Sarah had been in Kenya most of her life, but she had never met Africans like Erope or Julius. Their harmony with their surroundings was an education in itself. Each day brought a new lesson as she observed their methods of gathering information, learned the art of waiting and watching, of melting into the bush without disturbing their subjects.

‘All the Africans I knew in my childhood were working as cooks or gardeners, or farm labourers,’ she said as she sat with Allie and Dan one night beside the campfire. ‘We never considered where they’d come from, or tried to discover much about their wisdom, because we were so sure our ideas were better.’

‘They are. When we’re in our own neck of the woods,’ Allie said. ‘Let’s not get carried away here. I don’t want to be a circumcised third wife, or grind posho and herd goats.’

‘That’s for sure,’ Sarah said. ‘But when I was in Dublin I began to feel guilty about the way white people treated their staff. Yet I’ve watched Piet and Hannah dealing with the labour, and their watu do seem to be childlike and primitive from our point of view. It’s complicated.’

‘Not really,’ Allie said. ‘We arrived here at the turn of the nineteenth century and right away imposed our way of life on the land and the people. We brought schools and medicine and other advantages, but we didn’t listen enough, because that was perceived as a sign of weakness. If we whites were to rule, then we had to behave as though we knew everything.’

‘The deaf ear isn’t peculiar to government, or to Africa,’ Dan said. ‘It exists on every scale. If you took a redneck Georgia Cracker from some Southern plantation and brought him up to a swish New York restaurant to be a waiter, you wouldn’t stand around listening to his views. You’d be hammering all that laid-back Southern shit out of him, and turning him into something else as fast as possible. We all have that urge to change people, make them into our notion of who they should be.’

‘Time is the real issue,’ Allie said. ‘We have to accept Africans as equal players now, which is something we’ve never thought about until recently. But there’s plenty of goodwill in the air, and we can build on that. We’re talking generations, though, not just a year or two of transition.’