Friends

I’m not at all sure how this will turn out.

I don’t really know how to start. This is the most difficult thing to write about, and probably the most important. How do we ever know who our friends really are? Even in the bad times, some people help out simply because it is their nature. I suppose they are “practical” friends. They certainly are good friends to have around, but the problem is that I have moved a lot and long distances and I certainly don’t expect my friends to physically follow.

There are people I miss, but not all of these would I call friends. Some of them I appreciate for their qualities and the times we have shared together when circumstance has made it possible. And when circumstance has made it impossible we just understand and let it be.

But I just don’t know. Nor do I know why. I cannot recall ever looking for friends or trying to cultivate them, but thank god, I feel that I’ve always had them. And in the most natural way, some people have always made an effort to really communicate with me, and vice versa. Some people seem to have simply liked me, cared for me and accepted me. I suppose they are the friends. Some of them have even loved me – special friends.

Perhaps I best came to understand the meaning of the gift of friendship in Kenya. For quite a while the Masai Mara was my spiritual as well as physical home. I was very attached to the place and the people, the Kenyan tribespeople I worked with. There were two in particular – Kiprash and Nabaala – who had no education and knew nothing of my world but they accepted me into theirs. I basically hung out with these guys, drank their curdled milk out of smoky gourds, ate their roasted goat, slept in their huts made of mud and cow dung. We even had a herd of sheep in partnership although none of my sheep ever seemed to get pregnant while theirs all multiplied. I suppose that mine must have been either frigid or lesbian. But at least I could help them in someway. In these circumstances we became friends.

One day I made Kiprash a gift of my Akubra which he had often admired. It was a way of marking our friendship, when even at the best of times our spoken communication was limited. The next time I saw that hat was on the head of a scrawny, near-naked Masai I didn’t know and it looked as if every cow in Masai-land had pissed, shat and trodden upon it. At first I couldn’t believe it. Was that what Kiprash thought of our friendship – to just give away the hat I had given him? And to see it in that state. Last time he’s getting something from me, I thought.

Then I realised it: I had given him the hat. It was now his to do what he wanted with. And I saw that that was what real friendship was, too. You give it and what the other person does with it is up to them. Gifts should come without strings. Kiprash had taken my gift of friendship and passed it on. I should be grateful. I realise that it doesn’t always happen that way, but how funny that it should happen in the middle of Africa. And when it doesn’t happen that way what can you do but give it to someone else like my black friend with no education who knows what to do with it.

I may never see Kiprash again, I don’t know. My life is a long way from Africa now in the crowded wastes of Europe. Living here it isn’t hard to imagine how two world wars could have started in the vicinity.