Morality for Beautiful Girls (8 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE GIRL WITH THREE LIVES

N
OT EVERYBODY had a maid, of course, but if you were in a well-paid job and had a house of the size which Mma Ramotswe did, then not to employ a maid—or indeed not to support several domestic servants—would have been seen as selfishness. Mma Ramotswe knew that there were countries where people had no servants, even when they were well enough off to do so. She found this inexplicable. If people who were in a position to have servants chose not to do so, then what were the servants to do?

In Botswana, every house in Zebra Drive—or indeed every house with over two bedrooms—would be likely to have a servant. There were laws about how much domestic servants should be paid, but these were often flouted. There were people who treated their servants very badly, who paid them very little and expected them to work all hours of the day, and these people, as far as Mma Ramotswe knew, were probably in the majority. This was Botswana’s dark secret—this exploitation—which nobody liked to talk about. Certainly nobody liked to talk about how the Masarwa had been treated in the past, as slaves effectively, and if one mentioned it, people looked shifty and changed the subject. But it had happened, and it was still happening here and there for all that anybody knew. Of course, this sort of thing happened throughout Africa. Slavery had been a great wrong perpetrated against Africa, but there had always been willing African slavers, who sold their own people, and there were still vast legions of Africans working for a pittance in conditions of near-slavery. These people were quiet people, weak people, and the domestic servants were amongst them.

Mma Ramotswe was astonished that people could behave so callously to their servants. She herself had been in the house of a friend who had referred, quite casually, to the fact that her maid was given five days holiday a year, and unpaid at that. This friend boasted that she had managed to cut the maid’s wages recently because she thought her lazy.

“But why doesn’t she go, if you do such a thing?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

The friend had laughed. “Go where? There are plenty of people wanting her job, and she knows it. She knows that I could get somebody to do her job for half the wages she’s getting.”

Mma Ramotswe had said nothing, but had mentally ended the friendship at that point. This had given her cause for thought. Can one be the friend of a person who behaves badly? Or is the case that bad people can only have bad friends, because only other bad people will have sufficient in common with them to be friends? Mma Ramotswe thought of notoriously bad people. There was Idi Amin, for example, or Henrik Verwoerd. Idi Amin, of course, had something wrong with him; perhaps he was not bad in the same way as Mr Verwoerd, who had seemed quite sane, but who had a heart of ice. Had anybody loved Mr Verwoerd? Had anybody held his hand? Mma Ramotswe assumed that they had; there had been people at his funeral, had there not, and did they not weep, just as people weep at the funerals of good men? Mr Verwoerd had his people, and perhaps not all of his people were bad. Now that things had changed over the border in South Africa, these people still had to go on living. Perhaps they now understood the wrong they had done; even if they did not, they had been forgiven, for the most part. The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world. As had Seretse Khama, thought Mma Ramotswe; though nobody outside Botswana seemed to remember him anymore. Yet he was one of Africa’s great men, and had shaken the hand of her father, Obed Ramotswe, when he had visited Mochudi to talk to the people. And she, Precious Ramotswe, then a young girl, had seen him step out of his car and the people had flocked about him and among them, holding his old battered hat in his hand, was her father. And as the Khama had taken her father’s hand, her own heart had swelled with pride; and she remembered the occasion every time she looked at the photograph of the great statesman on her mantelpiece.

Her friend who treated her maid badly was not a wicked person. She behaved well towards her family and she had always been kind to Mma Ramotswe, but when it came to her maid—and Mma Ramotswe had met this maid, who seemed an agreeable, hardworking woman from Molepolole—she seemed to have little concern for her feelings. It occurred to Mma Ramotswe that such behaviour was no more than ignorance; an inability to understand the hopes and aspirations of others. That understanding, thought Mma Ramotswe, was the beginning of all morality. If you knew how a person was feeling, if you could imagine yourself in her position, then surely it would be impossible to inflict further pain. Inflicting pain in such circumstances would be like hurting oneself.

Mma Ramotswe knew that there was a great deal of debate about morality, but in her view it was quite simple. In the first place, there was the old Botswana morality, which was simply right. If a person stuck to this, then he would be doing the right thing and need not worry about it. There were other moralities, of course; there were the Ten Commandments, which she had learned by heart at Sunday School in Mochudi all those years ago; these were also right in the same, absolute way. These codes of morality were like the Botswana Penal Code; they had to be obeyed to the letter. It was no good pretending you were the High Court of Botswana and deciding which parts you were going to observe and which you were not. Moral codes were not designed to be selective, nor indeed were they designed to be questioned. You could not say that you would observe this prohibition but not that.
I shall not commit theft—certainly not—but adultery is another matter: wrong for other people, but not for me.

