Mombasa Friends

A friend phoned today to report the death of a man with whom we had been at primary school back in the early 1950s. The deceased wasn't someone I knew well, being a couple of years older than me, but he was one of the few people I knew who spent his whole life on the Kenya coast, running a game fishing business out of a small harbour to the north of Mombasa.

The conversation reminded me that I have managed to keep in contact with a number of school friends from my years at Mombasa Primary between the ages of five and eight but none from either my prep school or my public school. Perhaps it is that the Mombasa friends shared an unusually contented and privileged existence in a truly beautiful place, and wish to prolong the memories of those days.

The news prompted another, more unhappy thought, that there are fewer and fewer of those old Africa friends left, and that, with each death, a suite of memories disappears. I know that events in the history of British colonialism are under intense scrutiny but that isn't a reason for burying its history which had both a positive and negative side.