Mma Makutsi should make more of herself, thought Mma Ramotswe. She should remember who she was-which was a citizen of Botswana, of the finest country in Africa, and one of the most distinguished graduates of the Botswana Secretarial College. Both of those were matters of which one could be justly proud. You could be proud to be a Motswana, because your country had never done anything of which to feel ashamed. It had conducted itself with complete integrity, even in times when it had to contend with neighbours in a state of civil war. It had always been honest, too, without that ruinous corruption that had shamed so many other countries in Africa, and which had bled away the wealth of an entire continent. They had never stooped to that, because Sir Seretse Khama, that great man whom her father had once greeted personally at Mochudi, had made it clear to every single citizen that there was to be no taking or giving of bribes, no dipping into money that belonged to the country. And everyone had listened to him and obeyed this precept because they could recognise in him the qualities of chiefly greatness which his forebears, the Khamas, had always possessed. Those qualities could not be acquired overnight, but they took generations to mature (whatever people said). That was why when Queen Elizabeth II met Seretse Khama, she knew immediately what sort of man he was. She knew because she could tell that he was the same sort of person as she was: a person who had been brought up to serve. Mma Ramotswe knew all this, but she sometimes wondered whether people who were slightly younger-people like Mma Makutsi-were aware of what a great man the first president of Botswana had been and of how he had been admired by the queen herself. Or would it mean anything to her? Would she understand?