Chapter One
Honesty, Tea, and Things in the Kitchen
Mma Ramotswe was sitting alone in her favourite café, on
the edge of the shopping centre at the Gaborone end of the
Tlokweng Road. It was a Saturday, the day that she
preferred above all others, a day on which one might do as
much or as little as one liked, a day to have lunch with a
friend at the President Hotel, or, as on that day, to sit
by oneself and think about the events of the week and the
state of the world. This café was a good place to be, for
several reasons. Firstly, there was the view, that of a
stand of eucalyptus trees with foliage of a comforting
dark green which made a sound like the sea when the wind
blew through the leaves. Or that, at least, was the sound
which Mma Ramotswe imagined the sea to make. She had never
seen the ocean, which was far away from land-locked
Botswana; far away across the deserts of Namibia, across
the red sands and the dry mountains. But she could imagine
it when she listened to the eucalyptus trees in the wind
and closed her eyes. Perhaps one day she would see it, and
would stand on the shore and let the waves wash over her
feet. Perhaps.
The other advantage which this café had was the fact that
the tables were out on an open verandah, and there was
always something to watch. That morning, for instance, she
had seen a minor dispute between a teenage girl and her
boyfriend-an exchange of words which she did not catch but
which was clear enough in its meaning-and she had
witnessed a woman scrape the side of a neighbouring car
while she tried to park. The woman had stopped, quickly
inspected the damage, and had then driven off. Mma
Ramotswehad watched this incredulously, and had half-risen
to her feet to protest, but was too late: the woman's car
had by then turned the corner and disappeared and she did
not even have time to see its number-plate.
She had sat down again and poured herself another cup of
tea. It was not true that such a thing could not have
happened in the old Botswana-it could-but it was
undoubtedly true that this was much more likely to happen
today. There were many selfish people about these days,
people who seemed not to care if they scraped the cars of
others or bumped into people while walking on the street.
Mma Ramotswe knew that this was what happened when towns
became bigger and people became strangers to one another;
she knew too that this was a consequence of increasing
prosperity, which, curiously enough, just seemed to bring
out greed and selfishness. But even if she knew why all
this happened, it did not make it any easier to bear. 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.
Life was far better, thought Mma Ramotswe, if we knew who
we were. In the days when she was a schoolgirl in Mochudi,
the village in which she had been born, everybody had
known exactly who you were, and they often knew exactly
who your parents, and your parents' parents, had been.
Today when she went back to Mochudi, people would greet
her as if she had barely been away; her presence needed no
explanation. And even here in Gaborone, where things had
grown so much, people still knew precisely who she was.
They would know that she was Precious Ramotswe, founder of
the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, daughter of the late
Obed Ramotswe, and now the wife (after a rather protracted
engagement) of that most gracious of mechanics, Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni, proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. And
some of them at least would also know that she lived in
Zebra Drive, that she had a tiny white van, and that she
employed one Grace Makutsi as her assistant. And so the
ramifications of relationships and ties would spread
further outwards, and the number of things that might be
known would grow. Some might know that Mma Makutsi had a
brother, Richard, who was now late; that she had achieved
the previously unheard-of result of ninety-seven per cent
in the final examinations of the Botswana Secretarial
College; and that following upon the success of the
Kalahari Typing School for Men, she had recently moved to
a rather better house in Extension Two. Knowledge of this
sort-everyday, human knowledge-helped to keep society
together and made it difficult to scrape the car of
another without feeling guilty about it and without doing
something to let the owner know. Not that this appeared to
make any difference to that selfish woman in the car, who
had left the scrape unreported, who clearly did not care.
But there was no point in throwing up one's hands in
despair. People had always done that-the throwing up of
hands, the shrug-but one got nowhere in doing so. The
world might have changed for the worse in some respects,
but in others it was a much better place, and it was
important to remember this. Lights went off in some
places, but went on in others. Look at Africa-there had
been so much to shake one's head over-corruption, civil
wars, and the rest-but there was also so much which was
now much better. There had been slavery in the past, and
all the suffering which that had brought, and there had
been all the cruelties of apartheid just those few miles
away over the border, but all that was now over. There had
been ignorance, but now more and more people were learning
to write, and were graduating from universities. Women had
been held in such servitude, and now they could vote and
express themselves and claim lives for themselves, even if
there were still many men who did not want such things to
be. These were the good things that happened and one had
to remember them.
Mma Ramotswe raised her tea cup to her lips and looked out
over the brim. At the edge of the car park, immediately in
front of the café, a small market had been set up, with
traders' stalls and trays of colourful goods. She watched
as a man attempted to persuade a customer to buy a pair of
sunglasses. The woman tried on several pairs, but was not
satisfied, and moved on to the next stall. There she
pointed to a small piece of silver jewellery, a bangle,
and the trader, a short man wearing a wide-brimmed felt
hat, passed it across to her to try on. Mma Ramotswe
watched as the woman held out her wrist to be admired by
the trader, who nodded encouragement. But the woman seemed
not to agree with his verdict, and handed the bangle back,
pointing to another item at the back of the stall. And at
that moment, while the trader turned round to stretch for
whatever it was that she had singled out, the woman
quickly slipped another bangle into the pocket of the
jacket she was wearing.
Mma Ramotswe gasped. This time, she could not sit back and
allow a crime to be committed before her very eyes. If
people did nothing, then no wonder that things were
getting worse. So she stood up, and began to walk firmly
towards the stall where the woman had now engaged the
trader in earnest discussion about the merits of the
merchandise which he was showing her.
"Excuse me, Mma."
