The hens seemed equally irritated by Mma Makutsi’s presence. It was as if she, rather than they, were the intruder. By rights, this tiny building with its two small windows and its creaky door should be a henhouse, not a detective agency. If they outstared her, perhaps, she would go, and they would be left to perch on the chairs and make their nests in the filing cabinets. That is what the chickens wanted.

“Get out,” said Mma Makutsi, waving a folded-up newspaper at them. “No chickens here! Get out!”

The largest of the hens turned and glared at her, while the rooster merely looked shifty.

“I mean you!” shouted Mma Makutsi. “This is not a chicken farm. Out!”

The hens uttered an indignant clucking and seemed to hesitate for a moment. But when Mma Makutsi pushed her chair back and made to get up, they turned and began to move towards the door, the rooster in the lead this time, limping awkwardly.

The chickens dealt with, Mma Makutsi resumed her staring out of the door. She resented the indignity of having to shoo chickens out of one’s office. How many first-class graduates of the Botswana Secretarial College had to do that? she wondered. There were offices in town—large buildings with wide windows and air-conditioning units where the secretaries sat at polished desks with chrome handles. She had seen these offices when the college had taken them for work-experience visits. She had seen them sitting there, smiling, wearing expensive earrings and waiting for a well-paid husband to step forward and ask them to marry him. She had thought at the time that she would like a job like that, although she herself would be more interested in the work than in the husband. She had assumed, in fact, that such a job would be hers, but when the course had finished and they had all gone off for interviews, she had received no offers. She could not understand why this should be so. Some of the other women who got very much worse marks than she did—sometimes as low as 51 percent (the barest of passes) received good offers whereas she (who had achieved the almost inconceivable mark of 97 percent) received nothing. How could this be?

It was one of the other unsuccessful girls who explained it to her. She, too, had gone to interviews and been unlucky.

“It is men who give out these jobs, am I right?” she had said.

“I suppose so,” said Mma Makutsi. “Men run these businesses. They choose the secretaries.”

“So how do you think men choose who should get the job and who shouldn’t? Do you think they choose by the marks we got? Is that how you think they do it?”