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philanthropist. You bring, shall we say, hope into their lives?’
    Barron said nothing. He wondered if there might be a slight mockery, a sarcastic edge, in Mpande’s tone. He stepped from the car when the driver opened the door. The heat was horrendous, a force, a great white foundry of light. Unaccustomed to this blinding ferocity, Barron took a little time to absorb his surroundings and the people who were waiting under the shade of a blue canvas awning to greet him. Mpande made polite introductions, the mayor of the township, various elders, the minister, the schoolteacher – more faces and names than Barron could possibly remember. Later, he’d reflect on how indistinct everything was, the smiles, the harsh sunlight, the scrubland, the aroma of putrefaction which came from an open sewer nearby, the shanties cobbled out of any available material, cardboard, corrugated tin, flimsy wood, metal pipes. A fragile place: one storm would destroy it utterly.
    The mayor made a speech in English expressing the huge gratitude of the people of the township for Barron’s extraordinary generosity in establishing an educational trust fund for the youth of the place. Now the brightest children could go on to colleges and universities. Now they had – and here the mayor paused, and closed his eyes, swaying a little as if to give his choice of word extra significance – a benefactor . The crowd sighed with satisfaction and pleasure. Barron, sweating and uneasy in his white suit, listened with disguised impatience to all this. He wanted to get back to his air-conditioned hotel in Durban. He didn’t enjoy the feeling he had of himself as the great white saviour. He was only doing the kind of thing he’d done before in many underprivileged parts of the world – Guatemala, Somalia, Ethiopia: if it wasn’t money for education, then it was medicine; if it wasn’t medicine, then it was nutrition. Philanthropy – it was just one of the things he did.
    Somebody took his photograph and he smiled, a reflex gesture. Then he was escorted across a dusty plaza to the local school, which was clearly an establishment of some pride to the township, even if the grey concrete was cracking in places and weeds grew from fissures in the play-yard and windows were broken. He was shown inside boxy rooms where rudimentary desks and chairs had been neatly aligned, clearly for the occasion of his visit. The rooms smelled of chalk-dust and rust and were filled with flies. He noticed a blackboard on which had been written the phrases Welcome, Mr Barron and Thank You, Mr Barron .
    Kids clustered around him, pressing themselves against him, as if any brief contact with his flesh might bring them good fortune. A nun, Irish and freckled and withered from years in a climate vastly different from that of her native County Clare, said God bless you . She had tears in her pale green eyes. Barron modestly dismissed his contribution as a drop in the ocean, and the nun agreed there was much to be done in the world, but if there were only more men like himself so willing to give, wouldn’t life be better …
    â€˜Education,’ she said with all the solemnity of belief, ‘is one means of curbing violence.’
    Barron agreed with that.
    He was escorted back to the shade of the blue awning, where he was expected to give a speech to the people of the township. He looked out across the five hundred or so black faces and spoke, as he always did on such occasions, in platitudes concerning the fulfilment of ambition and how, if you had the right attitude, anything was possible. He wondered if anybody ever truly understood what he was saying, or if the message was somehow too American in its optimism, too foreign – but they always applauded and cheered him anyway. A small girl in a gingham dress was ushered forward to present him with a keepsake, a tiny hand-crafted copper medallion on which his initials had been