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Looking for the Lady Detective; Camera ready: the film crew in Botswana's Okavango Delta scout a location for the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency In touch with tradition: cows remain the symbol of wealth in Botswana, and the return to the cattle post is a significant pilgrimage for successful urban Batswana.

Article Excerpt
Byline: ANTHONY MINGHELLA

FOR several years, I have been involved in a complicated love affairwith a traditionally built African woman, Precious Ramotswe. She is, as manyreaders will know, the heroine of Alexander McCall Smith's astonishinglypopular series of novels, The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency. The complicationsarise not only because Mma Ramotswe does not actually exist but because myfascination with her has taken me, as the bones foretold, on a long and arduoushunt to bring her to the screen.

What distinguishes the novels is their celebration of Africa in general andBotswana in particular. It's arguable that most literature on the continent hasbeen paternalistic, focused on what is wrong with Africa, and film hascontributed its fair share of pungent illustrations, documenting the tyrannies,diseases, disasters and violent upheavals that have convulsed Africa before,during and after the intervention of European colonisers. These books and filmsseem to be telling you something about Africa but mostly they are tellingAfrica off. McCall Smith's novels, in which Botswana is as much a centralcharacter as the Lady Detective, surprise the reader with their constantassertion of what we might learn from Africa.

I'm sure I am not the only reader to be entranced by what sounded like anidyllic country, and one whose values seemed to evoke comforting memories ofmore simple times. That is the genius of the Mma Ramotswe novelsthey remind us of qualities we like to believe once existed in our own livesand countries: a nostalgia for decency. As described within the pages of thesebooks, Botswana is a serene place. Communities exist, life is slow andpeaceful, there's...