OANA MADALINA NEATA

The No.1 Ladies´ Detective Agency

BOOK REVIEW

¨And who am I? I am Precious Ramotswe, citizen of Botswana, daughter of

Obed Ramotswe who died because he had been a miner and could no longer breathe.

His life was unrecorded; who is there to write down the lifes of ordinary people?¨(page

13)

It is with this tone that Alexander McCall Smith through his precious

Ramotswe Precious, spells us to devour the 233 pager of his book.

Mma Ramotswe is finally there to write down her father’s life and her own .

Her father worked hard in the mines and then he bought cattle with the money he saved.

He ¨scrimped and saved to make life good for her¨ and after his death, Precious

Ramotswe decides to open a detective agency with the money he left her. This way,

Mma Ramotswe becomes the first lady detective in Botswana. And as it happens with

pioneers, she is an extraordinary person, with great wit and determination, with a great

experience of life from which she was clever enogh to learn many lessons. She has no

high degree, she has not been to renown schools; but if she engages to solve a case, she

will take the truth out of any kind of person: lawer or simple worker, poor or rich. She is

not the immoral type of detective that would do anything to solve a case... O, no! She is

an honest woman with a splendid love for her country and for her people and who

would only lie ¨for a good cause¨ It is wonderful how she manages to be a woman of

1
her country, with strong culture-bound beliefs, but at the same time, a woman of her

age, independent and broad-minded.

In more than one occasion we are described the harsh conditions of women in

Africa: the husband, the children and even the yard, are women’s responsibility. The

cousin is driven away from home by her husband because she can not have children. It

is a male-ruled society but Mma Ramotswe, after a bad marriage experience with Note

Mokoti, manages to retake hold of her life and to do good things with it.

As a detective, she succeeds in finding out what happened to Mma Malatsi’s

husband, where the ¨muti¨ came from or why the doctor at Princess Marina Hospital

was sometimes very good and other times very bad in his work; as a person, she

manages to be just, moral, capable, a good friend and citizen.

With Mma Ramotswe´s help, Alexander McCall Smith not only creates a

detective story but also a realistic description of Africa with its people and customs, of

the human nature,providing very short but deep insides into the inmigrants´ life or into

the women´s situation.

Born and educated for the first part part of his life in what is now Zimbabwe,

Smith really knows what he talks about when describing Africa and the way people

think and act there. Botswana citizens are presented as generally simple and honest,

with a great love for their country; the adversities of the climate represented for them

only a motivation for working harder and for being content with little. As Precious´

father says, ¨if a man is born in a dry place, then although he may dream of rain, he does

not want too much, and (...) he will not mind the sun that beats down and down¨( page

16). The love for Botswana is all over the book and although sometimes it is presented

as full of perils and ferocious animals, it finally leaves the impresion of an exotic and

majestic place.

2
 More than one time along the book, the reader witnesses Mma Ramotswe´s

reflections on what Botswana was and what it has become. It was a desert place where

one could only raise cattle or go to the mines; but people fought for their independence

and now, there are shops and factories and work-shops and people have jobs and houses

to live in. And this tells a lot about these people and Mma Ramotswe is proud of them,

she admires and loves them.

These descriptions of the place with its people and its customs which come

so naturally mingled with the detective stories make of The No.1 Ladies´ Detective

Agency an enriching and captivating reading

Furthermore, it is really easy to fall in with Smith´s main character; this is so

not only because she is an exceptional figure, but also because of the language used to

represent her to reader, because the author endows her with the gift of telling great

things in such a simple manner. Mma Ramotswe has not been formally educated but she

has read a lot because ¨as a private detective, it was important to scour the newspaper

and to put the facts away in one´s mind¨(page 230) That is why she preserves a

somehow antiquate way of narrating which is sometimes sprinkled with elevated,

formal words; and this gives her a strong personal style which simply captures.

I have just finished the book and I have to fight back a strong impulse of

going straight to the library to buy Mr McCall´s following novel and to find out whether

Precious Ramotswe married or not, what new adventures she has had and which other

misteries she has solved. But mostly, I would really like to have a little more of that

unpretentious way of talking which makes the book so much more interesting and

entertaining.