The voice came from behind her, and Mma Ramotswe turned
round to see who had addressed her. It was the waitress, a
young woman whom Mma Ramotswe had not seen at the café
before.
"Yes, Mma, what is it?"
The waitress pointed an accusing finger at her. "You
cannot run away like that," she said. "I saw you. You're
trying to go away without paying the bill. I saw you."
For a moment Mma Ramotswe was unable to speak. The
accusation was a terrible one, and so unwarranted. Of
course she had not been trying to get away without paying
the bill-she would never do such a thing; all she was
doing was trying to stop a crime being committed before
her eyes.
She recovered herself sufficiently to reply. "I am not
trying to go away, Mma," she said. "I am just trying to
stop that person over there from stealing from that man.
Then I would have come back to pay."
The waitress smiled knowingly. "They all find some
excuse," she said. "Every day there are people like you.
They come and eat our food and then they run away and
hide. You people are all the same."
Mma Ramotswe looked over towards the stall. The woman had
begun to walk away, presumably with the bangle still
firmly in her pocket. It would now be too late to do
anything about it, and all because of this silly young
woman who had misunderstood what she was doing.
She went back to her table and sat down. "Bring me the
bill," she said. "I will pay it straightaway."
The waitress stared at her. "I will bring you the bill,"
she said. "But I shall have to add something for myself. I
will have to add this if you do not want me to call the
police and tell them about how you tried to run away."
As the waitress went off to fetch the bill, Mma Ramotswe
glanced around her to see if people at the neighbouring
tables had witnessed the scene. At the table next to hers,
a woman sat with her two young children, who were sipping
with evident pleasure at large milkshakes. The woman
smiled at Mma Ramotswe, and then turned her attention back
to the children. She had not seen anything, thought Mma
Ramotswe, but then the woman leaned across the table and
addressed a remark to her.
"Bad luck, Mma," she said. "They are too quick in this
place. It is easier to run away at the hotels."
For a few minutes Mma Ramotswe sat in complete silence,
reflecting on what she had seen. It was remarkable. Within
a very short space of time she had seen an instance of
bare-faced theft, had encountered a waitress who thought
nothing of extorting money, and then, to bring the whole
matter to a shameful conclusion, the woman at the next
table had disclosed a thoroughly dishonest view of the
world. Mma Ramotswe was frankly astonished. She thought of
what her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, a fine judge of
cattle but also a man of the utmost propriety, would have
thought of this. He had brought her up to be scrupulously
honest, and he would have been mortified to see this sort
of behaviour. Mma Ramotswe remembered how she had been
walking with him in Mochudi when she was a young girl and
they had come across a coin on the edge of the road. She
had fallen upon it with delight and was polishing it with
her handkerchief before he noticed what had happened and
had intervened.
"That is not ours," he said. "That money belongs to
somebody else."
She had yielded the coin reluctantly, and it had been
handed in to a surprised police sergeant at the Mochudi
Police Post, but the lesson had been a vivid one. It was
difficult for Mma Ramotswe to imagine how anybody could
steal from another, or do any of the things which one read
about in the Botswana Daily News court reports. The only
explanation was that people who did that sort of thing had
no understanding of what others felt; they simply did not
understand. If you knew what it was like to be another
person, then how could you possibly do something which
would cause pain?
The problem, though, was that there seemed to be people in
whom that imaginative part was just missing. It could be
that they were born that way-with something missing from
their brains-or it could be that they became like that
because they were never taught by their parents to
sympathise with others. That was the most likely
explanation, thought Mma Ramotswe. A whole generation of
people, not only in Africa, but everywhere else, had not
been taught to feel for others because the parents simply
had not bothered to teach them this.
She continued to think of this as she drove in her tiny
white van, back through that part of town known as the
Village, back past the University, with its growing sprawl
of buildings, and finally along Zebra Drive itself, where
she lived. She had been so disturbed by what she had seen
that she had quite forgotten to do the shopping that she
had intended to do, with the result that it was only when
she pulled into her driveway and came to a halt beside the
kitchen wall that she remembered that she had none of the
items she needed to make that night's dinner. There were
no beans, for example, which meant that their stew would
be accompanied by no greens; and there would be no custard
for the pudding which she had planned to make for the
children. She sat at the wheel of the van and contemplated
retracing her tracks to the shops, but she just did not
have the energy. It was a hot day, and the house looked
cool and inviting. She could go inside, make herself a pot
of bush tea, and retire to her bedroom for a sleep. Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni and the children had gone out to Mojadite,
a small village off the Lobatse Road, to visit his aunt,
and would not be back before six or seven. She would have
the house to herself for several hours yet, and this would
be a good time for a rest. There was plenty of food in the
house-even if it was the wrong sort for the dinner that
she had planned. They could have pumpkin with the stew,
rather than beans, and the children would be perfectly
happy with a tin of peaches in syrup rather than the
custard and semolina pudding that she had thought of
making. So there was no reason to go out again.
Mma Ramotswe stepped out of the tiny white van and walked
round to the kitchen door, unlocking it to let herself in.
She could remember the days when nobody locked their doors
in Botswana, and indeed when there were many doors that
had no locks to lock anyway. But they had to lock their
doors now and there were even people who locked their
gates too. She thought of what she had seen only a short
time before. That woman who had stolen from the trader
with the wide-brimmed felt hat; she lived in a room
somewhere which she no doubt kept locked, and yet she was
prepared to steal from that poor man. Mma Ramotswe sighed.
There was much in this world over which one might shake
one's head. Indeed, it would be possible to go through
life today with one's head in constant motion, like a
puppet in the hands of a shaky puppeteer.