Mma Precious Ramotswe
Mma Ramotswe has been brought up as a simple country village girl in the large "village" of Mochudi, in Australian terms a city of some 45,000 (one source, at least, says 80,000, and it's the 4th largest "village" in Botswana) people. Settled by the Tswana in 1871, it's in the Bakgatla tribal region, in Botswana's Kgatleng District, just some 37 km (23 miles) northeast of Gaborone.
The Bakgatla kgosi situation is rather fraught. As we mentioned in an earlier web page, the "enthroned" kgosi is Kgafela II, who lives in South Africa and is rightly scared of being kidnapped and returned to Botswana for trial and possible imprisonment as a result of at least one death as a result of a pregnant woman being caned by one of Kgafela's regiments - caning having been reintroduced by Kgafela and freely used on anyone who questioned him or his reintroduction of traditionalism. This is despite Kgafela's birth in the United States and his reputation as a committed human rights lawyer and advocate.
Worse, the Bakgatla have members located in South Africa, in the North West Province, in a region called Moruleng. As it happens, this region is jam packed full of platinum, and is worth an estimated 26 billion South African rand (getting towards $AU2.3 billion, $USD1.8 billion, £UK1.2 billion).
Traditionally, Moruleng has been ruled by a regent appointed by the Bakgatla kgosi in Mochudi. Prior to Kgafela coming to the "throne", the last regent was another royal family member, Nyalala Pilane. Pilane, a major political player in South Africa, has really peeved the Molupeng community by claiming all the platinum wealth as his own, and so is also a major financial player in South Africa, a much more corrupt country than Botswana. The Molopeng community are attempting to break away from dominance by the Botswanan Mochudi Bakgatla line.
In the meantime, Kgafela asked Pilane to resign his regency, which he did. But a couple of months later he came back, opposing Kgafele's kgosi rights in South Africa, claiming not only that Kgafela was on the run from Botswanan law, which he was, but that despite Kgafela's claims through his mother's South African origins to be a South African citizen, Kgafele's claims were wrong. This is despite earlier correspondence from Pilane sating Kgafele's claims were right. As far as we can make out in his increasingly murky story, the South African authorities are investigating this matter.
Now, where are we, ah, yes. Pilane has challenged the Moruleng community's rights to hold meetings challenging his worse than odd financial transactions, but eventually the highest South African court ruled in favour of the community.
Now, to make matters even worse, another contender for "kgosiship" has stepped up, Merafe Ramono Molefe. Ramono challenged in 2013, and the Premier of North West Province established a commission to examine the situation. The commission apparently reported in 2014, but the Premier seems to have sat on it for a year, but was finally forced to release it late in 2015. It recommended, in essence that Ramono be made kgosi in Moruleng and Kgafele and Pilane be given the flick.
But the Premier didn't like the recommendations, and ordered that the matter be discussed with the various parties for two months. At the end of February 2016, the Premier announced that everything was on hold until he established a judicial commission to look at the matter again.
Next up, in May, Kgafele, in light of both the lack of action by the Premier and fear of what financial shenanigans Pilane might undertake to hang on to the platinum wealth while this whole kerfuffle was going on, and pretty much ignoring the Premier's authority by using his traditional powers as the Mochudi kgosi, announced he was replacing Pilane with a bloke called Pheto, who was to step up to the regency position in September 2016.
Concurrently, the remaining members of the Bakgatla royal line, made up of the extended members of 7 families, announced that they were not one bit happy with either Pilane or Kgafele.
Finally, he Premier established his judicial commission in June. When and what it will report are entirely unclear, as is he situation in place until and final action is taken. It's completely unclear what the upshot of this awful schemozzle will be, but one would hope it would actually result in the ridiculously old-fashioned notion of kgosi being scrapped and the Molopeng community, at least, be given the right of self determination, and be granted the return of the money taken by Pilane and his cronies.
