Deconstructing The Kalahari Typing School for Men
I have just finished Alexander McCall Smith’s novel The Kalahari Typing School for Men. This is one of the books in a series called The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, and like all of the books in this series, it is set in Botswana, where Smith was born.
It’s a pleasant enough read, apparently aimed at the young adult reader. What I had difficulty with was the completely different cultural context. The characters act in what are, to me, unexpected ways; their priorities and values are manifestly not Western. This is fun, and also disconcerting. For example, one of the male characters speaks of his children this way:
I found a good wife to marry me, and I had the two fine sons I told you about. I also had three daughters.
the few references to AIDS are extremely oblique:
The mother, who is late, had that disease which has run this way and that through the country, and everywhere.
and meat has that privileged role that it often assumes in poorer countries:
Boys should have good appetites, and it was normal for them to want to eat large amounts of cake and sweet things. As they grew older, they would move to meat, which was very important for a man.
The main character, Mma. (Momma) Precious Ramotswe, is also deeply conservative, grounded in and nostalgic for the Old Botswana. This is potrayed as a matter of genetic and historic identity in the book:
Mma Makutsi should make more of herself, thought Mma Ramotswe. She should remember who she was—which was a citizen of Botswana, the finest country in Africa. … You could be proud to be a Motswana, because your country had never done anything of which to feel ashamed. It had conducted itself with complete integrity, even in times when it had to contend with neighbors in a state of civil war. It had always been honest, too, without that ruinous corruption that had shamed so many other countries in Africa, and had bled away the wealth of an entire continent. They had never stooped to that, because Sir Seretse Khama … had made it clear to every single citizen that there was to be no taking or giving of bribes, no dipping into money that belonged to the country. And everyone had listened to him and obeyed this precept because they could recognize in him the qualities of chiefly greatness which his forebears, the Khamas, had always possessed. Those qualities could not be acquired overnight, but they took generations to mature (whatever people said.) … [he was] a person who had been brought up to serve.
I find the “brought up to serve†very interesting, given that historically, African tribal rulers haven’t been particularly democratic. I find this to be a bit of creative reinterpretation of African tradition on the author’s part, and it’s not the only instance. In fact, despite Mma Ramotswe’s rants about the old “moral†Botswana, the book seems to contain a fair number of rather modern spins on traditional values – traditional values that are, by Western secular standards, sometimes distasteful. For example, while Mma Ramotswe is clearly a devout Christian, the several pages of the short book are devoted to skewering a particularly zealous congregation:
“Yes,†said the minister. “There are strangers here. You are very welcome, but you must declare your sins before God’s people. We shall help you. We shall make you strong.†There was now complete silence. Mma Makutsi looked around anxiously. Surely this was no way to welcome visitors. Usually congregations greeted strangers warmly and clapped when you stood up. This must be a strange religion to which the apprentice had subscribed
whereupon Mma Ramotswe hams it up about being such a sinner that she can feel the fires of hell right this instant, and has to leave the church in a rush. The author also clearly feels strongly about the status of women. The protagonist is female, and several passages read like classic women’s lib:
The trouble with men, of course, is that they went about with their eyes half closed much of the time. Sometimes Mma Ramotswe wondered whether men actually wanted to see anything, or whether they decided that they would notice only the things that interested them. That was why women were so good at tasks which required attention to the way people felt. Being a private detective, for example, was exactly the sort of job at which a woman could be expected to excel.
In other words, the book is clearly didactic in certain passages. Smith, a law professor, is to my mind quite clearly trying to instill a new set of values based upon justice and equality into his young readers.
And this is just the problem. I have some knowledge of a few other African cultures, but I have never been to Botswana. Therefore, I cannot really make sense of this book. There’s a lot going on, a lot of different types of behavior on the part of different characters, and fundamentally I cannot distinguish what is from what the author hopes will be. There is, in some important way, not a lot I can really learn about Botswana society from this book, because I don’t know what portions are accurate background description, what is intended to be the idiosyncratic viewpoints of particular characters, what represents this author’s individual bias, and what is intended to inculcate a new set of values.
I simply do not have enough context to disentangle fact from fiction in this story.
Now, consider: I have been to Africa, I have good access to secondary sources, and I am undertaking a careful deconstruction of this text. Imagine what an illiterate peasant in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East is going to think based on American television – which is, I should note, widely available by satellite and widely viewed in every country in the world, as far as I can tell (Some time I’ll post what I watched on Arabsat when I was in Ethiopia.) Consider a naïve interpretation of Melrose Place. Survivor. The Jerry Springer show.
We have a problem.