Most morality, thought Mma Ramotswe, was about doing the right thing because it had been identified as such by a long process of acceptance and observance. You simply could not create your own morality because your experience would never be enough to do so. What gives you the right to say that you know better than your ancestors? Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe’s view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave to it.

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another—not even for his wife—would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls—young existentialist girls—you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.

MMA RAMOTSWE did not treat her maid, Rose, in an existentialist way. Rose had worked for her from the day that she first moved in to Zebra Drive. There was a network of unemployed people, Mma Ramotswe discovered, and this sent out word of anybody who was moving into a new house and who might be expected to need a servant. Rose had arrived at the house within an hour of Mma Ramotswe herself.

“You will need a maid, Mma,” she had said. “And I am a very good maid. I will work very hard and will not be a trouble to you for the rest of your life. I am ready to start now.”

Mma Ramotswe had made an immediate judgement. She saw before her a respectable-looking woman, neatly presented, of about thirty. But she saw, too, a mother, one of whose children was waiting by the gate, staring at her. And she wondered what the mother had said to her child.
We shall eat tonight if this woman takes me as her maid. Let us hope. You wait here and stand on your toe.
Stand on your toe. That is what one said in Setswana if one hoped that something would happen. It was the same as the expression which white people used: cross your fingers.

Mma Ramotswe glanced towards the gate and saw that the child was indeed standing on her toe, and she knew then that there was only one answer she could give.

She looked at the woman. “Yes,” she said. “I need a maid, and I will give the job to you, Mma.”

The woman clapped her hands together in gratitude and waved to the child. I am lucky, thought Mma Ramotswe. I am lucky that I can make somebody so happy just by saying something.

Rose moved in immediately and rapidly proved her worth. Zebra Drive had been left in a bad way by its previous owners, who had been untidy people, and there was dust in every corner. Over three days she swept and polished, until the house smelled of floor wax and every surface shone. Not only that, but she was an expert cook and a magnificent ironer. Mma Ramotswe was well dressed, but she always found it difficult to find the energy to iron her blouses as much as she might have wished. Rose did this with a passion that was soon reflected in starched seams and expanses to which creases were quite alien.

Rose took up residence in the servants’ quarters in the back yard. This consisted of a small block of two rooms, with a shower and toilet to one side and a covered porch under which a cooking fire might be made. She slept in one of the rooms, while her two small children slept in the other. There were other, older children, including one who was a carpenter and earning a good wage. But even with that, the expenses of living were such as to leave very little over, particularly since her younger son had asthma and needed expensive inhalers to help him breathe.

NOW, COMING home after dropping off Mma Makutsi, Mma Ramotswe found Rose in the kitchen, scouring a blackened cooking pot. She enquired politely after the maid’s day and was told that it had been a very good one.

“I have helped Motholeli with her bath,” she said. “And now she is through there, reading to her little brother. He has been running round all day and is tired, tired. He will be asleep very soon. Only the thought of his supper is keeping him awake, I think.”

Mma Ramotswe thanked her and smiled. It had been a month since the children had arrived from the orphanage, by way of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and she was still getting used to their presence in the house. They had been his idea—and indeed he had not consulted her before he had agreed to act as their foster father—but she had accepted the situation and had quickly taken to them. Motholeli, who was in a wheelchair, had proved herself useful about the house and had expressed an interest in mending cars—much to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s delight. Her brother, who was much younger, was more difficult to fathom. He was active enough, and spoke politely when spoken to, but seemed to be keener on his own company, or that of his sister, than on that of other children. Motholeli had made some friends already, but the boy seemed shy of doing so.

She had started at Gaborone Secondary School, which was not far away, and was happy there. Each morning, one of the other girls from her class would arrive at the door and volunteer to push the wheelchair to school.

Mma Ramotswe had been impressed.

“Do the teachers tell you to do this?” she asked one of them.

“They do not, Mma,” came the reply. “We are the friends of this girl. That is why we do this.”

“You are kind girls,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You will be kind ladies in due course. Well done.”

The boy had been found a place at the local primary school, but Mma Ramotswe hoped that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would pay to send him to Thornhill. This cost a great deal of money, and now she wondered whether it would ever be possible. That was just one of the many things which would have to be sorted out. There was the garage, the apprentices, the house near the old Botswana Defence Force Club, and the children. There was also the wedding—whenever that would be—although Mma Ramotswe hardly dared think of that at present.

She went through to the living room, to see the boy seated beside his sister’s wheelchair, listening to her as she read.

“So,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You are reading a story to your little brother. Is it a good one?”

Motholeli looked round and smiled.

“It is not a story, Mma,” she said. “Or rather, it is not a proper story from a book. It is a story I have written at school, and I am reading it to him.”

Mma Ramotswe joined them, perching on the arm of the sofa.