Unfortunately, the path being currently trodden by the South African government is towards more traditional governorship. Meanwhile the Botswanan government and Ian Khama have started negotiating Kgafele's return to Mochudi. Mma Ramotswe's old friends could be in for yet another very rough trot indeed.
So, back to Mma Ramotswe. While not appearing to be at all rebellious, there's much more to her than what on the surface might appear to be an unimaginative country girl. Not, of course, that I want to denigrate people who choose to live and are as happy as possible to live a village life. If it suits them, and they're happy at it, then all glory to them. After all, they're as important to those of us who have chosen a different path, as we are to them.
But Precious Ramotswe hankered after more than the village could provide. She has a questing nature that needs room to spread. Precious's mother died when Precious was very young, run over by a train at Mochudi's railway crossing - the South Africa to Rhodesia train on the rail line permitted by the leading Botswana Kgosi as a way of ensuring Botswana, or what was then the Protectorate of Bechuanaland, remained separate from South Africa and Rhodesia.
Not that that bit of history helped Precious's mum. Or Precious, for that matter. But Precious had a couple of brilliant strokes of luck. First, she had Obed Ramotswe as a father. And what a father. Precious both loved and very greatly admired her father. As a young man, he had been a miner in South Africa, as, indeed, very, very many Batswana men had been.
But Obed was a natural cattle man, so when he returned he used at least some of the money he earned to buy cattle. And he had an almost natural ability to only choose the best cattle, and as time went on his herd of wonderful cattle grew.
Even better, Obed was not a typical Batswana man. When he was down south, he didn't fritter his money away on drink, smokes, and loose women. And back in Botswana he was neither violent nor overly sexist. And he was possessed of great wisdom.
Precious's other stroke of luck was that her mother had a sister who was unmarried and prepared to devote her love and life to raising Precious. In this sense, with the aunt and her wonderful father, Precious was largely protected from the ravages that probably comprised the households of many of her friends.
Not, of course, that Sandy mentions much of this side of Batswana life. Nonetheless, without saying much, it's clear that Precious's high intellect, powers of observation and deduction, and capacity to listen have given her an excellent grounding in the failures and foibles, as well as the great successes of her fellow Batswanans.
Her responses to these things are very strongly guided by the remembered wisdom of her father, but having written that, it should also be noted that Obed passed his great capacity for wisdom on to his daughter.
As noted in the section on Sandy and Mma Ramotswe, Precious shares some things with Sandy. One of these is that small "c" conservatism that is suspicious of radical reform, whether it be of the left or the right. The wrong kind of change can run the risk of unexpected, usually bad, consequences.
Mma Ramotswe constantly worries about this kind of change occurring in Botswana. This can cause her to be very critical of young people, especially young women. My highly literate son, when he was ten years old, was so angered by this he insisted on us stopping a bedtime reading of one of the novels.
This small "c" conservatism is evinced in Precious by a love of tradition, and a hankering after the lovely way things were in the past. It would be a mistake, however, to regard Precious as being hidebound. She is quite well aware that not all traditional things are good - traditional black magic, for example.
Another thing she shares with Sandy is a great love of Botswana and its people. Botswana is the very best place on earth to live, and Mma Ramotswe can't imagine living anywhere else. And while they may have some faults, to Precious the Batswana are the very best people on earth, because their traditions make them so.
And the greatest Batswana of all is, of course, Seretse Khama, Botswana's only Prime Minister, and its first President, who tragically died far too young. Seretse and his supporters put in place the mechanisms for making Botswana what it is today, far and away the most successful post-colonial country in Africa, greatly aided, of course, by the diamonds discovered shortly after Botswana's peaceful liberation from imperial control.
Quite what Mma Ramotswe makes of Seretse’s sons, one of whom is president at the time of writing, and both of whom have some very serious questions to answer about their probity, is something we don't really know, although she does sometimes show some disdain for the men who run Botswana today.
