‘You know,’ he continued, ‘when the white man first came, a lot of people thought he didn’t have any toes. They thought that his shoes were his actual feet.’

He laughed in a jolly, drowsy way that made her smile a drowsy, jolly smile. She also had heard all sorts of amusing stories about when the white man first turned up. Her grandmother had told her that the very first time she saw a white man, she and her friends had run away, thinking it was an evil spirit.

‘You have such beautiful hair,’ Engineer continued. ‘Have you gone to school?’

‘Yes, I’ve finished secondary school.’

‘What of university? Don’t you want to read further?’

‘I’m learning how to sew.’

‘Ah. Learning how to sew and going to university are not the same thing. Look at all these people you see going to the farm every day.’ With his right hand, he drew a slow semi-circle in the air. ‘Do you know what they could have been if they had gone to school?’

She did not.

‘Some of them could have been great inventors, great doctors or engineers. Some of them would have been known in other parts of the world. Have you ever heard of the nature/nurture controversy?’

She had not.

‘These people,’ he said, turning to face her, ‘if they were taken away from this environment and placed somewhere else for a while… just a little while… they would all be very different.’

He kept quiet to allow her to digest his words. Then she remembered the discussion of the other day.

‘Is it true that monkeys are our ancestors?’ she asked.

Engineer smiled with gladness.

‘Augustina, I like you. You’re a smart girl. I like the way you listen and ask questions.’

One of her father’s wives had complained that this was her main problem in life, that she asked too many questions for a girl.

‘They call it evolution,’ he said, and then told her how scientists said that men were once monkeys, that the monkeys had gradually turned into human beings. He said that Christians were angry about this because the Bible says God created man.