Landlocked and composed mostly of the Kalahari Desert, the Republic of Botswana borders South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Namibia. The size of France though home to only 2.5 million people, 85 per cent of whom as Tswana. Formally a British colony known as the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Botswana gained independence in 1966. Its capital, Gaborone, has caught out many a pub quiz contestant, though has half a million inhabitants.
Strange then perhaps, and also maybe rather amusing, that the way most people come into contact with Botswana is via a series of crime books by a refined elderly gentleman, Alexander McCall Smith, who was formerly Professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University and is now the prolific author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. The investigations of Precious Ramotswe have covered 25 novels (as well as a radio and TV series) between 1998 and 2022 and as well as Precious and her various, often somewhat odd and eccentric, clients (and her receptionist Grace Makutsi and car mechanic suitor and later husband JLB Matekoni), Botswana itself is essentially a recurring character in the books. The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency is in Gaborone though Precious occasionally travels the country and its neighbour’s solving cases for wives whose husbands have gone missing, schoolteachers whose sons have disappeared, tracking down kidnappers, and finding wealthy businessmen’s missing daughters. Over the years and over the series McCall Smith has won just about every crime writing award, been translated into just about every language and sold millions of copies.
One might reasonably ask what McCall Smith, writing away in his study in rainy far-off Edinburgh is doing creating The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency? Well, McCall Smith is a child of Empire, born in Bulawayo in British-controlled Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where his father was a public prosecutor. In the 1980s he returned to Africa to teach at the University of Botswana in Gaborone. As if churning out over 20 novels (he also has some standalone mysteries outside of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency) wasn’t enough McCall Smith remains involved in bodies overseeing bioethics and genetics, is a former chairman of the Ethics Committee of the British Medical Association and, in 2024, was appointed Knight Bachelor (sorry, it’s complicated but it’s a very ancient order of knight not linked to any particular chivalric order!) for services to Literature, to Academia and to Charity.
The most recent No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was published in October 2024 – The Great Hippopotamus Hotel, set in the rolling hills just outside Gaborone where food poisoning, stolen laundry, and scorpions are destroying business. Accidental or intentional? Time to get Precious Ramotswe and Grace Makutsi on the case, while JLB Matekoni has a very tricky client situation to deal with. Long may The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency continue – say I, and millions of readers around the world.
But surely, I hear you cry, Precious Ramotswe and Grace Makutsi can’t be the only detectives in all of Botswana? And indeed they are not. There is also Botswana Criminal Investigation Department (CID) highflier, David ‘Kubu’ Bengu, now the star of eight books. The series is written by two authors, Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, under the pen name Michael Stanley. Both Sears and Trollip are, like McCall Smith, African-born Brits who know Botswana and Zimbabwe well. Their books are more grounded in the often-messy reality of Africa’s poverty, poor inter-tribal relations and exploitation by outsiders. Kubu (hippopotamus in Setswana) Bengu has been described as the “The African Columbo”, an opera-loving, wine connoisseur Assistant Superintendent with a sidekick, Samantha Khama – a new recruit to the Botswana CID. The novel the writing duo title Bengu book 0, Facets of Death (2021), is a good place to start – it’s Kubu Bengu’s first case straight out of university and fresh into CID. The richest diamond mine in the world is robbed of 100,000 carats worth of gems. Then the thieves are killed, execution-style. This is Kubu’s chance to prove himself or forever be a failure in his boss’s eyes.
A Deadly Covenant (2022) covers a lot of local ground too when a human skeleton is discovered at the site of a controversial new dam in remote northern Botswana and Kubu is sent to investigate, along with visiting Scottish pathologist, Ian MacGregor. More skeletons are found, a local headman killed, outrage builds over the massacre of the Bushman families and Kubu and MacGregor are in a race against time.
A few other crime novels featuring Botswana:
- Tess Gerritsen’s usually Boston-set Detective Jane Rizzoli and Forensic Pathologist Maura Isles series takes a bit of a detour in Die Again (2015). A murderer is at large in America, but, five years ago, a group of travellers set off on an African safari and none of them was ever seen again – apart from one woman who stumbled out of the bush weeks later, barely alive. Has the ‘safari killer’ resurfaced in Boston?
- Frederick Ramsay is from Baltimore but writes internationally set crime thrillers including his Botswana Mystery series which feature thinking animals, the Russian mafia, safari tourists, North Koreans and visiting American senators in the trilogy – Predators (2009), Reapers (2010) and Danger Woman (2016).
- Phoebe Morgan’s The Wild Girls (2021) – a Botswana safari lodge with no phone signal where four friends reunite for a birthday celebration, and then things go very wrong.
And finally, perhaps the most interesting crime writer at work in Botswana today is Unity Dow, who also finds time between books to be a leading lawyer, human rights activist and the member of parliament for Kgatleng West, which borders South Africa and also happens to be the hometown of Precious Ramotswe of No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency fame. Dow studied at the University of Botswana and Edinburgh University (academic home of Alexander McCall Smith incidentally). She opened the first all-woman law firm in Botswana and in 1997 became the first woman to be appointed as a judge to the country’s High Court. She has become a national figure involved in indigenous people disputes, LGBTQ+ issues and other cases. And then there are her novels, which she’s been writing for a quarter century and typically focus on social and legal issues in Botswana. Her first novel, Far and Beyon′ (2000), focused on the AIDS epidemic while The Screaming of the Innocent (2001) women’s rights, police corruption, ritual murder, and institutional secrecy as well as dipheko (murdering people to harvest their organs for their magical properties). Dow’s third novel, Juggling Truths (2003) portrays the childhood of Monei Ntuka, faced with both missionaries and the witchdoctors, in the Botswanan village of Mochudi.
Dow’s work can be quite dark with difficult themes. The Heavens May Fall (2007) features a new politically committed lawyer at the Bana Bantle Children’s Agency in Mochudi, Botswana, Naledi Chaba. Naledi’s caseload is full of crimes of rape and abuse. Then she takes on the case of a 15-year-old girl who has been raped and finds it rattles a lot of skeletons in Botswana’s legal and political establishment.
