World Affairs
Commentary - This summer's No 1
Published 11 August 2003
A series of novels about a black female detective in Botswana, written by a white male law professor in Edinburgh, is gaining a huge following. And deservedly so
Every so often, an author appears (such as J K Rowling or Philip Pullman) who makes you believe in the power of talent over hype. In the adult world, the strangely captivating fictions of an Edinburgh medical law professor, Alexander McCall Smith, featuring the Botswanan detective Precious Ramotswe, have sold more than a million copies in the US and are the essential British summer read of 2003.
First published in 1998 by Polygon, a small Scottish house, the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series (five books in all) is being republished by Abacus. But, you might wonder, how can a white man write about a black woman without being patronising or racist? Then you read the novels.
Mma Ramotswe sets up Botswana's only detective agency by selling the cattle left to her by her father. Lacking formal education, despite showing early signs of academic brilliance, she is a formidable creation, not least for being a wholly good character who does not become tiresome.
Precious Ramotswe is a "woman of traditional build", who falls on size 22 dresses with joy, and who is entirely happy with her size in a society that sees thinness in women, as in cattle, as a mark of misery and malnutrition. She combines the traditional culture of Botswana with progressive ideas concerning a woman's need for financial independence as well as a faithful husband. Mma Ramotswe may have comical but strikingly sensible objections to Freud and Madame Bovary, but she is, as she says, "a modern lady", and a feminist heroine the like of whom has rarely been seen in literature before. Her cases, modest ones of finding missing or unfaithful husbands, escalate into the pursuit of a child kidnapped for "muti", or witchcraft, and she faces Africa's dark heart with absolute confidence in the power of goodness, humility, courage and common sense.
It is this moral quality that is perhaps at the core of Mma Ramotswe's appeal. If all classic detective fiction stems, as Auden claimed, from our yearning for an Eden to which the detective, as an agent of God, can return us, few detectives of recent years have been especially appealing. From P D James's agonised Dalgliesh to Janet Evanovitch's bouncy Stephanie Plum, these characters have become defined by a fashionable gloom, neurosis and self-indulgence. The consolation offered by the detective novel in its original conception - with protagonists such as the rationalist Sherlock Holmes, the cynical Marlowe, the intuitive Miss Marple and the formidable Lord Peter Wimsey - has been abandoned in favour of psychological quirks, kinks and social realism. It has become more "literary" but less satisfying, reflecting our own fragmented society.
Botswana, with its population of two million interrelated families and its old-fashioned codes of conduct (albeit under threat), returns us to something simpler and more humane. The solution to a crime really matters among such a small population, and is also made to matter to us. Precious Ramotswe's answers to her clients' problems are always informed by her own humour and wisdom. Having been beaten by her cruel husband and having lost their only child, she has become a mother figure of strength and compassion that would be incredible in a European novel.
But Botswana is not paradise: cooks poison families; men are cruel; crocodiles lurk in rivers and snakes coil on car radiators. The impossibly bossy Mma Potokwani has an orphanage full of children, two of whom are adopted by our heroine's fiance. Aids, never mentioned by name, is called "that cruel illness". The characters know that violence and starvation exist, and that the Kalahari Desert could overtake them utterly.
The kind of Africa that stalks our newspapers and TV screens is, however, almost wholly absent. Here is a people living in a dry land, where precious drops of water must be individually brought to each plant by a thread, and where a family of eight children is considered admirably restrained. Its people speak an English at once sonorous and hilarious, dignified and inventive. Each novel in the series features a diamond-shaped mantra of the word "africa", and it is plain that the author (who set up the law faculty at the University of Botswana) knows and loves this country and its people with a deep and informed passion.
The beauty of the land, the people, the colours and smells are conveyed with such warmth that you find yourself laughing and crying instead of, as so often, hardening your heart against the seeming hopelessness of an entire continent. I can think of no author save Dickens who achieved such an effect, and no author writing today so deserving of an enormous audience.
Amanda Craig's latest novel, Love in Idleness, is published by Little, Brown
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