Morality for Beautiful Girls

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 an dneed 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 ag; these were also right in the same, absolute way. These codes of morality were like the Botswana PPenal 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.

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.

But now, in the tiny white van, she decided to put moral doubts aside. It was one of those situations where there were sound points to be made on both sides. She had decided that she would do it, because it was, on balance, better to act out a lie than to allow a life to be lost.

Mma Ramotswe sat up. There was something to be learned there, she thought. If somebody looked away, into the distance, then it meant that he or she did not want to be there. And the most common reason for not wanting to be somewhere was because one did not like the company one was in. That was always true.

People did not change a great deal. Mma Ramotswe had said that to her once and it had stuck in her mind. People do not change, but that does not mean that they will always remain the same. What you can do is find out the good side of their character and then bring that out. Then it might seem that they had changed, which they had not; but they would be different after wards, and better. That’s what Mma Ramotswe had said – or something like that. And if there was one person in Botswana – one person – to whom one should listen very carefully, it was Mma Ramotswe.

There was no doubt that Motlamedi was not a good girl, but was there any possibility, Mma Makutsi now glumly asked herself, that any of the others might prove to be much better? The difficulty was that good girls were unlikely to enter a beauty competition in the first place. It was, in general, not the sort of thing that good girls thought of doing.

She had seen his mother come to the garage once with a whole watermelon for her son and she had seen her cut it for him and gave it to him in the way in which one would feed a small child. That mother should not be doing that; she should be encouraging her son to buy his own watermelons and cut them up himself. If was exactly this sort of treatment which made him so immature in his treatment of women. They were playthings to him; hewers of watermelon; eternal substitute mothers.

They sat silently. Then Mma Ramotswe spoke. “Ithink that there are some matters that are best left undisturbed,” she said. “We don’t want to know the answer to everything.”
“I agree,” said Mma Potokwane. “It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don’t know everything.”
Mma Ramotswe thought for a momet. It was an interesting proposition, and she was not sure if it was always true; it would require further thought, but not just then.