She made a mental note to warn the children and to get Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to knock the fruit down with a pole before anybody was hurt. And then she turned back to her cup of tea and to her perusal of the copy of The Daily News, which she had unfolded on her lap. She had read the first four pages of the paper, and had gone through the small advertisements with her usual care. There was much to be learned from the small advertisements, with their offers of irrigation pipes for farmers, used vans, jobs of various sorts, plots of land with house construction permission, and bargain furniture. Not only could one keep up to date with what things cost, but there was also a great deal of social detail to be garnered from this source. That day, for instance, there was a statement by a Mr Herbert Motimedi that he would not be responsible for any debts incurred by Mrs Boipelo Motimedi, which effectively informed the public that Herbert and Boipelo were no longer on close terms—which did not surprise Mma Ramotswe, as it happened, because she had always felt that that particular marriage was not a good idea, in view of the fact that Boipelo Motimedi had gone through three husbands before she found Herbert, and two of these previous husbands had been declared bankrupt. She smiled at that and skimmed over the remaining advertisements before turning the page and getting to the column that interested her more than anything else in the newspaper.
Some months earlier, the newspaper had announced to its readers that it would be starting a new feature. “If you have any problems,” the paper said, “then you should write to our new exclusive columnist, Aunty Emang, who will give you advice on what to do. Not only is Aunty Emang a BA from the University of Botswana, but she also has the wisdom of one who has lived fifty-eight years and knows all about life.” This advance notice brought in a flood of letters, and the paper had expanded the amount of space available for Aunty Emang’s sound advice. Soon she had become so popular that she was viewed as something of a national institution and was even named in Parliament when an opposition member brought the house down with the suggestion that the policy proposed by some hapless minister would never have been approved of by Aunty Emang.
Mma Ramotswe had chuckled over that, as she now chuckled over the plight of a young student who had written a passionate love letter to a girl and had delivered it, by mistake, to her sister. “I am not sure what to do,” he had written to Aunty Emang. “I think that the sister is very pleased with what I wrote to her as she is smiling at me all the time. Her sister, the girl I really like, does not know that I like her and maybe her own sister has told her about the letter which she has received from me. So she thinks now that I am in love with her sister, and does not know that I am in love with her. How can I get out of this difficult situation?” And Aunty Emang, with her typical robustness, had written: “Dear Anxious in Molepolole: The simple answer to your question is that you cannot get out of this. If you tell one of the girls that she has received a letter intended for her sister, then she will become very sad. Her sister (the one you really wanted to write to in the first place) will then think that you have been unkind to her sister and made her upset. She will not like you for this. The answer is that you must give up seeing both of these girls and you should spend your time working harder on your examinations. When you have a good job and are earning some money, then you can find another girl to fall in love with. But make sure that you address any letter to that girl very carefully.”
There were two other letters. One was from a boy of fourteen who had been moved to write to Aunty Emang about being picked upon by his teacher. “I am a hard-working boy,” he wrote. “I do all my schoolwork very carefully and neatly. I never shout in the class or push people about (like most other boys). When my teacher talks, I always pay attention and smile at him. I do not trouble the girls (like most other boys). I am a very good boy in every sense. Yet my teacher always blames me for anything that goes wrong and gives me low marks in my work. I am very unhappy. The more I try to please this teacher, the more he dislikes me. What am I doing wrong?”
Everything, thought Mma Ramotswe. That’s what you are doing wrong: everything. But how could one explain to a fourteen-year-old boy that one should nottry too hard; which was what he was doing and which irritated his teacher. It was better, she thought, to be a little bit bad in this life, and not too perfect. If you were too perfect, then you invited exactly this sort of reaction, even if teachers should be above that sort of thing. But what, she wondered, would Aunty Emang say?
“Dear Boy,” wrote Aunty Emang. “Teachers do not like boys like you. You should not say you are not like other boys, or people will think that you are like a girl.” And that is all that Aunty Emang seemed prepared to say on the subject—which was a bit dismissive, thought Mma Ramotswe, and now that poor, over-anxious boy would think that not only did his teacher not like him, but neither did Aunty Emang. But perhaps there was not enough space in the newspaper to go into the matter in any great depth because there was the final letter to be printed, which was not a short one.
“Dear Aunty Emang,” the letter ran. “Four years ago my wife gave birth to our first born. We had been trying for this baby for a long time and we were very happy when he arrived. When it came to choosing a name for this child, my wife suggested that we should call him after my brother, who lives in Mahalapye but who comes to see us every month. She said that this would be a good thing, as my brother does not have a wife himself and it would be good to have a name from a member of the family. I was happy with this and agreed.
“As my son has been growing up, my brother has been very kind to him. He has given him many presents and packets of sweets when he comes to see him. The boy likes his uncle very much and always listens very carefully to the stories that he tells him. My wife thinks that this is a good thing—that a boy should love his kind uncle like this.
“Then somebody said to me: Your son looks very like his uncle. It is almost as if he is his own son. And that made me think for the first time: Is my brother the father of my son? I looked at the two of them when they were sitting together and I thought that too. They are very alike.
“I am very fond of my brother. He is my twin, and we have done everything together all our lives. But I do not like the thought that he is the father of my son. I would like to talk to him about this, but I do not want to say anything that may cause trouble in the family. You are a wise lady, Aunty: What do you think I should do?”
Mma Ramotswe finished reading the letter and thought: surely a twin should know how funny this sounds—after all,they are twins. If Aunty Emang had laughed on reading this letter, then it was not apparent in her answer.
“I am very sorry that you are worrying about this,” she wrote. “Look at yourself in the mirror. Do you look like your brother?” And once again that was all she had to say on the subject.
Mma Ramotswe reflected on what she had read. It seemed to her that she and Aunty Emang had at least something in common. Both of them dealt with the problems of others and both were expected by those others to provide some solution to their difficulties. But there the similarity ended. Aunty Emang had the easier role: she merely had to give a pithy response to the facts presented to her. In Mma Ramotswe’s case, important facts were often unknown and required to be coaxed out of obscurity. And once she had done that, then she had to do rather more than make a clever or dismissive suggestion. She had to see matters through to their conclusion, and these conclusions were not always as simple as somebody like Aunty Emang might imagine.