Another outstanding feature of Mma Ramotswe is her great humanity. She empathises with people, and she is sensitive to their needs and failings. Wrongdoing is not necessarily a sign of a bad person. There are many factors that can lead a person down the wrong track, and sometimes a strictly legally-based outcome is not what is needed.
Mma Ramotswe's life has not, despite appearances, been all love and roses. As a young woman she was swept off her feet by a cheating, lying, overly handsome and brilliant jazz trumpet playing root rat, with the emphasis on "rat". Ignoring, for once, her father's opinion, she married him.
Oh, I just remembered, "root rat" is an old australianism. In Australia, "root" does not mean "barrack" or "support" as it does in the US. Oh, no, it is a colloquialism for .... how can I put this .... ah, yes, "having sex with someone". And a "root rat" is a man (almost always a man) who is constantly chasing sex with multiple women (usually). As a tenor sax player myself, nothing in this description surprises me about a trumpet player.
This trumpet player, Note Mkoti by name, was also a sexist, violent brute, with thought of no-one other than himself. He beat Precious regularly, and she tolerated it, as so many women do, thinking it is their lot, despite the good example her father provided of an alternative to the kind of life she had with Note. Eventually she became pregnant, and looked forward lovingly and longingly to becoming a mother.
But near term, Note beat her again, causing her to be hospitalised. Her baby came unexpectedly. She was able to hold her for the short time the baby lived. Because of the beating and the physical trauma of this particular birth, she was no longer able to have children. She was devastated. Note was nowhere to be seen, completely uninterested in the fate of either Precious, or their baby.
Precious returned home, on her own, rightly confident that Obed would look after her without saying "I told you so." Don't worry, I'm not going to tell all of Precious's life story, and spoil all the books. I'm just going up to Obed's death, Precious's inheritance, and her establishment of the Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.
I don't recall Precious's age being mentioned, but she is older and even wiser than she would be in her early twenties, when I assume she lost her poor little baby. And when she is convincing people she is wise enough to be a private detective, added to various suggestions she is still of childbearing age, if she were able to bear children, I figure she was maybe in her mid-thirties, perhaps somewhere around 35-36 at the start of the novels.
So, I'm afraid that in what I think was her mid-thirties Precious had to bear the great grief of her father coughing himself to death at much too early an age. It is not entirely clear what the wonderful Obed died of. It is described as an illness of miners, and was probably silicosis.
Because of the atrocious conditions in which they worked, and which the mining companies knowingly allowed them to work in because it was cheaper to hire new workers than improve working conditions, many miners came down with this cruel but easily preventable disease. They breathe in very fine dust particles, which set and solidify in the lungs, eventually causing their lungs to slow and finally stop working. The sufferers, unless someone kind kills them humanely first, spend their last moments desperately gasping for breaths which never come.
The second lung disease that badly afflicts miners in South Africa is that great disease of poverty, also preventable if the mining companies could be bothered, tuberculosis, TB, consumption, as it is variously called. This also usually strikes at the lungs, and the sufferer eventually, unless that same kind person kills them first, dies coughing up blood and rotting pieces of their lungs.
Sandy doesn't feel the need to give us all this gory detail, and why the heck should he? His books are entertainments, not bitter angry treatises on the very long, seemingly, sometimes, endless list of the world's unkindnesses. And besides, he would probably not have Mma Ramotswe performing what many of us would regard as the greatest kindness of ending her father's life, as, as you will already know if you've read about Sandy, he does not agree with euthanasia. And it has to be said that Mma Ramotswe, as Sandy writes her, would probably be incapable of performing such a deed. But then again, with the strength she so often displays, she might have been able to do it.
But, yet once more, if she had offed her dad, as a kindness, we would not have had his rather darkly amusing last moments. Precious's dad breathes out that he gives permission for her to sell some of the cattle to finance a business, thinking she would plan for a little roadside shop, or something similar. He should have known his daughter better. She excitedly tells him she thinks she'll open a detective agency. Whatever Obed was going to say to go along with the rather surprised look on his face, perhaps rather fortunately died on his lips.
