Jane Merryman

Years ago when my book group read Robert Hellenga’s The Sixteen Pleasures, we could not believe it was written by a man, so well realized were the sensibilities of the main character, a female. More recently, Alexander McCall Smith has given to us another fictional female who acts like a woman, not like stereotype envisioned by a man, or like a man—perhaps the author’s alter ego—wearing a dress. Mma Precious Ramotswe lives in Botswana where she founded and operates the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. She is often called upon to be the local Dear Abby, or agony aunt as they would say in this former British protectorate. Her cases involve the usual human failings and weaknesses and she sees to it, in her own human way, that in the end all those involved do the right thing. Whether she is drinking bush tea in her office with assistant Mma Makutsi or cooking up a batch of pumpkin stew at her home on Zebra Drive or tootling around Gaborone in her tiny white van, she is as real to me as my next-door neighbor, and how I wish she were. That she is the creation of a white man who teaches medical law at Edinburgh University in Scotland stretches the boundaries of the absurd. Alexander McCall Smith, it is true, was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana. We’ll give him that—he knows something about Africa. But how did he get into the mind, and heart, of this rather plump (“traditionally built”) black woman? I suppose it is the goodness in the bone of Mma Ramotswe that makes me certain the author has uncovered a deep and essential truth. Perhaps as Professor Smith sat in his small office at the university and stared out his window at the gray mist, he remembered the sky of Africa, a washed-out blue that becomes streaked with copper-red as sunset approaches, and perhaps walking through spotless corridors on his way to class, he thought of Botswana’s warm dust settling on the leaves of the paw-paw trees. At such times he must have realized he loved Africa very much and that is why he created Mma Ramotswe so the rest of us could love Africa too. Fortunately for their levels of serotonin, readers now have five volumes of the chronicles of the No. l Ladies’ Detective Agency. Read the series in sequence. In Kalahari Typing School for Men, Smith has a bit of fun with us by writing himself into the story.

Smith, Alexander McCall . The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Anchor Books, 1998.

——. Tears of the Giraffe. Anchor Books, 2002.

——. Morality for Beautiful Girls. Anchor Books, 2002.

——. Kalahari Typing School for Men. Anchor Books, 2004.

——. The Full Cupboard of Life. Anchor Books, 2004.