The Kalahari Typing School for Men: More from the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

The Kalahari Typing School for Men is the fourth book in a very
successful series that began with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
Readers should be prepared for a little difficulty in keeping names
straight, and enormous difficulties in keeping from laughing out loud.
The setting is Botswana, a small country in southern Africa. Mma
Precious Ramotswe is a happy woman. And why not? Her agency business is
thriving, she owns her own house, and she has two adopted children. She
also has a handsome fiancé. Still, there are difficulties. Mr. J.L.B.
Matekoni has not set a date for their marriage. Her assistant, Mma
Makutsi, is eager to find a husband, but good husbands are hard to find,
and meanwhile, she lives in a single room shared with a sick brother.

In South Africa, difficulties are compounded by a culture where
corruption is a way of life and superstitions thrive. A girl with no
mother has been told by a fellow student that her dead mother “left
her” because she disliked her daughter. Mma Ramotswe consoles the girl
by assuring her that everyone in Botswana is of equal value: “You may
be an orphan girl, but you are as good as anybody else.” Touching
incidents include the killing of a hoopoe—a friendly and beautiful
little bird—by a small boy with a stone and a catapult in Mma
Ramotswe’s vegetable garden. Mma Ramotswe has been married once before
to a jazz trumpeter who looked like a young girl’s dream but proved to
be a wife’s nightmare, a man who provided “a daily diet of
cruelty.” Her ideal man is her father. She suspects that being married
to the old friend who frequently proposes would be “a somnolent
experience.” In Mma Ramotswe’s philosophy, every person in Botswana
is of equal value. Business tactics are cutthroat, but Mma Ramotswe
simply concludes that people do good things and bad things. Her friends
are equally philosophical. When a farmer is nearly killed on his ostrich
ranch by rustlers, he discusses the incident with Mma Ramotswe and they
agree that people need to be listened to, and that everyone should set
his life in order and be ready to die at any time.

The discovery of a large number of old typewriters gathering dust in
the attic of a store gives Mma Makutsi a brilliant idea. Men, even
engineers, bankers, and businessmen, need to be able to type but would
not be comfortable in a class with women: “Those poor men, desperate
to know how to type but too ashamed to ask how to do it, had relief in
store.” Difficulties multiply, but are solved ingeniously as they come
up. Mma Makutsi dismisses her boring suitor and establishes her typing
school for men. She is in no hurry to marry. Mma Ramotswe reflects that
it was astonishing how life had a way of working out, “even when
everything looked so complicated and astonishing.” The Kalahari
Typing School for Men might be called the archetypal melodrama, a parody
of the genre, or simply the most unusual book you will read this year.
Then again, it could be called delightful.