MMA RAMOTSWE VISITS HER COUSIN IN MOCHUDI, AND THINKS

MMA RAMOTSWE did not see Mr J.L.B. Matekoni that Saturday, as she had driven up to Mochudi in her tiny white van. She planned to stay there until Sunday, leaving the children to be looked after by Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. These were the foster children from the orphan farm, whom Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had agreed to take into his home, without consulting Mma Ramotswe. But she had been unable to hold this against him, even if many women would have felt that they should have been consulted about the introduction of children into their lives; it was typical of his generosity that he should do something like this. After a few days, the children had come to stay with her, which was better than their living in his house, with its engine parts that littered the floor and with its empty store cupboards (Mr J.L.B. Matekoni did not bother to buy much food). And so they had moved to the house in Zebra Drive, the girl and her brother; the girl in a wheelchair, for illness had left her unable to walk, and the brother, much younger than she, and still needing special attention after all that had happened to him.

Mma Ramotswe had no particular reason to go up to Mochudi, but it was the village in which she had grown up and one never really needed an excuse to visit the place in which one had spent one’s childhood. That was the marvellous thing about going back to one’s roots; there was no need for explanation. In Mochudi everybody knew who she was: the daughter of Obed Ramotswe, who had gone off to Gaborone, where she had made a bad marriage to a trumpet player she had met on a bus. That was all common knowledge, part of the web of memories which made up the village life of Botswana. In that world, nobody needed to be a stranger; everybody could be linked in some way with others, even a visitor; for visitors came for a reason, did they not? They would be associated, then, with the people whom they were visiting. There was a place for everybody.