Death hoaxes are common enough on social media, but it's understandably harder to pull them off with people who are already dead. That was no obstacle for whoever was pushing rumors of the death of Chinua Achebe on Monday morning.

The Nigerian literary titan, whose " Things Fall Apart" and " Arrow of God" are two landmarks of the 20th-century fiction, has indeed been dead since March 21, 2013. But despite Achebe's prominence — and despite the attention he received after publishing a long-awaited memoir in 2012 — this fact escaped notice with a critical mass of people that included the US government's former assistant undersecretary of State for African Affairs:

Susan Rice Screenshot

In fact, Achebe was laid to rest nearly two years ago.

Maybe there isn't any deeper significance in this Twitter gaffe, which would of course be less notable if Rice didn't hold the State Department's top Africa position from 1997 to 2001, a fairly tumultuous period that saw civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, a devastating war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and Nigeria's transition away from military rule.

But Rice is the US national security adviser, and Nigeria is in the midst of both one of the world's largest democratic presidential elections and one of its deadliest terrorist insurgencies. Nigeria's situation is tenuous with a controversial presidential electoral delay and a fight against the jihadist group Boko Haram that has even drawn in the US military at times.

Achebe is one of the most famous and beloved Nigerians of the past 50 years. Rice at least realized her mistake: The tweets had been deleted as of 10:04 a.m., about 40 minutes after they first appeared.
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