The African sleuth and her improbable creator

Who is this white man putting words in the mouth of an African woman?

He’s Scottish. He wears an orange-and-green plaid kilt, the Macauley tartan. He doesn’t have all of his hair. He’s a medical law professor at the University of Edinburgh and an internationally renowned bioethicist when he’s not rapidly pounding out books -- more than 50 so far -- ranging from “The Forensic Aspects of Sleep” and the definitive “The Criminal Law of Botswana” to “The Perfect Hamburger,” a popular children’s book, and “The Portuguese Irregular Verbs,” a collection of short stories about Germans who refer to one another as “Professor, Doctor, Doctor.”

She’s from Botswana. She gets her hair braided, and wears a size 22 dress, admirably so, because, in her southern African circles, big is beautiful. Intuitive and resourceful, she’s a private detective known around the world for solving quandaries as everyday as an adulterous husband or a sneaky teenage girl, and as extraordinary as the morality of beauty contestants (no hookers or shoplifters need apply) or the disappearance of a boy into the world of bush medicine, with its healing potions and pouches of lucky bones.

He knows her well. Very well. He created her.

Alexander McCall Smith, author of the bestselling “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” mystery series, starring Precious Ramotswe, gets the nuances so right that many readers assume he is a she.

“I’ve lived in Africa. I thought you were an African woman,” Suzi Lacey tells him at a recent bookstore appearance here.

McCall Smith deadpans, “You’ll notice that I’m wearing a skirt.”

He adds: “As a writer, you’ve got to be able to put yourself in another’s shoes. You’ve got to be able to empathize with people.”

Empathize he does as he describes the positives of life on a continent that is usually portrayed as one coup, civil war, famine, drought and AIDS epidemic after another.

Not in his books. And not in Botswana, a stable, well-run and prosperous country, rich in diamonds and cattle. “Solidly democratic since 1966,” McCall Smith points out, “the only consistently democratic country in Africa.”

That is not the Africa most fiction readers know.

“So many writers, when they write about Africa, write ‘Heart of Darkness’ novels,” he says. “They look at the pathology ... but there’s an awful lot of people living decent, generous lives.”

Like his heroine. In his latest book, “The Full Cupboard of Life,” he writes:

“Precious Ramotswe was sitting at her desk at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Gaborone. From where she sat she could gaze out of the window, out beyond the acacia trees, over the grass and the scrub bush, to the hills in their blue haze of heat. It was such a noble country, and so wide, stretching for mile upon mile to brown horizons at the very edge of Africa. It was late summer, and there had been good rains that year. This was important, as good rains meant productive fields, and productive fields meant large, ripened pumpkins of the sort that traditionally built ladies like Mma Ramotswe so enjoyed eating. The yellow flesh of a pumpkin or a squash, boiled and then softened with a lump of butter (if one’s budget stretched to that), was one of God’s greatest gifts to Botswana. And it tasted so good, too, with a slice of fine Botswana beef, dripping in gravy.”

There is no malnutrition, no violence, no hopelessness.

That’s part of the appeal, the author believes, of his series, which also includes “Tears of the Giraffe,” “Morality for Beautiful Girls” and “The Kalahari Typing School for Men.” All of the books have made the bestseller lists. They have been published in 28 languages, including Thai, Turkish, Catalan, Icelandic and, most recently, Latvian. More than 2.5 million are in print in the United States.

The first was published in 1998, when the Scottish publisher Polygon took a chance on “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” and printed 1,500 copies. McCall Smith says it was only when the books were published in the United States, by Pantheon in 2002, that they got the attention of the London publishers -- with a surprising consequence. Sales of Rooibos Tea, the red bush tea that Mma Ramotswe loves, have increased by 70% in the United Kingdom.

In Scotland, where he lives with his wife, Elizabeth, a physician, and their younger daughter, who is in her last year of high school (their elder daughter is “at university”), McCall Smith writes a daily newspaper serial. Inspired by Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City,” the light, amusing stories about apartment dwellers at a trendy address in Edinburgh reveal the author’s interest in everyday ethics. But while “44 Scotland Street” is well liked, he says the Precious Ramotswe mysteries have changed his life. During his U.S. book tour of 16 cities in 19 days, he attracts standing-room-only crowds. And Hollywood has come calling.

So how does he splurge?

His shoes, he points out, are new. But he still drives the same big 13-year-old Mercedes.

An African soul

Born in the old Southern Rhodesia, where his father worked as a government prosecutor, McCall Smith, now 55, has remained entranced with the region. He writes so intimately about Botswana that he is asked, during his stop in La Jolla at Warwick’s books: “Do you think in Setswana?” He says he doesn’t speak the national language, though he’s tried to learn it. Yet he captures the cadences of English as it is spoken there.

“I’m closely interested in the various forms of English and African English. It is rather beautiful and correct, and it has a lovely rhythm to it. I wonder if it’s biblical,” he says, referring to the King James version. “It’s quite rich in interesting expressions and metaphors.”

