The person who said the above was not so felicitous as to address me as Mr., and the pleasantry was pared off the title of a book I read and which I liked a lot: Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman. Feynman was a freethinking Nobel-winner physicist who was so buoyant with self-deprecating humour and levity that Richard Dawkins would look like a mirthless uber-sober Pope beside him. Surely You're Joking is a collection of essays, often earthy tongue-in-cheek, idiots-guide-to-physics essays, and of Professor Feynman’s townish adventures and deviltries.
But while someone had
told Professor Feynman with friendly frothiness that he must be joking, the
gentleman who said I was writing for the devil was dead earnest - he was
literally frothing at the mouth. It happened about a dozen years ago, close
to a devil’s dozen (13). I was the literary editor of the Gambian Observer, using a column I called Liferature to air my liberal views in a
breezy, New-Journalism, haute-vulgar way, which, not surprisingly, a lot of
people liked. I had a considerable readership, but on the other hand, some were willing to impale my head with the narrow assegai of
atavistic loathing.
A change of managing directors
meant that the one who thought I was doing a terrifically good job of being a ‘freethinker’
was replaced by a rather provincial, blinkered, marginally xenophobic
philistine who thought the first article I wrote after he became managing
director was a lampoon on him - it wasn’t, but not that he didn’t deserve it.
So, adding this misapprehension to a prepossession about my worldview, he took
a dislike to me. So far as the gentleman was concerned, he could stand, to a
degree, the fancy-free devil-may-care aspect of my writings - objectionable as it was to him, it was fairly pardonable. What he could not bear was my apparent
godlessness, my irreligion, and what he considered my preening indifference to
Allah and his diktats.
He told the editor that
he could not understand how anyone, an African for that matter, would not only not believe in god but also shout it
from housetops, at least from the balconied top floor of the Observer house. He asked the editor: are you sure this person is genuinely from
Nigeria? Okay, Nigeria has its fair share of oddities, but someone who calls
himself an agnostic or whatever is a bit wrong. Isn’t the country full of churches
and mosques? Isn’t every Nigerian a believer?
When the editor replied
that, of course, I was a Nigerian and that I was as easy-going a guy as anyone
might meet, the man went ape. Easygoing? The likelihood was that I was a devilish
jinn, the Islamic equivalent of Puck, a superstitiously overdressed version of the
Jewish golem because, apparently, I was writing for jinni. The editor pointed
out to the managing director that he and thousands of other Gambians read my articles, and as far as he was concerned, he was not a jinn.
The managing director
remained unconvinced that I was for real: irreligiousness was un-African - oh,
that silly word again - and anyone who spurned Allah or God must be from another
place. Maybe I was a misbegotten African, someone who should go and fester in the
canker of Western decadence and sin because Africans were unquestioning children of God; Africans were the elect. The managing director could not
understand why many people read my articles and stories. He thought there was something Faustian about this; I must have made a pact with the Devil to
corral so many readers.
Since the managing director
did not deign to confront me with all this, I heard it through colleagues, and
naturally, I shrugged it off and carried on as if I knew nothing. But one day,
I wrote a skit about two young men who are heading to heaven but who, somewhere in
cloudland, meet the recently-dead Joseph Heller - one of the men is the thief-on-the-cross
whom Jesus of Nazareth told to meet him in heaven for believing in him, he was
so happy about this promise of paradise that two thousand years later he is
still sauntering towards his Lord. Heller, author of Catch 22, persuades the two young men to accompany him to hell,
that hell is a better place to be, livelier, lovelier, full of wine and women,
luscious scarlet women, not diaphanous inexperienced virgins. After moments of catch-22 of juxtaposing heaven with hell, the men choose hell.
The managing director
could not contain himself after this. He was said to have brayed like a felled horse
in his capacious office, puffing and huffing as if he was on his way to
exploding like dumdum-fed Mr Big in Live and Let Die.
The managing director - perhaps intending to go out and get his breath back
before summoning me for a showdown - met me on the landing of the stairs of Observer house, and that was when he let
out: ‘Young man, I accuse you, you’re writing for the devil.’ Needless to say,
despite being aware of his feelings towards me, I was staggered.
