The Lineup

by Otto Penzler

  PRECIOUS RAMOTSWE

  BY ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH

  1

  My entire childhood and youth were spent in Africa, in a bewitchingly beautiful but somewhat unhappy country then called Southern Rhodesia. The rest of my life, the greater part of it, has been spent in Scotland. I consider myself a Scot who has had one foot in Africa, which is a continent I love. Most people who have lived for any time in Africa are affected by it profoundly. It is a part of the world with which it appears to be very easy to fall in love. It claims the heart, and often breaks it—again and again.

  That is why I write about it.

  2

  In 1980, I went to work for six months in Swaziland, a small country sandwiched between Mozambique and South Africa. I worked at the university there, and I lived in a house that had magnificent views of the mountains about which Rider Haggard wrote in King Solomon’s Mines. I had not been in Africa for a long time and I found many memories came flooding back. I was there in the rainy season, and once again I experienced that extraordinary sensation—the smell of rain on the wind. I saw birds that I remembered seeing as a child. Outside my window was a great bougainvillea bush of the sort that grew outside my window when I was a boy.

  The nearest town of any size was a place called Manzini. This was reached by a road that ran first past a hospital and then past a hotel called the Uncle Charlie Hotel. The Uncle Charlie Hotel had a dining room with a mural painted all the way round the top part of the wall, above the picture rail. This mural showed African animals—cantering giraffes, a pride of lions, scattered zebras—against a background of wide savannah. At one end of the picture there was a lake, and in front of the lake was a tiny flagpole with a painted Union Jack fluttering in the breeze.

  I used a fictional hotel a bit like this in a short story I wrote many years later, “He Used to Like to Go for Drives with His Father.” In the story, the owner of a hotel in Swaziland has a mentally handicapped son and a bored tennis-playing wife. He is very proud of a Mercedes-Benz car that he has, in fact, stolen and had repainted. The boy loves going for drives in this car, but the wife is determined that her husband should be punished for stealing it, and takes drastic action.

  Swaziland struck me as an eminently suitable setting for such a story. I believe in the existence of a literary continent called Greene-land, so called because the places within it are exactly the sort of places where Graham Greene set his stories. Greene never used Swaziland, but he would have loved it. There was just the right sense of being caught at the wrong end of history; and the lives led there by outsiders (and most of Greene’s characters are washed up from somewhere else) seemed to me to have that air of desperation, of dislocation, that makes a Greene novel so haunting.

  I was still single then, and time at weekends hung rather heavy on my hands. On Sundays I would sometimes drive up to Siteki, on the ridge of the Lebombo Mountains, and have lunch in the Siteki Hotel, an old colonial hotel that appeared to have changed little over the years. They served Brown Windsor soup, a heavy beef-based soup that was popular in Britain until the 1950s, and the tables were covered with carefully starched white linen. It was extraordinary that such a place should have survived.

  When I had rather more time—a break of three or four days—I would travel through South Africa, across what was then the Transvaal, all the way to Botswana. I had friends who lived in Mochudi, a village to the north of the capital, Gaborone. I would stay with them for a few days and then travel back to Swaziland.

  The road to Botswana ran unswervingly across dry plains of red earth, taking a breather every fifty miles or so in some depressing little agricultural town of neat, soulless bungalows and shops with wide verandas. As one approached these towns, the sun would glint off the silver spire of a Dutch Reformed church like a sharp sliver of Calvinist disapproval. And all about there was a feeling of things having stopped, of waiting for something that was expected but had yet to materialize.

  Then, after a God-forsaken town called Zeerust, the road turned north and headed for a final seventy miles or so to the Botswana border. Something happened now; the landscape changed, became more wooded; hills appeared, abrupt protuberances in the land like islands rising out of the sea. And as the landscape changed, so, too, did the atmosphere. Suddenly, as one neared and then crossed the border into Botswana, it seemed as if a weight of oppression lifted off one’s shoulders.

  3

  There are places that immediately impress the visitor with some special quality, a quality that has nothing to do with what you see about you—the landscape, the buildings—but has everything to do with what one might call spirit of place. Arriving in Botswana, I felt that I had come to, quite simply, a good place. I have felt something like that on other occasions, if not so markedly; conversely, in other places one may pick up an atmosphere of sadness and loss, as on the site of a great battlefield—Culloden, for instance. In Botswana I felt a peacefulness that was redolent of social harmony, of human decency. It was very striking, and it continues to resonate with visitors to that country. It is not imagined; it is really there. This was a place where human values were respected, where people lived together without fear, where kindness might be encountered.

  How can it be that what happens in a particular setting can remain in that place? Marconi espoused the theory that sound waves never die away but simply become fainter and fainter. If this is true, then all the sounds ever made persist and, had we the instruments, we could indeed hear everything ever said, all the music ever played. Would a place of conflict, then, be a place of faint, agonized cries; a place of peace one of gentle singing?

