... Bollocks to vulgarity. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
On the whole, the people of Tanzania were exquisitely well-mannered. Indeed, they were, en
masse, the best mannered people that I have ever met. They were ceremonious and courtly in their mode of address. (So, apparently, are the Botswanans. It is surely this quality, lovingly described by Alexander McCall Smith, that accounts for the worldwide popularity of the Mma Ramotswe books.) I had a house servant there who invited me to her house in the village. It was a mud hut, but of elegant shape, beautifully and soberly painted with an abstract design (the common loss by peasants of aesthetic sensibility as soon as they move to town is surely a subject of some psychological and anthropological in- terest). You approached the hut by a path through a field of tall green maize. It was in the shade of mango and avocado trees. Though lacking in running water and electricity, it was spotlessly clean, and the area around it immaculately swept.
She called her children to bring me a chair: or rather, the chair, for chairs, as against stools, were prized objects in the village, and she had only one. She made sure that the children greeted me in the appropriate manner, which was to reach up and touch me lightly on the crown of my head once I had sat down. A widow, she had to teach her children how to behave: aged six and eight, they already had exquisite manners. She was confident of the rectitude of the moral standard by which she judged.
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