Over the years, she had found a rationale that allowed her to tolerate his voracious pursuit of money and those who could help him make more of it. There were plenty of people who admired his ascent of the corporate mountain, viewing it as proof that black men were every bit as commercially gifted as the white men who had for so long had the field to themselves. Priscilla didn’t really buy into that particular conceit – at least, not as far as her husband was concerned – but it gave her a kind of cover, a suit of armour she could wear in the days when she used to accompany him to endless rounds of cocktail parties.

She found the new black elite hard to swallow. It was not their money but the way they made it. There were millions of black families in the emerging middle class, who had worked their way honestly to a suburban home, a new car, a decent school for their children and a holiday abroad. For them the promise of freedom had come good, and Priscilla admired them. It was the others, whose wealth came from political patronage and racial preferment, she abhorred: it wasn’t what the ‘struggle’ had been about. There they were, those ample women, tottering around on heels designed to carry the weight of some Italian waif. It had always struck her as comical that after years, decades in fact, of ridiculing the white madams and their endless, often futile commitment to physical rearrangement and disguise, those black women should pursue the same hopeless cause with such vigour.

She could forgive the young ones who had grown up with this exhibition of wealth and knew no better. It was their mothers Priscilla felt sorry for. Women who had once embodied the fecund resilience of African femininity tried to squeeze themselves into a mould that churned out the primped and pampered white women who lunched on salads in their gated communities and thrived on the inherited status of their husbands.

Priscilla had taken her cue from an elder stateswoman of the struggle, Albertina Sisulu, who stood her ground, resolutely hanging on to the values that had earned her respect in life and reverence in death.

The men were no better, she thought. Once, they had argued the merits of public ownership versus private provision, railed against a system that placed greater emphasis on the value of a share than on the welfare of an individual. Now they competed on a new plain. Brands replaced ideology. The party cadres who had once exhorted their members to share out the wealth of the country to all who lived in it now shared it out among themselves. The most expensive watch, the newest car, the biggest house – they accumulated it all without the slightest sense of irony. And her own husband, Josiah, was the finest exponent of the new art of self-aggrandisement.