  Such resonances seem inherently unlikely, but there are still places that somehow reflect the contentment and peacefulness of those who have lived there. Whatever lies behind this phenomenon, Botswana seems to be such a place.

  4

  My friends in Mochudi were Howard and Fiona Moffat. Howard was then the doctor in charge of the small hospital there. His wife, Fiona, had been a librarian. They had two children, John and Claire, who went to Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone.

  I had known Howard since boyhood days. He is the great-great-grandson of the famous Scottish missionary Robert Moffat, who set up the mission at Kuruman in the Northern Cape and whose daughter, Mary Moffat, married David Livingstone. Robert Moffat was the first person to render the language of those parts, Setswana, into written form. He was a great friend of the king of the Matabale people, Mizilikazi, and went on several long trips up into Matabeleland, where Mizilikazi had his capital at Bulawayo. I had spent my boyhood in Bulawayo, the city of Cecil John Rhodes, the arch-imperialist of Victorian times.

  Howard worked all the hours of creation in Mochudi Hospital. He was much appreciated by the people there—a good, kind doctor. When he took me round the hospital, small children came up to hold on to the white coat he wore. There are many places in Africa where, in the midst of suffering, one sees love in action.

  5

  On one occasion when I was staying in Mochudi, Fiona and I went down into the village to see a woman who had said that she wished to give us a chicken we could cook for lunch the next day, which was the anniversary of Botswana’s independence. Botswana had been a British Protectorate until 1966, when it ceased to be Bechuana-land and became Botswana under the presidency of that great and good man Sir Seretse Khama, paramount chief of the Bamangwato people.

  As a young man studying in London, Seretse Khama had met a secretary, Ruth Wilson, with whom he fell in love and whom he married. This marriage was very much opposed by the British government and by the tribal authorities back home. The British government, under strong pressure from the nationalist government in South Africa, exiled Seretse from his homeland. He returned home, however, and triumphed over those in the tribe who had opposed his marriage. Ruth Khama proved to be very popular. Eventually Seretse Khama went into politics and led the party that took Botswana to independence.

  In spite of the shabby way in whic
h he had been treated by the British government, Khama was not one to nurse a grudge. He set the moral tone of the new country, insisting that nonracial democracy was the only way forward. Under his government, Botswana prospered. Diamonds were discovered, and the revenues from this were put to good use. Whereas in many other African countries mineral wealth was pillaged by dictators and their retinues, in Botswana such funds were used for the benefit of the whole society.

  The Mochudi woman who that day was to give us the chicken lived in a small house with a beautifully kept yard. The sweeping of the yard is one of the most important symbolic tasks women in Botswana traditionally perform. A house with a well-swept yard would be a well-run establishment. An unhappy, chaotic house would not have a well-swept yard.

  I remember the woman greeting us at her gate. She was wearing a red dress and had the naturally courteous manner one finds so often in that country. Walking about in the yard, blissfully unaware of the fate that awaited it, was a chicken.

  After a few niceties had been exchanged, the woman started to pursue the chicken, which ran here and there, squawking in alarm but unable to escape. Once she had caught it, she dispatched it with a flick of the wrist and handed it to Fiona. I remember thinking: What a remarkable woman. And then I thought: I wonder what her history is? And finally I thought: One day perhaps I should write a story about a woman like this who lives in this village.

  That was the beginning of the story of Mma Ramotswe.

  6

  The following year I went to work in Botswana for a period of about eight months, having been allowed to do so by the University of Edinburgh, where I lectured. The University of Botswana had requested that I be seconded to them to set up their law program. I was happy to do this, as I had very much enjoyed my time in Gaborone the previous year and I rather liked the idea of spending more time there.

  I went out and was allocated a house behind a garage, not far from the Tlokweng Road. The garden was bare, but I was approached by a young man who wanted me to take him on as my gardener. In Botswana, as in other countries in the region, it is very much expected that one will contribute to the local economy by employing staff one does not really need. In Swaziland I had given a job to a young man called Simon who spent most of his time tending to the strawberries that were already growing in the garden. Then he ate most of the strawberries himself. It was a satisfactory arrangement—from his point of view, at least.

  Now I employed a man called Felix, who unfortunately revealed on the first day he worked for me that he had a very severe cough. I became suspicious and took him up to Mochudi to be seen by Howard, who confirmed that Felix was unfortunately suffering from tuberculosis. Howard admitted him to the hospital and cured him within three months or so. Felix returned to work; in many other countries in Africa, where health budgets are much more pinched, the outcome might have been different.

  One day Felix came to me and complained that somebody had whipped him very badly. He took off his shirt, and I saw the skin covered with weals. I asked him who had done this, and he replied that it had been the supervisor at a local mission. I drove with Felix to make a complaint to the missionary, who interrogated the supervisor. The supervisor agreed that somebody had whipped Felix, but said that this was because Felix had gone round the mission station biting his enemies.

  There was not much I could do, but I was reminded of a lesson that I was subsequently to make use of in the Mma Ramotswe books: Informal solutions are very common in African countries, and one has to be careful about interfering if one is an outsider. Mind you, I do not know quite what Mma Ramotswe would have done in this difficult situation.

