“I am not saying it is not a nice place,” said Mma Makutsi. “I am just saying that they walk very fast there. I have seen a film of that. They were walking very fast in the film.”

“I think you should continue,” said Mma Ramotswe. “So you were born out in Molepolole, Mma?”

“Yes. I actually don’t remember Molepolole very well because I was only four when we left and came into town. I think I have a memory or two of the place; I remember a garden with a tall rubber hedge—you know those hedges with the white sap that comes out if you break off a piece? I think I remember that. And I remember sitting on a verandah, which must have been at my parents’ house out there. Apart from that, my early memories are of this place—of Gaborone.”

Mma Ramotswe made a note on the pad of paper before her. Early life, she wrote. Gaborone.

“We stayed here until I was eight. Then we left.”

“Why was that, Mma?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

“My father was paid by the Canadian government,” said Susan. “It was a funded project and the money was given to something else. Aid people are always doing that—they support something for a while, and then it’s somebody else’s turn. It’s fair enough, I suppose. And anyway, his work was to do with tuberculosis, and they had made such good progress with treating TB that they probably wanted to spend their funds on something else. So it was time for us to go back to Canada—except in my case I hardly knew Canada. I had been there twice, I think—just for holidays on my grandmother’s farm in Ontario. I didn’t know the place otherwise. It was meant to be home, but it wasn’t really.

“So leaving Botswana was like leaving my real home—the place I’d grown up in, the first place I knew, the place that was so familiar to me.” She paused. “I remember it very well—the day we left. We had to drive over the border to get the plane from Johannesburg. I remember being in floods of tears because I was leaving my friends. It’s like that for children, isn’t it? Leaving friends is a very big wrench for them. It seems that you’re losing everything. You don’t believe your parents when they say you’ll make new friends—you will never make any more friends, you think. It’s like saying goodbye to the whole world.”

Mma Makutsi made a sympathetic noise. “Oh, I know what that’s like, Mma. I know that very well.”

“I’m sure you do,” said Susan.

“I remember when I left Bobonong,” Mma Makutsi went on. “I came down here to go to the Botswana Secretarial College, you know, Mma—I graduated from that place, you see.”