Wisdom from Africa opens a new chapter

I’ve been feeling guilty for weeks. While we were visiting my hometown in the United States for Christmas, I drove past a young man who was standing by the road in the cold holding a sign that said “Need Work.” His clothes did not look warm enough for the -5 C temperature.

Over the years, I’ve accumulated more warm jackets than I can possibly use, so while driving by I thought that I should come back and bring him one. But, I never did it. I certainly did not honor the spirit of Christmas, which is supposed to be focused on showing love for one’s fellow men and women, especially the more unfortunate among us.

Coincidentally, at the same time, I had been reading, mostly rereading, the First Ladies’ Detective Agency novels of Alexander McCall Smith. The sequential novels tell the story of Precious Ramotswe, a woman in the southern African country of Botswana who opens a detective agency in the capital city of Gaborone.

Ramotswe is not like the heroes of other detective series. She’s not a fighter. She’s not a femme fatale — she is of “traditional African build” and happy about it. She doesn’t help the police solve crimes that have baffled them. Her cases are not about great evils, but about the common weaknesses and foibles that touch everyone. She’s obviously very smart, but she never graduated from any school.

Much more importantly she is wise. Instead of helping her clients seek revenge, she finds ways to use kindness to put the problem right.

McCall Smith, a distinguished Scottish professor of medical ethics, taught at the University of Botswana, and fell in love with the country and its people. He portrays the life there so vividly that I feel I also know the country — he makes me really want to go there.

His writing is simple and deep, insightful and beautiful. In each chapter, really on each page, there is writing that makes me think, “I wish I could write like that.” I’m studying his style to try to figure out how he does it … Well, it’s OK to dream.

So far, there are 18 novels in the series. I do have to warn you that if you read the first novel, you will end up buying and reading the whole series. Then, you’ll hope McCall Smith hurries to finish the next one.

In the latest volume, titled The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine, a 10-year-old boy asks Ramotswe to pay him to watch her decrepit van while it is parked. She refuses, so, of course, there is a big scratch on the side of the van when she returns. She’s angry and hides behind a tree until she can catch him.

But, when she does catch him, he says he is a “rubbish boy” who deserves to be hit. She finds that his mother is a prostitute in a border city who left him with a woman who treats him as a slave. Ramotswe finds a good and loving home for the boy.

Ramotswe abhors violence, but she has to sit on the woman to make her leave the boy alone.

“If people come at you and start to scratch you, then of course you have the right to sit on them. Even Nelson Mandela, who was a good and gentle man, would have agreed with that,” she thought.

McCall Smith’s stories of traditional African values make me even more ashamed of my failure to be a good Samaritan.