  7

  I returned to Scotland. Each year, though, I would go back to Botswana, where I was still involved in a number of projects, including writing a book on the criminal law of the country. I imagined that one day I might write something about Gaborone and the people I had met there, but I did nothing about it. I had other things to work on and was kept fairly busy with them. But in 1996, I sat down one day and wrote a short story about a woman called Precious Ramotswe who uses the inheritance she received from her father to start a little business—a private-detective agency. All the odds are against her, but she succeeds.

  I wrote the short story in the space of an hour or so. I do not remember the circumstances in which I wrote it; most of us, I suspect, do not know at the time that some apparently insignificant act will change our lives. Perhaps there are some authors who, when they put pen to paper, say to themselves: Now, this is something that is going to change everything for me. I have never done that, even if I occasionally remember where I was and what I was doing when an idea came to me.

  I do remember, however, where I was when I wrote most of the novel that followed. My wife and I had arranged a house exchange with a couple from a small village outside Montpelier in the south of France. The house we were in had a study on a mezzanine floor, and it was here that I sat as I wrote The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. I wrote in the early morning, and then at lunchtime we would drive off to a picnic place near a river to take the children swimming. I remember finishing the book, but I do not remember thinking that it would be likely to have much of a life beyond an initial small print run.

  I gave the book to the publishers who had brought out my previous collection of short stories, Heavenly Date. Stephanie Wolfe Murray, who then ran the firm, read the manuscript while she accompanied a truckload of relief supplies to the Balkans. She said that the book would be published, and I waited to hear more. Then the publishing firm ran into difficulties and was bought by somebody else. Stephanie, one of Scotland’s great publishers of the twentieth century, was no longer in charge. I suspect that I was too non-hip for the new owners and so, realizing that my face did not fit, I took the manuscript to another publisher. This firm, Polygon, was then owned by Edinburgh University Press, and the commissioning editor was Marion Sinclair (God bless her). She and Alison Bowden (God bless her too) saw the book through to publication in 1998. I will remain forever in their debt.

  They printed fifteen hundred copies. At the time of publication I was spending six months as a visiting professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, a private university in a plush part of that remarkable and most unusual city. I was happy there, although I found that Dallas was a city that required a bit of work to get to know. I made friends amongst my new colleagues at SMU and began to study the saxophone under an African American instrument repairer and jazz player who took me to blues clubs in Dallas that I would never have been able to find had it not been for him.

  Another set of very good friends in Dallas were Joe and Mimi McKnight. Joe, who is a well-known Texas legal historian, was a Rhodes Scholar and is a great devotee of Oxford, where he and Mimi spend part of each summer. Mimi is a bibliophile, an authority on the ways of cats, and sings in the choir of a high Episcopal church in Highland Park. They held a launch party for the book in their house in Dallas. My friends from SMU generously came to this party, but nobody, including me, thought that this book would go anywhere in particular. Who would be interested in reading about the life of a woman in Botswana, a country that relatively few people then knew anything about?

  8

  The book was published in Scotland and was given a very encouraging review in the Daily Telegraph by Tony Daniels, who is an accomplished essayist and the author of a number of highly entertaining and thought-provoking books. Rather to my surprise, the first print run sold out and additional copies were printed.

  I wrote a sequel to the first book, and another book after that. After their publication in Scotland, these books were offered to large London paperback publishers but were consistently turned down. My agents pointed to the generous reviews, but this would not sway those publishers. Why? The impression I had was that they wanted edge; they expected violence and dysfunction, especially from a Scottish writer. We were all meant to be gritty and in-your-face.

  In the United States th
e books were initially distributed by Columbia University Press. They sold them into a number of independent bookstores, where they slowly started to get a word-of-mouth following. Eventually there were four in the series, and that was the stage at which the series was picked up by large publishers in New York, Anchor Books and Pantheon. Suddenly it became very successful. Foreign editions were sold, and today the books are published in some forty-five languages. Mma Ramotswe had arrived.

  It was the Americans who discovered Mma Ramotswe. I owe everything to my American readers, who bought the books in large numbers. Like any country, the United States has its faults, but at heart Americans are a kind and generous-spirited people, and the country remains a beacon in the darkness of this world.

  9

  But who is she, this woman from Botswana who has somehow succeeded in speaking to so many very different people?

  Her name is Precious Ramotswe, and she is called Mma Ramotswe. Mma is the honorific for a woman and is pronounced mar, with a slight emphasis on the m sound. She is the daughter of the late Obed Ramotswe, a miner who went from Botswana to work in the gold mines in South Africa. Her mother died when she was very young, and Precious was brought up by her father and a female cousin of his. She does not remember her mother, but she remembers her father very well and thinks of him constantly. “Not a day goes past,” she says, “not a day but I think of my late daddy, Obed Ramotswe, miner, citizen of Botswana, and a great judge of cattle.”