Western writers usually enter Africa by way of a protagonist who
belongs to their own culture (missionary, functionary, explorer,
soldier, mail-order bride) and is venturing into unknown territory.
So it is one of the mysteries --- and miracles --- of recent
fiction that a Scotsman named Alexander McCall Smith should have
created a character like Precious Ramotswe, the full-bodied,
clear-headed, absolutely captivating investigator who inhabits all
four of his Botswana novels: THE NO. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY,
TEARS OF THE GIRAFFE, MORALITY FOR BEAUTIFUL GIRLS, and now, THE
KALAHARI TYPING SCHOOL FOR MEN.

Mma Ramotswe (in traditional Botswana culture, honorifics are
always used; it seems rude not to do so in the review as well) has
had a tough life: married to an abusive jazz musician, she loses
her baby and then her beloved father. But she finds her vocation:
she sets up the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and is soon
attracting clients. She also acquires a fiancé, garage owner
Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, two orphans, and a sidekick, Mma Makutsi, who
received a grade of 97 percent on her exams at the Botswana
Secretarial College. You don't have to be familiar with the first
three books to follow the action in KALAHARI --- McCall Smith is
careful to supply context for the first-time reader --- but I think
it's better to discover them in order. Not only do you gradually
develop a sense of Mma Ramotswe and her life on Zebra Drive (yep,
that's the name of her street), but you also become deeply fond of
Botswana (this is important since, to the average Westerner, Africa
is still a "dark" --- that is, unknown --- continent). These wise,
charming books leave you feeling washed clean and peaceful, with an
expanded sense of humanity.

Although KALAHARI and the other books are technically mysteries,
plot is not the main thing here. There are interlocking events ---
a man across town opens a new detective agency; Mma Makutsi starts
a typing school for men; Mma Ramotswe solves a case or two --- but
there is little real tension or suspense. What keeps you reading is
the wonderful writing: pure, economical, funny, utterly lacking in
condescension. The evocation of Botswana is often lyrical (its
quiet roads, its ubiquitous cattle). Sometimes the stories seem
fable-like, as if McCall Smith is telling them around a campfire in
the deep African night. This impression is reinforced by the
repetition of certain phrases. Mma Ramotswe has a "tiny white van"
and is "traditionally built." She believes in "the old Botswana
morality" --- a phrase that covers everything from knocking and
calling out "Ko Ko" before you enter someone's house to the
deeper sense of courtesy and integrity that is being overwhelmed by
modern life.

It is one of the many ironies of this wonderful book that Mma
Ramotswe and her cohorts, despite their professed yearning for
traditional values, are actually the smartest, most progressive
people around. Because they are authentic and honest and guided by
common sense rather than greed or pride, they make phony modernists
like the proprietor of the rival Satisfaction Guaranteed Detective
Agency look like idiots (the scene in which Mma Ramotswe and Mma
Makutsi pay him a visit is priceless). Indeed, THE KALAHARI TYPING
SCHOOL FOR MEN, more than the others in the series, is very much
occupied with gender; it has a feminist streak a mile wide.

Consider the characters McCall Smith gives us: the entrepreneurial
Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi; the imposing head of the orphan farm,
Mma Potokwani, who wangles free products and services from everyone
("It would take a degree of courage that few possessed to turn
[her] down"); Mma Tsolamosese, whose daughter has died of AIDS and
who is caring for her doomed grandchild with dignity and
compassion; and Mma Boko, who is head of a local branch of the
Botswana Rural Women's Association but refuses to run for office
because "all [men] do is talk about money and roads and things like
that. … We women have more important things to talk
about."

With sly humor and wry tolerance, the novel captures that
conspiratorial sense among women --- in any culture --- that men
are not quite up to their standards (Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni being the
exception, of course): "The trouble with men," muses Mma Ramotswe,
"was that they went about with their eyes half closed for much of
the time. … That was why women were so good at tasks which
required attention to the way people felt. Being a private
detective, for example. …" Or Mma Makutsi, commenting on the
essays written by her typing-school students: "All of life seemed
to be laid out before her: mothers, wives, football teams,
ambitions at work, cherished motor cars; everything that men
liked." And when Mma Ramotswe says her foster son is going through
"a difficult patch," a friend replies dryly: "Boys do go through
times like that. It can last for fifty years."

McCall Smith, it turns out, was born in what is now Zimbabwe (then
called Southern Rhodesia) and taught law at the University of
Botswana, but those facts alone hardly explain his astounding
ability to enter the soul of a woman as well as the soul of Africa.
He, like Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, must be one of the exceptions, a good
man. He is certainly an imaginative and observant one. Somehow he
manages to communicate the specific feel and spirit of Botswana
while also creating characters that transcend the barriers of
geography, culture, and gender.

McCall Smith is writing a fifth Precious Ramotswe book, according
to his publisher, and has started a new series featuring another
lady detective, Isabel Dalhousie (Scottish father, American
mother). I can't wait.