Exploring Botswana Through Mma Ramotswe

Last week, I went out to buy milk and came back with two books. But what else would you get if you put a second-hand book shop next to a grocery store? In accordance with my current mission of trying to read as much as work by women as I read those by men, I picked what seemed like two interesting books- a collection of short stories by the British writer Rosamunde Pilcher, and a novel by the Tahitian writer Celestine Hitiura Vaite. It is the latter that I chose to read first- I hadn’t read any work from Tahiti yet.

The story is based on a married woman, who also hosts a local radio show, Matarena Mahi, and her husband, Pito, who constantly has to live under the shadow of his wife. While this does lead to domestic conflicts, the style of the novel suggests that between the beer-chugging and the visits to the Chinese store under the Tahitian sun, everything fixes itself in simple and myriad ways. Oh, and did I mention that there was a grandchild?

Matarena is a fascinating character, and for me, personally, reminiscent of many women in our lives. In addition to hosting the radio show, where women call in everyday to offer their opinions on the question of the day, she is also learning how to drive a car, and is actively involved in raising her granddaughter. All this is in addition to a preoccupation of locating her biological father. While this may be constituent of a certain personality unique perhaps to Matarena, there is another female character that kept flashing in my head as I read the little idiosyncrasies of various inhabitants of this Tahitian island.

Precious Ramotswe is the protagonist of Alexander McCall Smith’s No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series. Set mostly in Gaborone, this series follows the adventures of Mma Ramotswe, her secretary Mma Makutsi, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and an interesting array of characters as they flow in and out of the detective agency, and seem to weave their stories along with the protagonist’s. Mma Ramotswe’s is the first woman-run detective agency in Botswana, something that she is proud of.

These novels are what I consider perfect reads for a rainy night, with ginger biscuits and lemon tea (Mma Ramotswe’s own appetite for bush tea is enviable). Being bound in covers with bright slice-0f-life illustrations, the books-physically- give a sense of a colourful life and a return to the innocence that most of us seek in light reading. If this is what one seeks, then one is not going to be disappointed from what’s inside the books.

Mma Ramotswe is a proud Motswana woman, with her own house, her minivan, and the offices of her detective agency. She works with the assistance of Mma Makutsi, who goes on to start her own typing school for men. Later in the series, Mma Ramotswe is engaged to and is married to Mr. Matekoni, who owns a car garage. In addition to these, there are the two frivolous young assistants in the garage; Mma Potokwani, the matron of an orphanage, who convinces Mr. Matekoni to foster two children; Motholeli and Puso, the above mentioned two children, who grow up with Mma Ramotswe. Post-independent Gaborone forms the primary background to the stories, with Mma Ramotswe being involved in the lives of many, because of her profession. Though she swears by the handbook on detection by Clovis Anderson, Mma Ramotswe more often than not relies on her intuition and her sense of where the right lies to solve her cases. While this does occasionally lead to conflicts with her clients, for the most part, everyone walks away at the end of the novels happy.

The stories do not dwell on the cases. The cases merely become the means to a larger description of the personality of Mma Ramotswe and the other characters. What is fascinating is how Botswana as a country features in the discourse- ideas of nationalism, patriotism, and the cementing of the ethics that went into the making of such a nation are reflected in Mma Ramotswe. With her ‘traditional built’ and her love for meat cooked with pumpkin, Mma Ramotswe is placed in a position to mirror the values that Botswana cherishes- love for the neighbours, respect for the elderly, a deep attachment to land and cattle, and a desire to return to the village and look at one’s cows grazing. These are innocent values. There is occasional serious strife, like children being kidnapped, or an American boy being killed, but these are very rare instances, when compared to the other stories of Mr. Matekoni’s attempts to grow vegetables in the dry soil of Gaborone and the attempt to chase down runaway maids and to bring beauty pageant contestants to good behaviour. While there looms in Mma Makutsi’s past a tragic incident, most of her present is good-natured, humorous, and benevolent- something that one associates with Botswana too in the course of the books. With her veneration for Seretse Khama and the love for the African landscape that is her immediate surroundings, Mma Ramotswe makes the reader a part of her nostalgia and her pride in her country and of the roads that Botswana, and Africa by extension, had taken, in history.

