If heaven was real, Richard Leakey would be allowed in

I did not know Richard Leakey personally, but I read quite a lot about him in the 1990s. What struck me about the Kenyan conservationist, who died last week aged 77, was his firm belief that people are their own saviours and do not have to look to imaginary figures for help.

As a young man, Leakey studied fossils, something his parents also did, spending decades exploring Kenya’s Rift Valley in search of the origins of mankind.

Rightly or wrongly, Leakey was convinced that life was not created by a supreme being, as religion claims. He believed in evolution and was widely known as an atheist, which in many parts of Africa seems like taboo and often carries as much stigma as being a homosexual.

Indeed, when Leakey was once beaten by hired thugs, Kenya’s president at the time, Daniel arap Moi, described him as an atheist, a racist and a foreigner. 

There were Kenyans and other Africans who believed Leakey’s atheism was a problem, and Moi was capitalising on that. Shockingly, in 1999, Moi turned around and appointed the man he called an atheist as head of Kenya’s civil service.

The atheist was now leading a team of reformers whose mission was to rescue a country seen at the time as one of the world’s most corrupt from a major economic crisis.

If you went to Kenya looking for people who have stolen public wealth, you would never hear Leakey’s name mentioned. In an obituary, the BBC described Leakey as “seemingly incorruptible”.

It was a great posthumous compliment in a country where corruption is endemic, yet the vast majority of Kenyans, just like Ugandans, are not atheists but Bible-toting Christians who fill their social media pages with verses from ‘holy’ books and own TV stations that preach the word of God every day and night. The coastal city of Mombasa is teeming with Muslims who pray five times a day.

There is a good lesson to learn from people like Leakey. In many African and non-African countries, millions of people believe that not believing in God is a serious problem. 

But the example of Leakey shows the opposite. He was a decent man who would go straight to heaven if it existed.

In Uganda, we have political leaders who grace public events and quote the Bible, their spouses do the same and their daughters are pastors, but are they the leaders we want? 

More pertinent questions: Would Kenya be badly off if every Kenyan did not believe in God? Is it Kenyan atheists responsible for the violence (some of it deadly) that Kenyans have seen during election time?

Atheism is about truth and realism — a way of seeing, accepting and dealing with situations as they really are without being influenced by our emotions or false hopes.

Leakey died without legs having been amputated after a plane crash in 1993. It was all too easy for a believer to conclude that God had enabled him to survive the crash. But if God does exist, he knows that Leakey needed legs. 

Why would he save his life and ignore his legs? The artificial limbs Leakey used were not given to him by God.

We may continue to believe that the universe was designed for us by a loving God, but as long as we have zero evidence (which is true) that death will give us a chance to meet God, we had better act like Leakey.

Mr Namiti is a journalist and former Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk

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