Female Sleuth Ferrets Out Africa’s Goodness

“This is the spot of the creation of Mma Ramotswe,” the guide announces, swerving the open-air jeep to a halt at a dusty crossroad. Our party stands in reverence in the footsteps of Precious Ramotswe, the fictional Botswana detective whose heart and moxie have captivated readers worldwide and placed her on the best-seller lists.

It was here, in the village of Mochudi, that a writer named Alexander McCall Smith marveled years ago at the persistence of a woman chasing after a chicken for his dinner. He turned her into Mma Ramotswe (Mma means Mrs.), founder of “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” who calls herself “just a tiny person in Africa” and whose caseload ranges from cheating husbands and truant schoolkids to sinister witchcraft and a kidnapping.

The five Mma Ramotswe books transport readers into a Texas-sized land of thorn trees and desert, home-grown values and good-hearted people. Botswana is a country of 1.5 million people that is rich in diamonds, well-governed, untouched by coups and corruption.

The biggest thing to hit Botswana of late was this month’s visit by President Bush, but fans of the books are already on fairly intimate terms with the country. Now they can join Africa Insight -- a tour outfitter that normally takes tourists on rugged safaris through the Okavango Delta and Kalahari Desert -- on a tour of the Ramotswe trail in and around the capital, Gaborone.

The trip takes in the squat homes and meandering dirt roads of Mochudi; the President’s Hotel, where Mma Ramotswe likes to take tea; Zebra Drive (really Zebra Way), the quiet street where she lives, and a garage strikingly similar to Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors and the fictional business of Ramotswe’s true love, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni.

McCall Smith, 54, a prolific author of fictional and academic books, is a medical lawyer who teaches at the University of Edinburgh. He spent several years in Botswana helping set up its law school. Born and reared in neighboring Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, Smith is aware that some find it strange for a white man to be writing from a black woman’s point of view.

“But I think as a writer, one must be able to empathize with all sorts of people. As a writer, I try to keep my eyes open. I hope I get it right. One has to be careful in writing about someone else’s culture. You can get it wrong and misinterpret. But if you are careful, you should be able to say something about their lives.”

He said Africa, and Botswana in particular, have remained with him. “You feel it when you get off a plane ... something about the atmosphere of good in the country,” he said. “I’m delighted if people are seeing the positive side of Africa and people are getting the message that in the middle of civil war, disaster and all the difficulties in Africa, there are an awful lot of people trying to lead good lives.”

Indeed, Gaborone is unusual. It has none of the violent crime and poverty endemic elsewhere in Africa. There’s only one real detective agency in the phone book and calls to its listed number went unanswered.

Botswana’s one enormous problem is its AIDS infection rate, the world’s highest. Nearly 40% of adults are HIV-positive.

The “Mma Ramotswe Tour” starts soon after sunrise. Driving out of Gaborone along a paved highway, we wend our way up the hills overlooking Mochudi, crossing the murky Notwane River, where our heroine solves the mystery of a man who goes missing after he is baptized.

Nearby, a kgotla, or traditional court hearing, is being held under a wide thatched canopy. Today’s case involves a woman who has moved back into her husband’s house, much to his new wife’s consternation.

“In traditional culture, there would have been no need for Mma Ramotswe to be a detective,” said the guide, Tim Race. “All the issues she deals with would have been dealt with by the kgotla.”

Mochudi has grown into a suburb of Gaborone, with gas stations, restaurants and a “My Darling Fresh Produce and Butchery Shop.” “All this is new; Mma Ramotswe would be lost here,” Race said. Then comes a dirt road through neatly swept homes. A donkey cart. White goats grazing. Vervet monkeys darting in the shadows.

Minah Phiri, 89, is on her knees laying a new patio of sun-hardened mud and dung outside her home. It could easily be Mma Ramotswe’s childhood home. A woman gumshoe? The great-grandmother cocks her head in disbelief. “In my day, a woman could not be a detective, she said. “That would have been a man’s job.”

Onward to Fiona Moffat, a retired librarian and friend of McCall Smith. She and her husband agreed to be portrayed as Ramotswe’s friends in the series, but never imagined the books would become best sellers.

“I think so many awful things are happening all over the world.... People actually like to hear a pleasant story not filled with gloom and doom,” she said.

Down the road is a garage that looks a lot like Speedy Motors. “This is Speedy Motors as it was ... very laid-back workshop, nothing fancy, but we do good work, sometimes speedily, sometimes not,” said proprietor, John Moxen.

Fragments of engines, carburetors and gaskets litter the shelves. Trays are piled high with invoices and paperwork. “That’s supposedly ‘matters pending,’ ” he said.

Chasing the sunset, we reach the flat, arid edge of the Kalahari, which Mma Ramotswe thought of as “those empty spaces, those wide grasslands that broke and broke the heart.” A go-away bird, so-called because its call warns of predators, flies overhead.

And then a very rare sight: A pair of cheetahs slink by, putting a surprise ending to an unusual tour -- the kind of ending that Mma Ramotswe would have loved.