" Madam, he never so much as asked my name! That's why some rude ... some ill-informed people still call me "Friday" today. He callously christened me "Friday" and told me that his own name was to be Master. That, not Robinson. The idea!
      My dear father --you know how happily I was united with him after we'd finished building that boat to get off the island-- he wasn't asked either what his name was. Crusoe didn't even care to call him, like me, after the day of his rescue. Haven't you noticed, Madam, that he actually kept on referring to my dad as "Friday's father" for the rest of his life? As if I, Benamak, were not the son of Bena, just as once a Robinson, one may imagine, must have been the son of a Robin. Yes, 'Master' Crusoe's self-satisfied complacency was, besides his industriousness, a central feature of his rather flat character. But at the time I was meek and mild. I should never have allowed him to call me "Friday" -- such a frigid colonial name ... "Benamak for friends, Sir; and Mr Mukoowo for others. Nothing else, Sir!"
      Didn't he rescue and convert me?
      Rescue, indeed, Madam, but only to turn me, good-natured as I was, into a slave, a mere source of manpower, and a cheap one at that. You must recall what choice Crusoe gave Xury, that African boy, before coming to South America: "Either be faithful to me, or I'll throw you into the sea". Then, for being faithful to him, he sold Xury to the captain of a Portuguese ship; he who'd assisted him so loyally in procuring his liberty. By now Xury is a free man, after ten more years of slavery, and only because he agreed to become a Christian -- would you believe it? Forgive me the comparison, Madam, but if I save you from drowning or from being slaughtered by brutish savages of your own race does this give me the right to immediately turn you into my slave, to require you to be faithful to me, to call you "my loyal servant", and to capitalize on this one good deed forever? Definitely not, but, Benamukee, did I know ...
      And convert me, Madam? It's too outrageous for words. I assume you now refer to that mean tale about him converting me? Let me explain to you, Madam, if anything, it was I who converted him!
      That it was he who civilized me by teaching me English and by instructing me in religion?
      The poor creature: he wanted 'to lay a foundation of religious knowledge in my mind'. As if he possessed any of that at all himself! Devil-lore, yes, but knowledge? If you're interested, Madam, I'll tell you exactly what discussion took place between the two of us before Crusoe relapsed into his archaic creed again. Well, 'exactly' ... Thirty years ago, when I was still in my twenties and Crusoe the only English-speaking person I'd met, my command of your language was, of course, not what it is now.
      For example, when Crusoe once asked me out of the blue who'd 'made' me, I didn't understand him right away. Moreover, such a dubious question I wasn't used to ask myself in spiritual matters before other so much more important ones. When he also mentioned the sea, the land, the hills, and the woods, however, I replied, if only to show goodwill, that Benamukee had made them. (And, please, forget about that crazy c before the k.) Naturally, if a god had produced the island, the moon and the stars, as, I must admit, I sort of believed then, it was at least as old as the fruits of its creative involvement. That seemed pretty logical to me. (And also the fact that this 'maker' was not necessarily a he, but might as well be a she, or neither.) Therefore, I never said that 'one old Benamukee' had created the world, just as Crusoe himself would never have said that 'one old Lord' had done it. The treacherous liar!
      His next question was why not all things worshipped Benamukee -- "this old person" as he disparagingly referred to our deity. As if everything on Earth worshipped his Old Person!
      "All things say O to him"?
      O, I remember I said that, sometime in the beginning, when we'd just met. But that was a long time before we had the discussion I'm talking about now. That was when I didn't even know the words for believer and prayer in English. All I meant to say then was that believers say prayers to Benamukee. I offered to teach him my language as we were in the part of the world where I, not he, was born, but he considered himself too civilized for such an undertaking. So I had to be smart enough to learn his language, because he was not smart enough to learn mine. Should he've tried it, I'm sure he'd still have expressed himself twice as clumsily as me until many years later.
      That I thought that those eaten up went to Benamukee too?
      Yes, at the time I believed that. All innocent people 'went' to Benamukee, whether they were murdered or not, and whether their bodies were devoured or not (by humans or other animals). In this respect Crusoe's own religion was no different, except that he didn't always use the same words and names for the same things. That's why I was at first rather stupefied than irritated when he wanted to instil 'the knowledge of the true God' in me, for that 'true God' seemed to be no-one else than Benamukee in an exclusively male, foreign disguise. (I say "foreign", not "false".) It --or if you prefer its contrived masculinity: he-- was the great maker of all things. It lived up somewhere 'beyond all' or 'in Heaven'. It influenced the world by the same power and providence by which it had produced us.