And in Botswana, it’s also quite formal. For that reason, he uses the honorific Mma (Ms.) when referring to his protagonist.

“There is quite a bit of formality in that society and people, particularly people like Mma Ramotswe, who’s more conservative” in a social sense. “She believes in the old courtesies ....They’ve got very nice manners, and great dignity, particularly the older people.”

Not unlike McCall Smith, who doesn’t even allow his protagonist to kiss her fiance. “It wouldn’t be very dignified that they would smooch away,” he says, adding that fans tell him he writes books that one can give to a 90-year-old grandmother.

“You know, when people first began to get a glimpse of this African dignity, when they were introduced to Nelson Mandela, when Mandela hit the headlines, and people suddenly realized what a marvelous man, what a gracious man, he is,” he says. “There are a lot of people like that, with that great graciousness.”

Mandela and McCall Smith’s protagonist share another trait.

“Mma Ramotswe has this very traditional view of things, but she’s also a very forgiving person, and that’s another thing that you find in the southern African psyche,” he says. “That there’s a forgiveness, which Mandela really brought out very well, and the world’s jaw sort of hit the table and they couldn’t believe it when he walked out of prison and he wasn’t talking about revenge or anything like that.”

Because he routinely refers to her as Mma Ramotswe in his books, McCall Smith is asked how that honorific is pronounced. He elongates the “ma” and adds a bit of an “r” sound at the end, then asks: “Does anyone here speak Setswana?”

Moses McGeoff and his wife, Rabiya -- the only black people in this overflow crowd -- do.

McCall Smith says, “I always feel a little embarrassed when I talk about Botswana and there are real Botswana here.”

He needn’t. McGeoff, a minister in nearby Poway, likes “the way he really presents a positive image of Botswana. I seldom see that

He and his wife, a graduate student studying to become a family and marriage counselor, also recognize some of the real people and real places McCall Smith has put in his novels, such as Chief Linchwe in Mochudi -- which is the hometown of Mma Ramotswe and where Rabiya McGeoff worked as a library assistant during her national year of service after high school.

“It’s just so amazing to talk about the same people halfway across the world,” McGeoff says. He is a graduate of the University of Botswana, where McCall Smith helped set up the law school in 1981.

Every year, the author returns to the country, where the books are so popular that he has been received by President Festus Mogae, and tourists can visit the places where Mma Ramotswe lives and works. But this is not the Africa of his early years, before independence transformed Southern Rhodesia into the black-run Zimbabwe.

“My childhood was at the tail end of the colonial period. I obviously had an isolated, artificial childhood. It’s a matter of great regret to me that I never learned an African language, for example. But we’re all children of our times and our circumstances,” he says. “Obviously, there were racial barriers, which were a great tragedy, so it was very nice for me to go back to Africa among more natural circumstances.”

As he accentuates the positive in his books, McCall Smith is accused of ignoring AIDS in a country that has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world, so high that President Bush stopped there last summer during his African tour to reassure President Mogae about American efforts to help.

“People often say to me, ‘How can you write about a country which is afflicted with HIV/AIDS to such an extent?’ The infection rate is really awful,” McCall Smith says. “In the 19-to-45 age group in Botswana, it’s between 36% and 38%. It’s devastating, one in three people. What can one say about that? They don’t like to talk about it very much. They don’t want the rest of the world to see them as sick. By and large, they feel they have got to lead their normal lives in the face of this, and they do,” he says. “I respect that. I feel that it wouldn’t be right for me to go on and on about it.”

He points out that the brother of Mma Ramotswe’s assistant dies from it. “But I allude to it in the ways in which they themselves would talk about it. It’s a delicate position, but I feel I could justify it.”

Answering unasked questions

No one at the book-signing asks about AIDS, although McCall Smith is prepared to tell them, “The people in the United States can be proud of what their country is doing in Botswana to help. Especially the Harvard AIDS Project. I’ve met many American doctors and nurses.”

And no one asks the Hollywood question: Who will play Precious Ramotswe?

Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella has optioned the rights to the first book for a television series and earlier this month visited Botswana, where, according to the African press, President Mogae asked that he please film on site. (Minghella made “Cold Mountain,” about the U.S. Civil War, in Romania.)

“I had dinner with Minghella about two months ago,” McCall Smith says. “He’s actually a very nice man, a very modest man, really, very, very decent, which is a great relief to me. He said a television series would give him much more room to draw the character of Mma Ramotswe.”

Well, who should play her?

“I have no views on that,” he says. “It would be great if they were walking on the streets of Botswana and turned a corner and there was a lady, and Minghella said, ‘Mma Ramotswe,’ but I don’t think in real life it’s like that. It would be great if they managed to get some local actresses. I hope they get somebody who is capable of really conveying the kind of character ... the traditional notion of beauty. The thing would be the face and the smile. They’ve got to get somebody who can get across that serenity. That’s how I see her, somebody with a great smile.”