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received for any task she had
performed; Obed had thanked her, and done so often, and generously, but it had
not occurred to him to praise her, because in his view she was just doing her
duty as a woman and there was nothing special about that.
    “We are
the ones who first ploughed the earth when Modise (God) made it,” ran an
old Setswana poem. “We were the ones who made the food. We are the ones
who look after the men when they are little boys, when they are young men, and
when they are old and about to die. We are always there. But we are just women,
and nobody sees us.”
    Lessons About Boys
    Mma
Ramotswe thought: God put us on this earth. We were all Africans then, in the
beginning, because man started in Kenya, as Dr Leakey and his Daddy have
proved. So, if one thinks carefully about it, we are all brothers and sisters,
and yet everywhere you look, what do you see? Fighting, fighting, fighting.
Rich people killing poor people; poor people killing rich people. Everywhere,
except Botswana. That’s thanks to Sir Seretse Khama, who was a good man,
who invented Botswana and made it a good place. She still cried for him
sometimes, when she thought of him in his last illness and all those clever
doctors in London saying to the Government: “We’re sorry but we
cannot cure your President.”
    The problem, of course, was that
people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They
needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out
for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best
for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That’s how most
people thought.
    Precious Ramotswe had learned about good and evil at
Sunday School. The cousin had taken her there when she was six, and she had
gone there every Sunday without fail until she was eleven. That was enough time
for her to learn all about right and wrong, although she had been
puzzled—and remained so—when it came to certain other aspects of
religion. She could not believe that the Lord had walked on water—you
just couldn’t do that—nor had she believed the story about the
feeding of the five thousand, which was equally impossible. These were lies,
she was sure of it, and the biggest lie of all was that the Lord had no Daddy
on this earth. That was untrue because even children knew that you needed a
father to make a child, and that rule applied to cattle and chickens and
people, all the same. But right and wrong—that was another matter, and
she had experienced no difficulty in understanding that it was wrong to lie,
and steal, and kill other people.
    If people needed clear guidelines,
there was nobody better to do this than Mma Mothibi, who had run the Sunday
School at Mochudi for over twelve years. She was a short lady, almost entirely
round, who spoke with an exceptionally deep voice. She taught the children
hymns, in both Setswana and English, and because they learned their singing
from her the children’s choir all sang an octave below everybody else, as
if they were frogs.
    The children, dressed in their best clothes, sat in
rows at the back of the church when the service had finished and were taught by
Mma Mothibi. She read the Bible to them, and made them recite the Ten
Commandments over and over again, and told them religious stories from a small
blue book which she said came from London and was not available anywhere else
in the country.
    “These are the rules for being good,” she
intoned. “A boy must always rise early and say his prayers. Then he must
clean his shoes and help his mother to prepare the family’s breakfast, if
they have breakfast. Some people have no breakfast because they are poor. Then
he must go to school and do everything that his teacher tells him. In that way
he will learn to be a clever Christian boy who will go to Heaven later on, when
the Lord calls him home. For girls, the rules are the same, but they must also
be careful about