The No. 1 Ladies

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and many other books. He was born in Zimbabwe and moved to Scotland when he was 17 to continue his education. He earned 2 degrees in law and then began teaching law. Afterwards, he went back to Africa, and in 1980 he went to Botswana. While he was in Botswana, he founded a law school and he began teaching there. The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is the first book out of a series. The setting of the novel is the country of Botswana. The main character of the book is Precious Ramotswe. She is better known to the people as “Mma Ramotswe”. In the book, she opens up a detective agency for ladies. When she does that, she becomes the first lady detective in Botswana. In his book, The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith portrays the setting of Botswana through the characters’ lives, gender roles, and traditions.
It is a landlocked and arid country. Botswana is 224,607 miles in area, which is almost the same size of France. Two-thirds of the country is the Kalahari Desert. The capital city of Botswana is Gaborone. Citizens of Botswana are known as the “Batswana”. “Ba” meaning “the people”. The Batswana people descended mainly from the Bantu. They feel a great pride in their history and government and they share a strong sense of national identity. Their official language is Setswana and their official business language is English. Those are their 2 main languages, but they also speak 26 other languages. The people of Botswana have a long-held belief in democracy. Most of the towns and villages in Botswana have a Kgotla. A Kgotla is a meeting place where everybody can have their say and their decisions are taken by