snooping ladies

I read on the funky ghetto hijabi's blog that there’s this list of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th century. It was cool to check it out and find that my taste in literature can’t be all bad if most of the African writers I’ve read (although not a lot) are actually on there.

It’s interesting to come across this now, though, cos I’m currently reading The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. It’s pretty light reading, with fairly simple language and a narrative that’s paced like linked short stories, which is great for a tired mind on the train ride home. But it’s becoming a rather problematic read.

The basic premise, easily guessed from the title, is that this is the story of Precious Ramotswe, a woman in Botswana who decides to open up her own detective agency – the first of its kind in the country. This seemed interesting enough to me, and I’d glanced over a Sunday Times interview with the author who was recently in town to promote his new book, so picked it up when I saw it going for $4.50 at a garage sale a few weekends ago.

One of the problems I am having is that the language just seems a little too simplistic. It’s obvious the guy can write, but his writing style makes it seem as if he is trying to “dumb down” his language. This may be because the book is meant to be ‘young adult fiction’, but a quick Internet search tells me that it’s not marketed to that specific reader demographic. Is he trying to mimic the way people in Botswana talk, if they even speak to one another in English? I say mimic because, in case it wasn’t already obvious, Alexander McCall Smith is a white guy – an older, Scottish medical law and ethics academic who was born and grew up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe to be exact.

And therein lies my other major discomfort with the book. What is it about white guys writing colonized women? (Think Memoirs of a Geisha.)

Smith’s heart seems to be in the right place – he says he wants to write positive stories about Africa, he wants Africa to be known not just for AIDS and poverty and blood diamonds, he wants to tell feel-good stories because isn’t the world full of so many terribly depressing things already that we need some happy thoughts in our lives. His well-meaning intentions just aren’t enough though. Wasn’t the entire European colonial project propped up by an ideology of well-meaning intentions?

Where is Smith’s cultural knowledge of the ‘good side of Africa’ coming from? His portrayal of middle class, working class and peasant Africans will necessarily be a portrayal as seen through the eyes of an upper class English-educated white man living in Zimbabwe. He cannot simply erase his identity and ignore his position in the race-class-gender hierarchy in Southern Africa. For instance, I remember reading in the Sunday Times interview that Smith chose to set the story in Botswana rather than his home of Zimbabwe because Botswana is an economically stable country with decent infrastructure and no military conflict. As an upper class descendant of colonizers, I am sure Smith would much prefer if the locals did not fight for autonomy and simply integrated quietly into the global capitalist economy. Funny how Smith never mentions that the single largest foreign contributor to the Botswana army is the United States, or that HIV/AIDS is a major healthcare crisis in Botswana, and although he describes the difficulties of working in a diamond mine (Precious Ramotswe’s father worked as a diamond miner), he never takes the mining companies to task for the exploitation of their workers and the land.

It just seems as if it’s a lot easier to look at the good in the world when you’re not intimately affected by the bad. The book’s attempt at humanizing Southern Africans only results in objectifying them further, in this cynic’s view.