THEY MADE slow progress on the last part of the journey. The road, which was untarred, was pitted with large and dangerous potholes, and at several points they were obliged to edge dangerously out into the sandy verge to avoid a particularly large hole. This was perilous, as the tiny white van could easily become stuck in the sand if they were not careful and they might have to wait hours for rescue. But at last they arrived at Mma Tsbago’s village, which was the village closest to the farm that Mma Ramotswe was seeking.

She had asked Mma Tsbago about the settlement, and had been provided with some information. She remembered the project, although she had not known the people involved in it. She recalled that there had been a white man and a woman from South Africa, and one or two other foreigners. A number of the people from the village had worked there, and people had thought that great things would come of it, but it had eventually fizzled out. She had not been surprised at that. Things fizzled out; you could not hope to change Africa. People lost interest, or they went back to their traditional way of doing things, or they simply gave up because it was all too much effort. And then Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.

“Is there somebody in the village who can take me out there?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

Mma Tsbago thought for a moment.

“There are still some people who worked out there,” she said. “There is a friend of my uncle. He had a job out there for a while. We can go to his place and you can ask him.”

THEY WENT first to Mma Tsbago’s house. It was a traditional Botswana house, made out of ochre mud bricks and surrounded by a low wall, a lomotana, which created a tiny yard in front of and alongside the house. Outside this wall there were two thatched grain bins, on raised legs, and a chicken house. At the back, made out of tin and leaning dangerously, was the privy, with an old plank door and a rope with which the door could be tied shut. The children ran out immediately, and embraced their mother, before waiting shyly to be introduced to the stranger. Then, from the dark interior of the house, there emerged the grandmother, wearing a threadbare white dress and grinning toothlessly.

Mma Tsbago left her bag in the house and explained that she would return within an hour. Mma Ramotswe gave sweets to the children, which they received with both palms upturned, thanking her gravely in the correct Setswana manner. These were children who would understand the old ways, thought Mma Ramotswe, approvingly—unlike some of the children in Gaborone.

They left the house and drove through the village in the white van. It was a typical Botswana village, a sprawling collection of one- or two-room houses, each in its own yard, each with a motley collection of thorn trees surrounding it. The houses were linked by paths, which wandered this way and that, skirting fields and crop patches. Cattle moved about listlessly, cropping at the occasional patch of brown, withered grass, while a pot-bellied herd-boy, dusty and be-aproned, watched them from under a tree. The cattle were unmarked, but everybody would know their owner, and their lineage. These were the signs of wealth, the embodied result of somebody’s labours in the diamond mine at Jwaneng or the beef-canning factory at Lobatse.