, sat across from me, listened carefully, and decided that my contradictions were worth recording. He was right. Farewell, Chuks. May the record of your work outlive the brevity of your days.