Our beloved Mma Precious Ramotswe will soon be on television in a BBC-HBO mini-series. Precious Ramotswe is an inspired creation of Alexander McCall Smith. She is the proprietor of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, and now the wife of that “most good natured and gracious of mechanics”, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors.

Mma, the local language equivalent of ‘Mother’ or ‘Mrs’, is ably assisted by Grace Makutsi (played by Dreamgirls star Anika Noni Rose), an impulsive ugly duckling with an Imelda-like fetish for impractical shoes, unsuitable men, and the exciting modern world. Grace, who wears large round spectacles and has ‘difficult skin’, is a graduate, with an unheard-of 97 per cent in the final exams, of the Botswana Secretarial College (a fact no one is allowed to forget).

The series’s universal appeal stems from its theme: How can we adopt the best qualities of the new globalised era without giving up values from the old? For Mma, the answer is simple: follow old Botswana morality. “The rest of the world might become as rude as it wished, but this was not the way of things in Botswana and she would always defend the old Botswana way of doing things.” Old Botswana morality requires, for instance, that one should help a relative in need even if the connection was a distant one.

What ought to be the relationship between means and ends and how might a moral balance be achieved? If the cleaning woman in the hospital inadvertently caused several patients “to become late” because of her tendency to unplug the ventilator so that she could polish the floor, should the police be informed? These delightful and unlikely sleuths solve such puzzles emerging from human foibles by using common sense, observation, folk wisdom, and Clovis Anderson’s Principles of Private Detection. Solutions invariably require brewing a pot of red bush tea (ordinary tea for Grace), and sipping it either at home or in the office “with two desks, two chairs and a typewriter,” while contemplating the ubiquitous acacia tree.

... contd.