      Didn't I open my eyes by degrees?
      Of course, I did. Because Crusoe maintained that his god God was omnipotent and could do (literally) everything for us, and could hear us 'up beyond the sun'. Just a lot of hot air, this so-called 'omnipotence' and, as I learned later, 'omniscience'. And what authoritarian claptrap, this childish business of a male deity giving everything to people, so long as they submit themselves to all his wishes, and taking everything away from them, if they don't. I certainly listened with attention --that's true-- but I was getting more and more disgusted with Crusoe's overbearing manners towards someone who was not a fellow-believer ... And more and more shocked, too, by his wild ideas. He seriously argued that he was shipwrecked off Amaa Amapi --"the Island of Despair" as he called it: his despair-- because his father wanted him to become a lawyer, and he'd defied him by becoming a sailor instead. 'Worshipwrecked', as it were, for it was his god, he claimed, who'd warned him before, and who'd thus punished him for his disobedience.
      Mind you, he never feared to be punished for having enslaved or killed so many non-Europeans! In this respect he was no different from that other European, and religious zealot, Columbus, who treated the Tainos of the island in which he founded his colony of La Isabella like brutes without any feelings. After raping, torturing and murdering them, and burning their villages, he transported the survivors to Spain, as slaves. This is the way the native peoples of the Americas were, and still are, invited to become Christians of their own accord, and to submit to the love for and the servitude to 'Their Majesties' and to the whole of the Spanish nation. I won't have to explain to you that I didn't make these discoveries until much later. The crown Crusoe wore (or had to bear) was not Spanish but English.
      Without knowing the details of Columbus' visits to a number of islands in our region now more than two hundred years ago I was already irritated enough by some aspects of my own encounter with Crusoe. It was merely out of piety that I tried to hide this irritation as much as possible. And somehow it was also informative to observe that there was god-worship even among people who could read and write. The creation of some form of religion or other to preserve, first of all, the potency and veneration of some cabal of patriarchs was obviously not to be found in my native land only but even among the technologically most developed countries. Money and God together were for a materialist such as Crusoe, as I came to realize, the two general denominating articles in the world. And yet he insinuated to me that the phenomenon of my old men going up the mountains to say prayers to their god was a fraud; that if they met with any answer, or spoke with anyone there, it had to be with an evil spirit.
      How unfair an insinuation this was, Madam! As if his own old men going up the stairs of a church to say prayers were ever met with any concrete, divine answer. My Benamukee! As if his Supreme Being had ever spoken to him or his coreligionists in their buildings, those unnatural, man-made molehills of idolatry. But at the time I genuinely believed in Benamukee, and Crusoe's god seemed to be little different, not even kindlier. It was Crusoe's attempt at proselytizing which was so much worse than I had ever met with before.
      Whether Crusoe didn't convince me of the existence of a devil?
      Something else he's cheated his readers with! My words were: "If your Lord is so omnipotent, he must be stronger than this so-called 'devil', mustn't he? Why, then, doesn't he prevent that devil's evil deeds, if he can?". Crusoe was really surprized and not at all capable of answering my question. He didn't know what to say, my 'Master'. Pretending not to hear me he asked me what I'd said, tho' he'd understood me well enough. After an awkward pause he uttered something completely ridiculous like: "God will punish him by casting him into a bottomless pit with an everlasting fire". Upon which I asked him immediately, but politely, why this god of his waited so long before he decided to punish his devil for the crimes he'd meanwhile committed. "You may as well ask me", Crusoe then replied, "why God doesn't kill you and me, when we do wicked things here which offend him. We're preserved to repent and be pardoned". To me this meant that it was his own Lord who was so obstinate as to allow his counterpart no repentance, and to refuse him forgiveness, so that all other creatures in the world were to suffer for the one's sadism and the other's obstinacy forever. I mused a while at this morbid state of affairs in Crusoe's mind, and then asked him in a seemingly subservient way whether, indeed, the devil was pardoned too, in the end.
      How he reacted?
