THE MORALITY OF MMA. RAMOTSWE

Every so often an author appears who makes you believe in the power of talent over hype. Both JK Rowling and Philip Pullman grew this way, passed from reader to reader without a penny spent on advertising. In the adult world, the strangely captivating fictions of an Edinburgh medical law professor, Alexander McCall Smith, featuring the Botswanan detective, Precious Ramotswe have now sold over a million copies in America, and have become the essential British summer read of 2003 – also by word of mouth. First published in 1998 by Polygon, a small Scottish house, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, five in all, are now being cheaply published by Abacus this month. You may be as dubious as I was: 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 with the cattle left to her by her father. Lacking in formal education despite showing early signs of academic brilliance, and gloriously well-endowed with common sense, 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 entirely happy to be so in a society that sees thinness in women, as in cattle, as a mark of misery and malnutrition. Her amused bemusement at Western images of beauty is part of her appeal, but so is her ability to bridge the traditional culture of Botswana with progressive ideas concerning women’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 which 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 heart of darkness with absolute confidence in the power of goodness, humility, courage and sense.

It is this moral quality that, as much as the perfectly plain style of a master, the cast of charming characters and the love of a good tale, that is perhaps at the core of Mma. Ramotswe’s extraordinary appeal. If all classic detective fiction stems, as Auden claimed, from our yearning for a corrupted Eden which the detective, as an agent of God, can return us to, few detectives of recent years have made themselves especially appealing characters. From PD James’s agonised Dalgliesh to Janet Evanovitch’s bouncy Stephanie Plum, this form has become marked by a fashionable gloom, neurosis and self-indulgence. The consolation offered by the detective novel in its original conception and protagonists – the rationalist Sherlock Holmes, cynical Marlowe, intuitive Miss Marple and 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 2 million inter-related families, its old-fashioned codes of conduct (albeit under threat, as Mma Ramotswe and her fiance Mr. JLB Maketoni, perceive) returns us to something simpler, and more humane. The solution to a crime really matters in such a small population, and is also made to matter to us. Precious Ramotswe’s solutions to her clients problems are always logical, always tactful, informed by her own humour and wisdom. Having been beaten by her cruel husband and lost their only child, she has become a mother-figure of strength and compassion that, in a European novel would be frankly incredible.

Botswana is not paradise, of course. Cooks poison families, men are deceitful and cruel, crocodiles lurk in rivers and snakes coil on your radiator. The impossibly bossy Mma. Potokwani has an orphanage full of children, two of whom, disabled but intelligent, are adopted by our heroine’s fiance when he learns the boy was buried alive as a baby. AIDS, never mentioned by name, is called “that cruel illness”, and one case involves atoning for a crime by looking after a child dying of it, and making her brief life a happy one. 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 thought admirably restrained. Its people speak an English at once sonorous and hilarious, dignified and inventive. You fall in love with them the moment they speak, and a part of this love is the double vision engendered by their author. Mma Ramotswe suggests to a former business rival he start a driving school called Learn to Drive With Jesus: the wild comedy of this title to a European is undercut by an appreciation that it is also an inspired idea. Each volume features a diamond- shaped mantra of the word “africa”, and it is plain that the author, (who set up Botswana’s Law Faculty [check website] on its independence) 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 leap off the page with such warm-hearted liveliness that you find yourself laughing and crying instead of, as so often, hardening your heart against the seeming hopelessness of an entire continent. For an author to entertain and instruct with such effortless simplicity is one thing, but to achieve this effect upon readers is remarkable. I can think of no author save Dickens who has achieved it, and no author now writing currently deserving of an enormous audience.

The New Statesman August 2003