This observation set the two girls giggling again, and Mma Ramotswe had to bite her lip to prevent herself from giggling too. But she could not join in the girls' mirth at the expense of a teacher. Teachers had to be respected—as they always had been in Botswana—and if children thought them stupid, then that would hardly encourage respect.

“I do not think that this teacher can be like that,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Teachers have to pass examinations. They are very well-educated.”

“Not this one,” said Motholeli, setting the two children off in paroxysms of laughter.

Mma Ramotswe gave up. There was no point in trying to stop teenage girls from giggling; that was the way they were. One might as well try to stop men liking football. The analogy made her stop and think. Football. Tomorrow morning, if she remembered correctly, Mr. Leungo Molofololo had arranged to come to see her at ten o'clock. Mma Ramotswe was used to receiving well-known people, but Mr. Molofololo, by any standards, would be an important client. Not only did he have a large house up at Phulukane—a house which must have cost many millions of pula to build—but he had the ear of virtually every influential person in the country. Mr. Molofololo controlled the country's best football team, and that, in the world of men, counted for more than anything else.

“He is just a man,” Mma Makutsi had said, after Mr. Molofololo's secretary had called to make the appointment. “The fact that he has a football team is neither here nor there, Mma. He is the same as any man.”

But Mma Ramotswe thought differently. Mr. Molofololo was not just any man; he was Mr. Football.

CHAPTER TWO

WALKING IS GOOD FOR YOU,
AND FOR BOTSWANA

THE NEXT MORNING, over breakfast, Mma Ramotswe announced to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni that she would be walking to work that day. She had taken the decision an hour or so earlier, in the middle of her habitual stroll around her garden, shortly after inspecting the pawpaw trees that marked the boundary between her plot and the small piece of wasteland that ran behind it. She had planted the trees herself when first she had come to Zebra Drive and the garden had been nothing, just hard earth, scrub, and sour weeds. Now the trees were laden with fruit, heavy yellow orbs that she would shortly pick and enjoy. She liked pawpaw, but neither Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni nor the children did, and so these would be for her alone, a private treat, served with orange juice and topped, perhaps, with a small sprinkling of sugar.

Beside the pawpaw trees was an acacia tree in which birds liked to pause on their journeys and in which Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had once seen a long green snake, curled around a branch, its tail hanging down like an elongated twig to be brushed against by some unwary person passing below. The sighting of snakes was an everyday occurrence in Botswana, but the unfortunate creatures were never left alone. Mma Ramotswe did not like to kill them and had thoroughly agreed with a recent public plea from the Wildlife Department that people should refrain from doing anything about snakes unless they actually came into the house. They have their place, said the official, and if there were no snakes, then there would be many more rats, and all the rats would make quick work of the patiently gathered harvest.