      Flabbergasted he was. He rose up hastily, as if he suddenly had to go on important business. He even sent me for something far away on the other side of the island. Before I left, however, I managed to get Crusoe to listen to me for one more second. "Master, let's talk man-to-man for one moment now", I said. "We both worship the same god, even tho' it may have different rival names". (I meant tribal names.) "Benamukee is as good a god as yours, or --if I may be so bold-- better, for Benamukee is not a consuming fire to anyone, not in the habit of treading anyone down under his feet, and never even thinks of destroying us and all the world. Those things and those thoughts are in these parts reserved for the inhabitants of Caribe. With their many canoes they plunder our islands and eat our flesh. They believe in a Supernatural Being whose behaviour is a mere reflection of their own strife: a Monster with its believers' basest doings and dealings."
      Even Columbus, who could be so blatantly biased and cruel at other moments, wrote about the intense general goodness of the inhabitants of our islands --long before anyone turned Christian-- that they were willing to give as much love as their hearts could give, that they were honest and generous, that they didn't have religious sects, nor indulged in image worship, altho' they believed in things higher and better than those here and now. At the time, however, all I'd heard about Columbus was that he'd 'discovered' us.
      "Our god", I pointed out to Crusoe, "has been peaceful throughout the records of our oral history. Furthermore, Benamukee doesn't arrogate a position above the mountains or above nature. No, Benamukee is part of the mountain, part of the natural environment. If we felled or defiled the woods, we'd fell or defile Benamukee itself, himself and herself. That we'd never do! Nature is not something given by a father-god, a sun-god or a father-son-god to be used at will, let alone for his pleasure". The thought of being reduced to 'a mere state of nature' was an abomination to Crusoe, and I imagined that he and his god would there merely resemble each other.
      But what I could stomach least of all was --how shall I say?-- the ... demonical part of Crusoe's religion. I continued, before he would leave me: "About this devil-business, master -- you cannot be serious! Please, be honest to me here, where no-one else is around. Admit that someone who's as intelligent as you are doesn't entertain such a mad, mediaeval belief, whatever he may feign when he's with compatriots or fellow-feigners".
      Crusoe was quite impressed and sat down again, but not before looking around him to see if there were no (more) intruders anywhere. Then he confessed --I swear it, Madam-- "No, Friday, it doesn't make much sense. We in civilized countries have been inculcated with these two spirits of religion from our earliest childhood. Our world is not the firm bedrock of eternal peace and harmony between man and nature, as your ideal seems to be, but the unsteady theatre of an ever-lasting war between god and devil. Rather than a war between good and evil, this sickening war itself is our evil, and so all-encompassing that it has become a war of man against nature as well. Where I come from, Friday, salvation doesn't lie in the hills or in the sea but in Heaven. And Heaven is far, far away from this natural world, where my people are held in the grip of a devil who has secret access to their passions and affections, who adapts his snares to their inclinations, and who causes them to run upon their own destruction by their own choices. The belief in it is a collective persecution complex that takes away their innocent pleasures, their will to act for the better, their personal responsibility".
      "Well", I said, "you do agree, then, that you've been indoctrinated and strayed from the strait natural path of sound reasoning"? "Yes, I fear so, Friday", he answered, "I'm glad I met you," and he smiled 'mighty affectionately'. I embraced him and swiftly left for the task assigned to me. Never ever did Crusoe bother me with this nonsense about a devil anymore, and whenever he got in a theist mood, we'd agree that the god and prophets of the Middle East, or of the North for that matter, were no better than those of the Middle and the South of this planet. (For it goes without saying we had our prophets or gurus too.)
      Why, then, the story of Crusoe's life tells of my conversion to his religion?
      How could it have been the other way around? Had Crusoe written down that it was I, Benamak Mukoowo, who'd shown him the silliness of his demonical ideas and cured him from his theist arrogance (this true God phraseology) he'd never have held the limelight in the first place. On his return to England in '87 he fell back into his former beliefs and customs, due to social pressures, and because it would earn him money. Only reborn as a bedeviled (and 'begodded') Christian was he able to publish his book and to become famous. Otherwise no-one would ever have heard of him ...
      And of me ...
      Maybe, that would have been better, for it's certainly no unqualified pleasure, Madam, to be the object of a 'false, shuffling, prevaricating rascal unfit to give his testimony in a Court of Justice', as my master was described by another friend of his, long before I myself became fully aware of the existence of our own culture and the significance of my own thoughts. The story of him converting me in The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is as egregious a lie as that of my death in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. As you can see with your own eyes, Madam, I'm still hale and hearty. "