He went outside and stood on the stoep. The white light of a wintry sun shone through the delicate filigree of a spider’s web stretched between the thatched roof and one of the timbers on which it was supported. A single dewdrop clung to the bottom of the web, like a pearl hanging from an intricate necklace. A few metres in front of him, a young boy, wearing a T-shirt that reached halfway down his shins, was herding half a dozen rangy cattle down the main street. Kagiso checked to see if the extra chairs he’d borrowed from the church up the road had been delivered. Word had got round that Lesedi Motlantshe – heir to a billionaire – would be visiting Soil of Africa and he knew there would be quite a crowd. Motlantshe himself had proposed meeting some of the farm workers from around the town.

Kagiso Rapabane’s transition from favoured civil servant to charity worker was as surprising as it was exceptional. A poorly paid job helping South Africa’s rural poor was a far cry from his days at the Ministry of Rural Development and Land Reform in Pretoria, where he was a policy adviser to one Jake Willemse, at the time an up-and-coming minister. Kagiso had been something of a high flyer himself, one of the brightest prospects in the policy department, someone destined to go to the very top. There had been shock and not a little incredulity when it had been announced that he’d accepted a transfer to the rural outpost of Malelane. His industriousness, his renowned discipline, even his lean physique, all of these seemed ill suited to the altogether more laid-back attitude to work in the languid province of Mpumalanga in the eastern reaches of the country.

At the ministry, he’d been something of an enigma: everybody’s friend but no one’s confidant. You’d have been hard pushed to find anyone who had a bad word to say about him, but in the world of office camaraderie people wanted more of a colleague, someone who was clubbable in a way that Kagiso was unable and unwilling to be. While the others had aspired to owning BMWs, he was satisfied with his Yamaha scooter; while they signed up with a personal trainer – a status symbol in the new South Africa – he would disappear on long, lonely runs. No one knew about his love life, whether he even had one. He seemed inured to the charms of even the most attractive women at the ministry. The men couldn’t understand it and the women were intrigued. They wondered what went on behind those bespectacled eyes. His aloofness, his unavailability, was much more alluring than the crude lasciviousness of the other men, brought up in a society hooked on the conventional rituals of men chasing women.

Kagiso’s phone rang. He didn’t recognise the number.

‘Lesedi Motlantshe here. How’s it going?’