“My husband decided one day that he had had enough of living up at the diamond mine. ‘There is nothing to do here,’ he said. ‘There is just dust and more dust.’

“I said to him that we should not move until we had made more money, but he was fed up and wanted to come to Gaborone. Fortunately, he got a job very easily through somebody who had stayed in the guest house and who knew that the President Hotel was looking for another chef. So he came down here, and I soon found a job at that college, the big new one which they built over that way—you know the place, Mma. I was very happy with this job and I was happy that we were able to live in Gaborone, where everything is happening and where it is not just dust, dust, dust.

“And everything went very well. I was not the senior cook—there is another woman who has that job. She is called Mma Tsau. She was very good to me and she made sure that I got a pay-rise after I had been there one year. I was very happy, until I discovered something bad that was going on.

“Mma Tsau has a husband, whom I had seen about the place once or twice. One day, one of the cleaning ladies said to me, ‘That man is eating all the food, you know. He is eating all the best food.’

“I had no idea what this lady meant, and so I asked her which man she was talking about. She told me that it was Mma Tsau’s husband and that there was a storeroom in the college where he came for a meal from time to time and was given all the best meat by his wife. On other days, she said, Mma Tsau would take home packets of the best meat to cook for her husband at their house. This food belonged to the college, she said, but it went straight into the mouth of Mma Tsau’s husband, who was getting fatter and fatter as a result of all these good meals he was having.

“I did not believe this at first. I had noticed that he was a very fat man, but I had thought that this must be because he was married to a good cook. The husbands of good cooks are often fatter than other men—and that is natural, I suppose.

“I decided one day to see whether what the cleaning lady had told me was true. I had noticed that at lunchtimes Mma Tsau used to leave the kitchen from time to time, but I was always so busy that I hardly paid any attention to it. There is always something happening in a busy kitchen, and there are many reasons why the head cook may need to leave the stoves for a short time. There are supplies to be checked up on. There are telephones to answer. There are assistants to chase up.