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The more money the Colonel made, the more he wasconvinced that all along he had been right. But the Colonel’s wife,in private moments, thought differently. The Colonel’s moneydid not bring them favor, or let them into the forbidden placesfrom which they would always be excluded: it merely let thempretend, sometimes, that Apartheid didn’t exist at all. Where thefact of inequality crept into their daily lives, the Colonel simplyreplaced the inevitable with the illusion of choice; going onlyto the Indian cinemas because there were no “for use by whitepersons” signs since no white people ever went there at all;sending Mohammed to a private school in Botswana; telling hiswife to take a more scenic route from the market rather than thedirect path through the cemetery where white children wouldhide behind the gravestones to throw rocks at her; never going tothe annual Rand Easter show where a man of his color would bedenied entry on certain days or to the nicest pavilions no matterhow much he might pay for a ticket, but where the poorest whitewould be allowed to enter.In the summer, the family went on trips to places where onecould be treated as an equal: to Spain, to England, to Botswana,to Portugal. The Colonel managed eventually to buy the largestbuilding in their area, one that took up the whole corner of theblock, and had given himself a spacious set of offices downstairsand leased the rest out to a café. He had tasked his wife withtransforming the upper floor (which the Colonel preferred tocall the penthouse) into a charming warren of imported marbletiles, costly fabrics, and modern conveniences. They had hiredEunice, and the Colonel had built a sparse, four-by-four roomon the roof for her to live, a room in which she would live for thenext thirty years. For the Colonel’s wife, Eunice soon became15A Party for the Colonel | F.T. Kola