I CAME to Africa twelve years ago. I was forty-three and Africa meant nothing to me. I suppose I had the usual ideas about it-a hotchpotch of images of big game and savannah and Kilimanjaro rising out of the cloud. I also thought of famines and civil wars and potbellied, half-naked children staring at the camera, sunk in hopelessness. I know that all that is just one side of it-and not the most important side either-but it was what was in my mind.

My husband was an economist. We met in college and married shortly after we graduated; we were very young, but our marriage lasted. He took a job in Washington and ended up in the World Bank. He became quite senior there and could have spent his entire career in Washington, going up the ladder there. But he became restless, and one day he announced that there was a posting available to spend two years here in Botswana as a regional manager for World Bank activities in this part of Africa. It was promotion, after all, and if it was a cure for restlessness then I thought it preferable to his having an affair with another woman, which is the other way that men cure their restlessness. You know how it is, Mma, when men realize that they are no longer young. They panic, and they look for a younger woman who will reassure them that they are still men.