The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Episodes engaging with the complexities of gender-based roles and behavior appear throughout the novel as a motif and reflect the struggle that many women face to be safe and autonomous, in Botswana and across the world. The novel makes the nature and effects of gender-based violence explicit and explores both their causes and effects. The most violent instance of misogyny in the novel is Precious’s memory of the sexual and physical abuse she suffers at the hands of her ex-husband, Note Mokoti. After Mokoti proposes to Precious, he rapes her, saying, “Now that you are going to be my wife, I must teach you what wives are for” (53). This horrific assault shows that Mokoti believes women should be sexually subservient to their husbands. Precious’s internal response to the abuse expresses what she perceives as her lack of choice or autonomy, given the messages society has sent her: “[T]his is what happened, she supposed. This is how men were, just as her friends at school had told her” (53). This passage suggests that these attitudes were not uncommon when Precious was 20 (in the 1980s), being acknowledged amongst women then as just “what happen[s],” perhaps especially in more traditional, rural communities.

By the time of the setting of the novel, however, when Mma Ramotswe is 34, some improvements have been made. Mma Ramotswe is able to live and work independently and, for the most part, is treated with respect by women and men alike in a modern, urban environment. Mma Ramotswe’s establishment of her detective agency is her response to the necessity of making a new life for herself after the traditional family-marriage model has served her so badly. Her enterprise is reflective of her desire to be independent and, therefore, safer from male violence and control: The word “agency” is an important pun here as her business is directly expressive of, and enabling of, her personal agency. Her “Ladies’” agency is designed to serve the needs of female clients and to fill a societal gap where these needs are often overlooked by more traditional male-centric models. The recurrence of cheating and lying husbands throughout the novel does highlight the ongoing complexity of gender-based roles and behaviors in Botswana at the time of the novel’s publication. Mma Ramotswe laments that sometimes she feels that “all women in Botswana were the victims of the fecklessness of men” (140) but, importantly, her detective agency exists as means to assist women who find themselves in these difficulties. The novel frames Precious and the other female characters not in fact as “victims” but as survivors, and as taking the pragmatic action they can to improve their situation. Precious’s ultimate acceptance of Rra Matekoni’s marriage proposal, and his portrayal throughout the novel as a good and compassionate man, is optimistic of a future for Precious, and Botswana, where good men are the norm. This contrasts directly with the novel’s portrayal of the past, in which gender-based violence and other forms of female oppression were acknowledged as commonplace.