Mr Oriku, You’re Writing For the Devil

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.