But, I am a woman from a third-world country that is still grappling with the issues that arise at the hem of the receding colonial legacies of a country that ‘granted’ us independence 70 years ago. Why was it that in spite of the charms of life in Gaborone, I felt a certain discomfort with the narratives? The answer soon came back to me- Alexander McCall Smith.

Having spent most of his young years in Botswana, Scottish writer McCall Smith is also a trained doctor, who finished his education in the United Kingdom. His has written extensively, beyond the Ladies Detective Agency series, including some medical texts that I understand are held in high esteem in that field.

Through Mma Ramotswe, McCall Smith navigates a post-colonial Botswana through his sensibilities. In an article on the series, Christine Matzke (2006) argues that what McCall Smith is celebrating is a certain sense of nostalgia that he holds of Botswana.  The innocence  of the Motswana, the values they cherish point to a version of Botswana that was perhaps his lived experience. She explicitly points out to a particular continuing theme in the novels, that I had been deeply uncomfortable with. Mma Ramotswe is fascinated by and holds the British royal family in a high family, to the extent that she is proud of the ‘fact’ that Queen Elizabeth met Seretse Khama and seemed to hold him in high respect. Now, my problem with this is this- again as a post-colonial subject, I understand that the British royal family, by extension, is indeed an extension of a power that determined the fate of my ancestors and the land that I live in. It took a great deal of unlearning to view the actors of that part of history with certain objectivity. Moreover, being in a country where ‘fair skin’ is loved more than ‘dark skin’, the approval of the White-Other is somehow deemed necessary for a validation of any particular aspect of one’s cultural lives and accomplishments. (At my university gates, I would be asked for my ID, but not my Belgian ex-boyfriend. The same privilege was not extended to my African-American friend either.) In such a context, what appears to be a third world celebration of the approval of a distant royal family is a nod in the direction of a past from whose symbolic grips post-colonial subjects are constantly trying to escape from.  I am also curious to see the responses that this would elicit, in the current political climate of Black Lives Matter, and the claiming of a collective African past that underlines much anti-racism activism in many parts of the Western world.

While McCall Smith looks at Botswana with much affection, it is also untainted from any troubles that seem to have been problems that inhabitants face in the now. When I remarked to a friend who’s father worked for a few years in Botswana, that I wanted to go to Gaborone, he told me about how his father’s stuff were stolen a couple of times while he was there and how life was generally tough there. While McCall Smith makes it obvious that Botwsana and Africa do have a very long way to go in terms of development, the picture painted is mostly of a place that is happily inching forward to it. While Mma Ramotswe and Mr. Matekoni enjoy hearing the cattle bells on the radio and dream of going back to the village in their old age, one should realise that these are dreams that stem from a certain privilege. For much of the third world, aspirations are of a different sort- jobs in the technology or corporate sector, a house in a city and a Western oriented education and lifestyle. The nostalgia for land and a return to largely failing agriculture is a nostalgia that only a few can afford.

From a feminist perspective too, the essentialisation of Mma Ramotswe as the storehouse of traditional Motswana values and wit is problematic. The participants in the beauty pageants are considered rude and are looked down upon, but who is actually doing the looking down? Are their aspirations to be ‘independent’, to have boyfriends, or to dress as they will any less important than the dreams of owning land? Who decides which aspirations get valued and which don’t?

This is in no a comprehensive piece of writing on the series, and I have only chosen a few points here that unsettled me. To be completely honest, Alexander McCall Smith is one of my favourite writers and it is rare indeed to find someone who looks for and finds the beauty in life like he has. Writing a detective series based on Botswana could have gone another way, but McCall Smith chose to write with the humour and mundaneness that characterises our lives in many ways. His portrayal of Mma Ramotswe struck very close to home for me; I could picture her being good friends with Matarena from Tahiti with her radio show, or with my own mother, who in her late 40s dances at every opportunity she can, on the stage. Women are fascinating beings, and stories of their joys and little quirks should make its way into the public, rather than just the stories of their subjugation- their existence consists of both.

However, being a good reader also means being able to view a writer’s work critically. We call out on the ones we love. Even though my generation largely believes in post-modernism, I find it difficult to remove a writer from the writing, and this is where the above mentioned problems come in for me. But that in no way has stopped me from looking for more of McCall Smith’s works, or from reading them fondly during monsoon nights. At the end of the day, this is also one of the reasons we read- to escape, to live through someone else. This is also why many of us write.