The Bakgatla kgosi situation is rather fraught. As we mentioned in an earlier web page, the "enthroned" kgosi is Kgafela II, who lives in South Africa and is rightly scared of being kidnapped and returned to Botswana for trial and possible imprisonment as a result of at least one death as a result of a pregnant woman being caned by one of Kgafela's regiments - caning having been reintroduced by Kgafela and freely used on anyone who questioned him or his reintroduction of traditionalism. This is despite Kgafela's birth in the United States and his reputation as a committed human rights lawyer and advocate.
Worse, the Bakgatla have members located in South Africa, in the North West Province, in a region called Moruleng. As it happens, this region is jam packed full of platinum, and is worth an estimated 26 billion South African rand (getting towards $AU2.3 billion, $USD1.8 billion, £UK1.2 billion).
Traditionally, Moruleng has been ruled by a regent appointed by the Bakgatla kgosi in Mochudi. Prior to Kgafela coming to the "throne", the last regent was another royal family member, Nyalala Pilane. Pilane, a major political player in South Africa, has really peeved the Molupeng community by claiming all the platinum wealth as his own, and so is also a major financial player in South Africa, a much more corrupt country than Botswana. The Molopeng community are attempting to break away from dominance by the Botswanan Mochudi Bakgatla line.
In the meantime, Kgafela asked Pilane to resign his regency, which he did. But a couple of months later he came back, opposing Kgafele's kgosi rights in South Africa, claiming not only that Kgafela was on the run from Botswanan law, which he was, but that despite Kgafela's claims through his mother's South African origins to be a South African citizen, Kgafele's claims were wrong. This is despite earlier correspondence from Pilane sating Kgafele's claims were right. As far as we can make out in his increasingly murky story, the South African authorities are investigating this matter.
Now, where are we, ah, yes. Pilane has challenged the Moruleng community's rights to hold meetings challenging his worse than odd financial transactions, but eventually the highest South African court ruled in favour of the community.
Now, to make matters even worse, another contender for "kgosiship" has stepped up, Merafe Ramono Molefe. Ramono challenged in 2013, and the Premier of North West Province established a commission to examine the situation. The commission apparently reported in 2014, but the Premier seems to have sat on it for a year, but was finally forced to release it late in 2015. It recommended, in essence that Ramono be made kgosi in Moruleng and Kgafele and Pilane be given the flick.
But the Premier didn't like the recommendations, and ordered that the matter be discussed with the various parties for two months. At the end of February 2016, the Premier announced that everything was on hold until he established a judicial commission to look at the matter again.
Next up, in May, Kgafele, in light of both the lack of action by the Premier and fear of what financial shenanigans Pilane might undertake to hang on to the platinum wealth while this whole kerfuffle was going on, and pretty much ignoring the Premier's authority by using his traditional powers as the Mochudi kgosi, announced he was replacing Pilane with a bloke called Pheto, who was to step up to the regency position in September 2016.
Concurrently, the remaining members of the Bakgatla royal line, made up of the extended members of 7 families, announced that they were not one bit happy with either Pilane or Kgafele.
Finally, he Premier established his judicial commission in June. When and what it will report are entirely unclear, as is he situation in place until and final action is taken. It's completely unclear what the upshot of this awful schemozzle will be, but one would hope it would actually result in the ridiculously old-fashioned notion of kgosi being scrapped and the Molopeng community, at least, be given the right of self determination, and be granted the return of the money taken by Pilane and his cronies.
Unfortunately, the path being currently trodden by the South African government is towards more traditional governorship. Meanwhile the Botswanan government and Ian Khama have started negotiating Kgafele's return to Mochudi. Mma Ramotswe's old friends could be in for yet another very rough trot indeed.
