They printed fifteen hundred copies. At the time of publication I was spending six months as a visiting professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, a private university in a plush part of that remarkable and most unusual city. I was happy there, although I found that Dallas was a city that required a bit of work to get to know. I made friends amongst my new colleagues at SMU and began to study the saxophone under an African American instrument repairer and jazz player who took me to blues clubs in Dallas that I would never have been able to find had it not been for him.
Another set of very good friends in Dallas were Joe and Mimi McKnight. Joe, who is a well-known Texas legal historian, was a Rhodes Scholar and is a great devotee of Oxford, where he and Mimi spend part of each summer. Mimi is a bibliophile, an authority on the ways of cats, and sings in the choir of a high Episcopal church in Highland Park. They held a launch party for the book in their house in Dallas. My friends from SMU generously came to this party, but nobody, including me, thought that this book would go anywhere in particular. Who would be interested in reading about the life of a woman in Botswana, a country that relatively few people then knew anything about?
8
The book was published in Scotland and was given a very encouraging review in the Daily Telegraph by Tony Daniels, who is an accomplished essayist and the author of a number of highly entertaining and thought-provoking books. Rather to my surprise, the first print run sold out and additional copies were printed.
I wrote a sequel to the first book, and another book after that. After their publication in Scotland, these books were offered to large London paperback publishers but were consistently turned down. My agents pointed to the generous reviews, but this would not sway those publishers. Why? The impression I had was that they wanted edge; they expected violence and dysfunction, especially from a Scottish writer. We were all meant to be gritty and in-your-face.
In the United States the books were initially distributed by Columbia University Press. They sold them into a number of independent bookstores, where they slowly started to get a word-of-mouth following. Eventually there were four in the series, and that was the stage at which the series was picked up by large publishers in New York, Anchor Books and Pantheon. Suddenly it became very successful. Foreign editions were sold, and today the books are published in some forty-five languages. Mma Ramotswe had arrived.
It was the Americans who discovered Mma Ramotswe. I owe everything to my American readers, who bought the books in large numbers. Like any country, the United States has its faults, but at heart Americans are a kind and generous-spirited people, and the country remains a beacon in the darkness of this world.
9
But who is she, this woman from Botswana who has somehow succeeded in speaking to so many very different people?
Her name is Precious Ramotswe, and she is called Mma Ramotswe. Mma is the honorific for a woman and is pronounced mar, with a slight emphasis on the m sound. She is the daughter of the late Obed Ramotswe, a miner who went from Botswana to work in the gold mines in South Africa. Her mother died when she was very young, and Precious was brought up by her father and a female cousin of his. She does not remember her mother, but she remembers her father very well and thinks of him constantly. “Not a day goes past,” she says, “not a day but I think of my late daddy, Obed Ramotswe, miner, citizen of Botswana, and a great judge of cattle.”
Obed Ramotswe was a good man. In his daughter’s mind he represents the old Botswana values-those of integrity and concern for others. She remembers his moral example and his love for her. He was proud of his daughter, just as he was proud of his country.
People sometimes say to me that I rather overstate the pride people in Botswana feel for their country. I do not think I do. The Batswana are immensely proud of their country and of what it has achieved in the forty or so years since independence. They have built a prosperous country, brick by brick. They have done so by their own efforts. They have avoided getting into debt. They have been consistently democratic and they have observed the rule of law through all those four decades, even when they have been surrounded by countries in conflict. They have every reason to be proud.
A few years ago I had a conversation with a man in Botswana about his country. Our conversation was being filmed by the BBC for a television show. I asked him, “Are you proud of your country?” and he replied, “Yes, I am very proud of Botswana. I am proud to be a Motswana.” And then I saw that tears had come into his eyes.
10
Precious Ramotswe stayed at school until she was sixteen and then she had a series of smallish jobs. She met a handsome trumpeter called Note Mokoti, and she married him. It was a terrible mistake, of the sort that any young person can make when confronted with glamour or good looks. Note was a bad husband and he was violent toward her, hurting her.
She had a baby, who lived only a matter of hours. She was able to hold this small scrap of humanity until death took the child from her. Note did not even come to the funeral. Her father, Obed, took her back when Note left. He did not gloat, although he had seen Note for what he was; he simply took her back into his home.
In due course Obed himself became ill. The mines had ruined his lungs, and the damage that they had done caught up with him. Part of Mma Ramotswe’s world ended when Obed died. Part of Botswana, this country she loved so much, seemed to wither and recede into the past.
11
She sold a number of the cattle her father had left her and set up her little detective agency near Kgali Hill, on the edge of Gaborone. She had no idea of how to be a private detective, but she managed to get hold of a manual by one Clovis Andersen. This book, The Principles of Private Detection, became her main guide, even if a lot of the advice it gave struck her as being merely a matter of common sense. Incidentally, I am often asked by readers where they can purchase a copy of The Principles of Private Detection. I reply that the book does not exist, which I think causes them disappointment. Perhaps I shall write it myself. Certainly, in a future book I shall write about a visit that Clovis Andersen makes to Botswana. Mma Ramotswe will meet him and will, with her characteristic kindness, do something to help him. I see Clovis Andersen as a bit of a failure; he may be able to write about being a private detective, but I suspect that he will never have been very good at the job.
Mma Ramotswe acquired an assistant, Mma Makutsi, a graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College who, in the final examinations of that college, achieved the hitherto unheard-of result of 97 percent. That 97 percent is of immense importance to Mma Makutsi, and she often refers to it. She represents all those who have had to battle to get anywhere in life. She comes from a poor background in the north, and she has had to make do with very little in the material sense. She is a resourceful and intelligent woman, however, and in the later books she finds a kind and wealthy fiancé, Phuti Radiphuti, the proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Store. Mma Ramotswe likes Phuti. She sees him as an entirely suitable husband for her assistant.