Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Read Free Page A

more
important. The track came down from Bulawayo, crossed into Botswana at
Plumtree, and then headed south down the side of the country all the way to
Mafikeng, on the other side.
    As a boy I used to watch the trains as
they drew up at the siding. They let out great clouds of steam, and we would
dare one another to run as close as we could to it. The stokers would shout at
us, and the station master would blow his whistle, but they never managed to
get rid of us. We hid behind plants and boxes and dashed out to ask for coins
from the closed windows of the trains. We saw the white people look out of
their windows, like ghosts, and sometimes they would toss us one of their
Rhodesian pennies—large copper coins with a hole in the middle—or,
if we were lucky, a tiny silver coin we called a tickey, which could buy us a
small tin of syrup.
    Mahalapye was a straggling village of huts made of
brown, sun-baked mud bricks and a few tin-roofed buildings. These belonged to
the Government or the Railways, and they seemed to us to represent distant,
unattainable luxury. There was a school run by an old Anglican priest and a
white woman whose face had been half-destroyed by the sun. They both spoke
Setswana, which was unusual, but they taught us in English, insisting, on the
pain of a thrashing, that we left our own language outside in the
playground.
    On the other side of the road was the beginning of the
plain that stretched out into the Kalahari. It was featureless land, cluttered
with low thorn trees, on the branches of which there perched the hornbills and
the fluttering molopes, with their long, trailing tail feathers. It was a world
that seemed to have no end, and that, I think, is what made Africa in those
days so different. There was no end to it. A man could walk, or ride, forever,
and he would never get anywhere.
    I am sixty now, and I do not think God
wants me to live much longer. Perhaps there will be a few years more, but I
doubt it; I saw Dr Moffat at the Dutch Reformed Hospital in Mochudi who
listened to my chest. He could tell that I had been a miner, just by listening,
and he shook his head and said that the mines have many different ways of
hurting a man. As he spoke, I remembered a song which the Sotho miners used to
sing. They sang: “The mines eat men. Even when you have left them, the
mines may still be eating you.” We all knew this was true. You could be
killed by falling rock or you could be killed years later, when going
underground was just a memory, or even a bad dream that visited you at night.
The mines would come back for their payment, just as they were coming back for
me now. So I was not surprised by what Dr Moffat said.
    Some people
cannot bear news like that. They think they must live forever, and they cry and
wail when they realise that their time is coming. I do not feel that, and I did
not weep at that news which the doctor gave me. The only thing that makes me
sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my
mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa, because
they say that where you go, wherever that may be, there is no smell and no
taste.
    I’m not saying that I’m a brave man—I’m
not—but I really don’t seem to mind this news I have been given. I
can look back over my sixty years and think of everything that I have seen and
of how I started with nothing and ended up with almost two hundred cattle. And
I have a good daughter, a loyal daughter, who looks after me well and makes me
tea while I sit here in the sun and look out to the hills in the distance. When
you see these hills from a distance, they are blue; as all the distances in
this country are. We are far from the sea here, with Angola and Namibia between
us and the coast, and yet we have this great empty ocean of blue above us and
around us. No sailor could be lonelier than a man standing in the middle of our
land, with the miles and miles of blue about him.
    I have never