When I was in High School, and used to work on my Dad's leased wheat and barley farms in Maasailand, there was this guy called Kosgei.

He was an alcoholic. We all shared room in small rickety wooden cottages, and used tents or rented rooms when we did contract harvesting in different parts of Tipis. Kosgei never shared a room with anybody. He would buy changaa and drink, cook for himself. He spoke to no one. He had a few kids in the area with different women; the joke was always made - what did he tell them? None of us ever heard him speak more than a sentence or two. He never had money for mboga, or the occasional meat, so he often just ate ugali, or nothing, and refused to share a meal with others. Sometimes he went and picked wild terere, or nettles and cooked them. Or mushrooms when it rained. His lips were burnt pink from the booze.

But Kosgei could drive a tractor. We would be crawling in the morning and grunting awake - and you could hear him gone already. Sometimes even after you had heard him retching outside his door at 4am. Or when somebody would find him asleep outside his door, pissed on himself , in the freezing night (3000 metres above sea level).

We could take on hilly slopes that nobody else would risk. We would give him our oldest tractor (1967) to risk on a steep slope, and he would deliver. His lines were clean, his speed ferocious; he started first and stopped last. He hated taking leave. His tractor was always in immaculate shape.

 He was a legend, and you could ask around tractor people from Subukia to Mau Summit, and people would tell you about Kosgei.

 At the same time, he was a target for all the other drivers, and manager. Everybody really. It wasn't so much that he was anti-social. It was that for whatever the reason, this was his vocation. He wasn't interested in doing it for girls, for money, to keep you away from your wife for nine months. He was amazing to watch, swinging to the end of some virgin piece of grass-covered land, that could lift a tractor off its wheels - it was so tough - and watch him tease the plough through, looking back as he did it - and you got a glimpse of a whole world of order, and frameworks and things that he had applied himself to, laserlike, for maybe 30 years. Everybody was always trying to get him fired. He showed people up. You would get some new manager, and he would come and say Kosgei refused. And Kosgei would always refuse for one of two reasons. Any move to stop him drinking. Or any move to ask him to do something that dishonoured his craft or his tractor. The manager would maybe say, ‘Hey Karanja,  take Kosgei's tractor and go to Narok to collect diesel'. Kosgei would say no. Or take the tractor and disappear for a few hours.

 He was no work angel. He had been nabbed several times doing work on the sly, especially when he needed money for booze.

 But a group of people could sit down, and say why they found him beyond bearing and have a conversation that seems fixed and familar to me. Yaani, four drivers, a  manager, a few land-owning old Maasai men would sit and say, ‘Oh, but Kosgei is stupid. He won't play the game'. And the game is not to care.

 In form two, we had a crazy teacher called Brother Raymond Boisvere (Greenwood). He was the Chief examiner for English, had fought in World War one. He had taught in Kenya since 1946. He was sentimental, a bully, and was racist too, "stupid black monkeys" ...and the most popular teacher in the school. With students. He was deeply unpopular with staff, both teaching and workers.

 One morning, we all were woken by him. He had arranged a new tractor from the Canadian High Commission. It must have been 5 am. He spent that whole Saturday cutting all the grass in the school. All. That is like forty acres. The man was over seventy. Now it wasn't the whole business of "work ethic" or what. It was his inability to be cynical about his vocation that got people fired up about him. He refused to give us marking schemes. And not because he was a Church guy. It was not God. Greenwood was a deeply unpleasant man in many ways, but would not mess with the thing he found noble - and that, was teaching. But - he was protected, white and Canadian. He was untouchable. I loved that man.

 A similar teacher like Themina Kaderbhai at Lenana who had no such protections, becomes a really exceptional kind of hero.

 I would not say either of these two people were exceptionally "smart" - all they were mostly were people who refused to play games. I can name so many such people. Mrs. Gichiri, Nonkwe Nyaima Manyanki, my auntie Grace and so on.

 And all of them have tragedy hanging over them. They matter deeply. I would not have even a possibility of faith in a working Kenya if I had not been through the hands of these people at some point in my life. They are my civil society.

  They live and die as singular people, or move to America as Miss Khaderbhai did ultimately, as Lenana collapsed into utter cynicism. She had lived hiding under a lingering tradition that protected both the venal and the sincere, what came after it, with the New Man, Maneno, was a sort of technocratic nothingness that sought to "transform" - but had no animating spirit, no soul, no vision, just well-combed hair.

 He was maybe, the  Zinjanthropus that ushered in the era of The Privatiser, the expert who landed somewhere, and looked at a file, and imposed a template on some company, and left the next day saying things are fixed. It seems too, that a season of "skills" arrived, where people learnt to "make code" or "manipulate markets" and this veneer masked an increasing lack of people who made the world work, you could turn over so much more just shifting things from one place to another. All my Nakuru friends, lawyers and so on, were making chooms not farming now, but by buying potatoes in one place and selling them in another. Intelligence - became the ability to recognise that the littlest effort can bring great rewards to those who simply remain networked.

 This may be the feature of our generation.

 The Kosgeis?

  What did he get out of it? He died youngish, liver burnt. If he had been home for christmas that 2008, I bet he would have been seen drunk and mumbling and heading off towards Mau Narok to start ploughing. And killed on the way.

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