I think that I can say that I had never been happier in my life. We had found a country where the people treated one another well, with respect, and where there were values other than the grab, grab, grab which prevails back home. I felt humbled, in a way. Everything about my own country seemed so shoddy and superficial when held up against what I saw in Africa. People suffered here, and many of them had very little, but they had this wonderful feeling for others. When I first heard African people calling others—complete strangers—their brother or their sister, it sounded odd to my ears. But after a while I knew exactly what it meant and I started to think the same way. Then one day, somebody called me her sister for the first time, and I started to cry, and she could not understand why I should suddenly be so upset. And I said to her: It is nothing. I am just crying. I am just crying. I wish I could have called my friends “my sisters,” but it would have sounded contrived and I could not do it. But that is how I felt. I was learning lessons. I had come to Africa and I was learning lessons.

Michael started to study Setswana and he made good progress. There was a man called Mr Nogana who came to the house to give him lessons four days a week. He was a man in his late sixties, a retired schoolteacher, and a very dignified man. He wore small, round glasses, and one of the lenses was broken. I offered to buy him a replacement because I did not think that he had much money, but he shook his head and told me that he could see quite well and, thank you, it would not be necessary. They would sit on the verandah and Mr Nogana would go over Setswana grammar with him and give him the words for everything they saw: the plants in the garden, the clouds in the sky, the birds.

“Your son is learning quickly,” he said to me. “He has got an African heart within him. I am just teaching that heart to speak.”

Michael made his own friends. There were quite a few other Americans in Gaborone, some of whom were of a similar age to him, but he did not show much interest in these people, or in some of the other young expatriates who were there with diplomatic parents. He liked the company of local people, or of people who knew something about Africa. He spent a lot of time with a young South African exile and with a man who had been a medical volunteer in Mozambique. They were serious people, and I liked them too.

After a few months, he began to spend more and more time with a group of people who lived in an old farmhouse out beyond Molepolole. There was a girl there, an Afrikaner—she had come from Johannesburg a few years previously after getting into some sort of political trouble over the border. Then there was a German from Namibia, a lanky, bearded man who had ideas about agricultural improvement, and several local people from Mochudi who had worked in the Brigade movement there. I suppose that you might call it a commune of sorts, but then that would give the wrong idea. I think of communes as being the sort of place where hippies congregate and smoke dagga. This was not like that at all. They were all very serious, and what they really wanted to do was to grow vegetables in very dry soil.