That evening Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, garagiste saviour of countless marginal vehicles, husband, foster father and citizen of Botswana, enrolled at a community improvement course hosted by the University of Botswana. The course was not at the forefront of the university’s offerings to the people of Gaborone; more prominent on that list were popular courses in the History of Post-Independence Botswana, in the Flora and Fauna of the Kalahari, and in the Management of the Domestic Budget. Those were in the top rank in terms of popularity and acclaim; below that were second-ranking courses in Personal Self-Presentation, Managing the Small Business, and First Aid. Finally came the course on which Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had embarked: How to Be a Modern Husband (Level 1). There was no Level 2 of that course, although it had been talked about and the organisers had promised that it would be offered if demand was there.

The Modern Husband course was held in one of the old classrooms, away from the large buildings that had sprung up in the later phases of the university’s development. The old buildings were redolent of the city in its more comfortable days, when structures tended to grow outwards rather than upwards. Low squat buildings, painted uniformly white and shaded by wide eaves, were linked to one another by walkways shielded from the sun and, more rarely, from downpours of rain by arched tin roofs. Now the students sat through their lectures in the greater comfort of new lecture theatres, leaving the old classrooms for the occasional use of less popular subjects and, as in this case, outside courses.

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni felt slightly awkward as he parked his aged green truck in the parking lot outside the classrooms. He had every right to be there – as a taxpayer, and a scrupulously conscientious one at that, he paid for at least some of all this, and as a prospective member of a university-hosted evening class he was, in a sense, a student. In spite of this, though, he felt that this was not his world. This was the world of the new Botswana, of the young people who would go on to do things that he would never have dreamed of doing – to be lawyers and accountants, and even doctors, now that the medical school had been opened. In his day, such things had seemed hopelessly remote – the preserve of those who could go off on government scholarships over the border or even overseas. They had not been for somebody like him, the young man from Molepolole who had never dreamed of being anything other than a mechanic.