Alexander Smith: The Kalahari Typing School For Men

“I am very happy,” said Mma Makutsi miserably. “I am happy with this job. I do not want to go anywhere else.”

Mma Ramotswe laughed. “Oh, the job. Of course you’re happy with that. We know that. And we’re very happy with you. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and I are very happy. You are our right-hand woman. Everybody knows that.”

It took Mma Makutsi a few moments to absorb this compliment, but when she did, she felt relief flood through her. She picked up her teacup, with a steady hand now, and took a deep draught of the hot red liquid.

“What I’m really wanting to find out,” went on Mma Ramotswe, “is whether you’re happy in your… in yourself. Are you getting what you want out of life?”

Mma Makutsi thought for a moment. “I’m not sure what I want out of life,” she said after a while. “I used to think that I would like to be rich, but now that I’ve met some rich people I’m not so sure about that.”

“Rich people are just people,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I have not met a rich person yet who isn’t just the same as us. Being happy or unhappy has nothing to do with being rich.”

Mma Makutsi nodded. “So now I think that happiness comes from somewhere else. It comes from somewhere inside.”

“Somewhere inside?”

Mma Makutsi adjusted her large spectacles. She was an avid reader and enjoyed a serious conversation of this sort, in which she would be able to bring up snippets that she had garnered from old issues of the National Geographic or the Mail and Guardian.

“Happiness is found in the head,” she said, warming to the subject. “If the head is full of happiness, then the person is definitely happy. That is clearly true.”

“And the heart?” ventured Mma Ramotswe. “Does the heart not come into it?”

There was a silence. Mma Makutsi looked down, tracing a pattern with her finger on a dusty corner of her desktop. “The heart is the place where love happens,” she said quietly.

Mma Ramotswe took a deep breath. “Would you not like to have a husband, Mma Makutsi?” she said gently. “Would it not make you happier to have a husband to look after you?” She paused and then added, “I was just wondering, that’s all.”

Mma Makutsi looked at her. Then she took off her glasses and polished them with a corner of her handkerchief. It was a favourite handkerchief of hers-with lace at the edges-but now it was threadbare from so much use and could not last much longer. But she loved it still and would buy another one just like it when she had the money.

“I would like to have a husband,” she said. “But there are many beautiful girls. They are the ones who are getting the husbands. There is nobody left over for me.”

“But you are a very good-looking lady,” said Mma Ramotswe stoutly. “I am sure that there are many men who will agree with me.”

Mma Makutsi shook her head. “I do not think so, Mma,” she said. “Although you are very kind to say that to me.”

“Perhaps you should try to find a man,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Maybe you should be doing a bit more about it if no men are coming your way. Try to find them.”

“Where?” asked Mma Makutsi. “Where are these men you are talking about?”

Mma Ramotswe waved a hand in the direction of the door, and of Africa outside. “Out there,” she said. “There are men out there. You have to meet them.”

“Where exactly?” asked Mma Makutsi.

“In the middle of the town,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You see them sitting about at lunchtime. Men. Plenty of them.”

“All married,” said Mma Makutsi.

“Or in bars,” said Mma Ramotswe, feeling that the conversation was not taking the turn she had planned for it.

“But you know what they are like in bars,” said Mma Makutsi. “Bars are full of men who are looking for bad girls.”

Mma Ramotswe had to agree. Bars were full of men like Note Mokoti and his friends, and she would never wish anybody like that on Mma Makutsi. It would be far better to be single than to become involved with somebody who would only make you unhappy.

“It is kind of you to think of me like this,” said Mma Makutsi after a while. “But you and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni mustn’t worry about me. I am happy enough, and if there is going to be somebody for me, then I am sure that I shall meet him. Then everything will change.”

Mma Ramotswe grasped at the opportunity to bring the conversation to an end. “I’m sure that you are right,” she said.

“Perhaps,” said Mma Makutsi.

Mma Ramotswe busied herself with a sheaf of papers on her desk. She felt saddened by the air of defeat which seemed to descend upon her assistant whenever the conversation turned to her personal circumstances. There was no real need for Mma Makutsi to feel like this. She might have had difficulties in her life until now-certainly one should not underestimate what it must be like to grow up in Bobonong, that rather dry and distant place from where Mma Makutsi had come-but there were plenty of people who came from places like that and made something of their lives in spite of their origins. If you went through life thinking, I’m just a local girl from somewhere out in the bush, then what was the point of making any effort? We all had to come from somewhere, and most of us came from somewhere not particularly impressive. Even if you were born in Gaborone, you had to come from a particular house in Gaborone, and ultimately that meant that you came from just a small patch of the earth; and that was no different from any other patch of the earth anywhere else.

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?

Mma Ramotswe was a royalist, of course. She admired monarchs, as long as they were respectable and behaved in the correct way. She admired the king of Lesotho, because he was a direct descendant of Moshoeshoe I, who had saved his country from the Boers and who had been a good, wise man (and modest, too-had he not described himself as the flea in the blanket of Queen Victoria?). She admired the old king of Swaziland, King Sobhuza II, who had had one hundred and forty-one wives, all at the same time. She admired him in spite of his having all those wives, which, after all, was a very traditional approach to life; she admired him because he loved his people and because he consistently refused to allow the death penalty to be exacted, always-with only one exception in his long reign, a most serious case of witchcraft murder-granting mercy at the last moment. (What sort of man, she wondered, could coldly say to another who was begging for his life: no, you must die?) There were other kings and queens, of course, not just African ones. There was the late queen of Tonga, who was a very special queen, because she was so fat. Mma Ramotswe had seen a picture of her in an encyclopaedia, and it had covered two pages, so wide was the queen. And there was the Dutch queen, of whom she had seen a photograph in a magazine, enigmatically described in the caption below the picture as the Orange Queen. And indeed she had been wearing a dark orange outfit and two-tone orange-and-brown shoes. Mma Ramotswe thought that she might like to meet that queen, who looked so cheerful and smiled so warmly (and what, she wondered, was this House of Orange in which this queen was said to live?). Maybe she would come to Botswana one day, in her two-tone shoes perhaps; but one should not hope too much. Nobody came to Botswana, because people just did not know about it. They had not heard. They just had not heard.