Aida's village is like all the other African villages I know. The houses are made of clay or sheets of corrugated iron or the strangest mixture of materials that happened to be at hand for the builders. But all of the lived-in houses I saw in her village had a roof.

On the other hand, there were also abandoned houses that had collapsed. When I asked why this was so, I was told that the people who had lived there had died of Aids.

African houses often have a distinctive character. Perhaps you could say it is the equivalent of the Scandinavian passion for ornate carpentry at the end of the nineteenth century. In Aida's village two doors from an old American car make up the gate in a ramshackle fence round a house where a hairdresser is plying his trade. As we pass, he is cutting a customer's hair in the shade of a tree. Shortly before we came to Aida's house – or rather her mother, Christine's, house – I notice two men, their backs running with sweat, building a wall made of rusty pieces from old petrol drums between two corner-posts.

African houses in rural areas are a hymn to the imagination, if you like. But of course they are also an expression of poverty and destitution. Around the houses are small gardens, gravel roads meandering all over the place, and apologies for fences. Nearly all of the windows have broken panes with curtains flapping behind them.

Life proceeds at a leisurely pace in these villages. Haste is a human error that has not established very deep roots in the African countryside.

7

But none of this is important. I do not need to describe houses and roads, as if this were some sort of travelogue from a country in Africa. I have other reasons for being here.