Green Shoots: Friends are the family you choose - IOL
It’s a time when work starts piling up – the pressure of the year’s labour seems to reach a fever pitch as budgets must be spent and targets reached. South Africans are crawling towards the December holidays when the country comes to a standstill and the great migration to the coast and to rural villages begins.
This week my beloved and I made such as trip to the rurals to visit friends from our youth. For a few days we chilled and looked at the mountains and the amazing landscape. We cooked and ate and drank lovely drinks, and most of all we talked and laughed and reminisced about our youthful adventures, and how growing older had caught us all by surprise. It’s been a blessing to spend this time with them.
Another friend with whom we had only a fleeting time together in Swaziland some years ago channels Toni Morrison in her recent blog and speaks about how, when the world has beaten us down and we have nothing else, friends become the currency of our lives.
She writes: “The friends who are able to pull us out of our mire, to see our better side and to trust that we can reach where we stretch, they are here, nearby in our lives. They respect us and care enough about us to listen as we share our most intimate feelings and help us to see into ourselves, and even through these times we live in now.”
Regular readers of Green Shoots will know that I beat the drum of solidarity and love quite loudly and often. The first solidarity in our lives, outside of our immediate families, is encountered in the friends we make and keep.
Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela met as young students at Fort Hare University in the 1930s. They would go on to form South Africa’s first black-owned law firm in Johannesburg in1952, becoming champions of black people who were victims of apartheid laws. With others they formed the Youth League of the African National Congress to breathe life into the resistance movement.
When opposition organisations were banned, one went to jail and the other into exile to build the campaign against apartheid. They would be reunited after over 30 years in Sweden in 1990, shortly after Mandela's release from prison. The love they had for each other was impossible to miss in the joy they showed at meeting up again.
I tried to find other examples of such friendships forged in the crucible of struggle and solidarity. Not much came up, and I had to settle for “revolutionary friends” George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, a young French aristocrat who fought in the Revolutionary War against the English in the late 1700s that led to the independence of the United States of America.
And there’s the Greek mythical story of Pythias who was sentenced to death by Dionysius of Syracuse. He asked to go home to settle his affairs, and left his friend Damon as security that he would return to face his execution. Dionysius was so impressed that Pythias actually returned that he set both friends free. I hope I’m never called upon to follow that example.
While we probably all have those friends who are dramatic, most friendship is not about these life-or-death situations, nor about exile and imprisonment. Friendship is usually quite mundane in its expression. We get to share our true selves with our friends knowing that they won’t judge us, even when we know we’re being extra. It’s the greatest expression of solidarity where we hold each other up, challenge each other to become better versions of ourselves. It’s where we know we can find safe haven, that in our worst moments we can depend on the love of friends to help us rise again.
Heaven knows, the world is full of challenges that are better navigated in the company of comrades who you love and who love you back.
