With minutes to sunset, Jeanne had not yet reached the hills. The red-tinged veld, with occasional ploughed-up mealie fields, stretches away to the horizon. Red-roofed farm houses and mud-daubed huts of farm labourers, stand isolated, unadorned, in the long grass, without a tree in sight. She slows down as she approaches yet another rural town with a cemetery, a police station and a black township on its outskirts. Cylindrical wheat silos tower over austere churches and dull-fronted shops, and houses with iron lacing line streets wide enough to turn a span of oxen.