The dancing class was to be held in a room at the back of the hotel, a room which was used for business lunches and cheaper private parties. As Mma Makutsi made her way along the corridor, she heard the sound of an amplified guitar and drums. This was the band which had been promised in the advertisement, and it was a sound which filled her with a feeling of anticipation. And there were voices too, the sound of people talking amongst themselves; there were going to be a lot of people there, it seemed.

At the entrance to the room there was a small table at which a comfortable-looking woman in a red sequinned dress was seated. She smiled at Mma Makutsi and pointed to a small printed notice which gave the cost of the class. It was forty pula, which was not cheap, but then this was a proper dancing class, thought Mma Makutsi, with a real two-piece band and a room in the President Hotel. She reached into her purse, took out the money, and paid.

“Are you experienced, or are you a beginner?” asked the woman.

Mma Makutsi thought about this. She had danced before, of course, but then so had just about everybody. From the point of view of this woman, with her sequinned dress, though, Mma Makutsi must be very much a novice.

“I have done some dancing,” said Mma Makutsi. “Like everybody else. But not very much.”

“Beginner,” said the woman.

“I suppose so,” said Mma Makutsi.

“Yes,” said the woman. “If you have not been to a dance academy before, then you are a beginner. But you need not be ashamed. Everybody has to begin somewhere.”

The woman smiled at her encouragingly and pointed at the doorway. “Go in. We shall be starting very soon,” she said. “Mr Fanope is in the bar, but will come very soon. He is a very famous dancer, you know. Johannesburg. Nairobi. He has danced in all these places.”

Mma Makutsi went in. It was a large room, the centre of which had been cleared and the carpet taken up. Chairs had been placed around the sides, and at the far end, on a small platform, the two musicians, the drummer and the guitarist, were perched on stools. The guitarist was fiddling with a lead to his instrument, while the drummer, a thin man wearing a silver-coloured waistcoat, was staring up at the ceiling, tapping his drumsticks against his knee.

Most of the chairs were occupied, and for a moment Mma Makutsi felt awkward as the eyes of those already there fell upon her. She felt that she was being appraised, and she searched quickly for any face that she knew, for any person whom she could approach and greet. But there was nobody, and under the gaze of the sixty or so people present, she crossed the floor to take a seat on one of the few chairs which were still free. Glancing around, she saw, to her relief, that she was dressed in much the same way as the other women, but none, she saw, was wearing glasses. For a moment she thought about taking hers off and putting them away, but the difficulty with doing that was that she really needed them and without them she would not be able to make out what was happening.