"Quick, I need to find out what's really going on. Get me Precious Ramotswe."
That's what I plan on saying the next time I need to know what's happening for real.
Mma Ramotswe is Alexander McCall Smith's private detective, unfortunately fictional, although you couldn't prove it by me.
Smith is a law professor. He teaches medical law at the U. of Edinburgh, Scotland after having taught at the U. of Botswana, in the African nation of that name. This is a country of one-and-a-half million people, eighty percent of whom regard any form of wealth apart from cattle as dust. Yet there are the several cities of the realm, and in cities people make their money in ways that more closely resemble business as we understand it in places familiar to us.
Smith, a white, grew up in Zimbabwe and he knows the difference among the different native nationalities and tribes, their ways of greeting, and who the different groups like and dislike among other African groups.
Botswana, the former Bechuanaland before 1966, is a landlocked, dry country (as in the Kalahari Desert), bordering the Union of South Africa to the north.
Mma (the polite form of address) Ramotswe did well in school, won a prize for her art, and found work in the business office of a cousin who owned two buses. There she found that the bus receipts kept turning up short. She figured out how some of the drivers were stealing the fares and the situation gets straightened out. This is her start in righting wrongs.
When her father dies and the cattle are sold, Mma Ramotswe decides to go into business for herself to put her experience and book learning to good use.
This is how Precious Ramotswe became the first lady private detective in Botswana, at the foot of Kgale Hill in Gabarone, the capital.
"The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency," she called it, which is also the title of the book. It may be found in the mystery section (Anchor Books, 1998, paperback). People soon began coming to her for the solution to their problems. This required her to go out and speak to people and use a little moxie, which, while not an African word, is as much valued there as here.
Smith is SUCH a good story-teller. And the stories are frequently SO heartwarming, that I can't wait to read his others. He writes so simply and sparely, especially for a law professor. It's as though he remains uncorrupted by legal writing.
It it hard not to feel present in Botswana as Mma Ramotswe deals with an officious border-crossing guard, or a lawyer whose client is trying to perpetrate a fraud which she uncovers, of course, since that's her job, or the fraudulent doctor, or the practitioner of witchcraft, the bane of many of the locals.
At first you're in a strange land. Africa is definitely strange to an American who's never been there. "Natives," we think of the locals as. And then a funny thing happens. We get to know a few of them through Precious Ramotswe. And suddenly they're people as we looking over the shoulder of Precious as she deals with everyone from goat herd to trader from India, not people I see every day, although I could probably trade her a few folks with unusual callings, like some of my Gypsies, for example.
All this is a way of saying that I didn't just like the book, I loved it, and went out and bought the rest of Smith's books today. Lessons in how to write, I call it.