So, back to Mma Ramotswe. While not appearing to be at all rebellious, there's much more to her than what on the surface might appear to be an unimaginative country girl. Not, of course, that I want to denigrate people who choose to live and are as happy as possible to live a village life. If it suits them, and they're happy at it, then all glory to them. After all, they're as important to those of us who have chosen a different path, as we are to them.
But Precious Ramotswe hankered after more than the village could provide. She has a questing nature that needs room to spread. Precious's mother died when Precious was very young, run over by a train at Mochudi's railway crossing - the South Africa to Rhodesia train on the rail line permitted by the leading Botswana Kgosi as a way of ensuring Botswana, or what was then the Protectorate of Bechuanaland, remained separate from South Africa and Rhodesia.
Not that that bit of history helped Precious's mum. Or Precious, for that matter. But Precious had a couple of brilliant strokes of luck. First, she had Obed Ramotswe as a father. And what a father. Precious both loved and very greatly admired her father. As a young man, he had been a miner in South Africa, as, indeed, very, very many Batswana men had been.
But Obed was a natural cattle man, so when he returned he used at least some of the money he earned to buy cattle. And he had an almost natural ability to only choose the best cattle, and as time went on his herd of wonderful cattle grew.
Even better, Obed was not a typical Batswana man. When he was down south, he didn't fritter his money away on drink, smokes, and loose women. And back in Botswana he was neither violent nor overly sexist. And he was possessed of great wisdom.
Precious's other stroke of luck was that her mother had a sister who was unmarried and prepared to devote her love and life to raising Precious. In this sense, with the aunt and her wonderful father, Precious was largely protected from the ravages that probably comprised the households of many of her friends.
Not, of course, that Sandy mentions much of this side of Batswana life. Nonetheless, without saying much, it's clear that Precious's high intellect, powers of observation and deduction, and capacity to listen have given her an excellent grounding in the failures and foibles, as well as the great successes of her fellow Batswanans.
Her responses to these things are very strongly guided by the remembered wisdom of her father, but having written that, it should also be noted that Obed passed his great capacity for wisdom on to his daughter.
As noted in the section on Sandy and Mma Ramotswe, Precious shares some things with Sandy. One of these is that small "c" conservatism that is suspicious of radical reform, whether it be of the left or the right. The wrong kind of change can run the risk of unexpected, usually bad, consequences.
Mma Ramotswe constantly worries about this kind of change occurring in Botswana. This can cause her to be very critical of young people, especially young women. My highly literate son, when he was ten years old, was so angered by this he insisted on us stopping a bedtime reading of one of the novels.
This small "c" conservatism is evinced in Precious by a love of tradition, and a hankering after the lovely way things were in the past. It would be a mistake, however, to regard Precious as being hidebound. She is quite well aware that not all traditional things are good - traditional black magic, for example.
Another thing she shares with Sandy is a great love of Botswana and its people. Botswana is the very best place on earth to live, and Mma Ramotswe can't imagine living anywhere else. And while they may have some faults, to Precious the Batswana are the very best people on earth, because their traditions make them so.
And the greatest Batswana of all is, of course, Seretse Khama, Botswana's only Prime Minister, and its first President, who tragically died far too young. Seretse and his supporters put in place the mechanisms for making Botswana what it is today, far and away the most successful post-colonial country in Africa, greatly aided, of course, by the diamonds discovered shortly after Botswana's peaceful liberation from imperial control.
Quite what Mma Ramotswe makes of Seretse’s sons, one of whom is president at the time of writing, and both of whom have some very serious questions to answer about their probity, is something we don't really know, although she does sometimes show some disdain for the men who run Botswana today.
Another outstanding feature of Mma Ramotswe is her great humanity. She empathises with people, and she is sensitive to their needs and failings. Wrongdoing is not necessarily a sign of a bad person. There are many factors that can lead a person down the wrong track, and sometimes a strictly legally-based outcome is not what is needed.
Mma Ramotswe's life has not, despite appearances, been all love and roses. As a young woman she was swept off her feet by a cheating, lying, overly handsome and brilliant jazz trumpet playing root rat, with the emphasis on "rat". Ignoring, for once, her father's opinion, she married him.
Oh, I just remembered, "root rat" is an old australianism. In Australia, "root" does not mean "barrack" or "support" as it does in the US. Oh, no, it is a colloquialism for .... how can I put this .... ah, yes, "having sex with someone". And a "root rat" is a man (almost always a man) who is constantly chasing sex with multiple women (usually). As a tenor sax player myself, nothing in this description surprises me about a trumpet player.
This trumpet player, Note Mkoti by name, was also a sexist, violent brute, with thought of no-one other than himself. He beat Precious regularly, and she tolerated it, as so many women do, thinking it is their lot, despite the good example her father provided of an alternative to the kind of life she had with Note. Eventually she became pregnant, and looked forward lovingly and longingly to becoming a mother.
But near term, Note beat her again, causing her to be hospitalised. Her baby came unexpectedly. She was able to hold her for the short time the baby lived. Because of the beating and the physical trauma of this particular birth, she was no longer able to have children. She was devastated. Note was nowhere to be seen, completely uninterested in the fate of either Precious, or their baby.
Precious returned home, on her own, rightly confident that Obed would look after her without saying "I told you so." Don't worry, I'm not going to tell all of Precious's life story, and spoil all the books. I'm just going up to Obed's death, Precious's inheritance, and her establishment of the Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.
I don't recall Precious's age being mentioned, but she is older and even wiser than she would be in her early twenties, when I assume she lost her poor little baby. And when she is convincing people she is wise enough to be a private detective, added to various suggestions she is still of childbearing age, if she were able to bear children, I figure she was maybe in her mid-thirties, perhaps somewhere around 35-36 at the start of the novels.
So, I'm afraid that in what I think was her mid-thirties Precious had to bear the great grief of her father coughing himself to death at much too early an age. It is not entirely clear what the wonderful Obed died of. It is described as an illness of miners, and was probably silicosis.
Because of the atrocious conditions in which they worked, and which the mining companies knowingly allowed them to work in because it was cheaper to hire new workers than improve working conditions, many miners came down with this cruel but easily preventable disease. They breathe in very fine dust particles, which set and solidify in the lungs, eventually causing their lungs to slow and finally stop working. The sufferers, unless someone kind kills them humanely first, spend their last moments desperately gasping for breaths which never come.
The second lung disease that badly afflicts miners in South Africa is that great disease of poverty, also preventable if the mining companies could be bothered, tuberculosis, TB, consumption, as it is variously called. This also usually strikes at the lungs, and the sufferer eventually, unless that same kind person kills them first, dies coughing up blood and rotting pieces of their lungs.
Sandy doesn't feel the need to give us all this gory detail, and why the heck should he? His books are entertainments, not bitter angry treatises on the very long, seemingly, sometimes, endless list of the world's unkindnesses. And besides, he would probably not have Mma Ramotswe performing what many of us would regard as the greatest kindness of ending her father's life, as, as you will already know if you've read about Sandy, he does not agree with euthanasia. And it has to be said that Mma Ramotswe, as Sandy writes her, would probably be incapable of performing such a deed. But then again, with the strength she so often displays, she might have been able to do it.
But, yet once more, if she had offed her dad, as a kindness, we would not have had his rather darkly amusing last moments. Precious's dad breathes out that he gives permission for her to sell some of the cattle to finance a business, thinking she would plan for a little roadside shop, or something similar. He should have known his daughter better. She excitedly tells him she thinks she'll open a detective agency. Whatever Obed was going to say to go along with the rather surprised look on his face, perhaps rather fortunately died on his lips.
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