Refusing to Read: Precious Ramotswe Meets Rahab for a Cup of Bush Tea, 2016

Abstract

In this article, the biblical Rahab and I ؛ill pay a visit to Precious Rawiotswe or a cup of red bush tea. That is, the narrative of Rahab will provide a reading grid by which to analyse a Botswanan woman character. Precious Ramotswe, created and popularized by Alexander McCall Smiths’ nod. The Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. This postcolonial feminist reading of the nods analyses the characterization of Mma Ramotswe through Rahab’s context, highlighting how McCall Smith’s narrator serves as a spy who investigates, reports, and translates Botswanan cultures for the Western world by using her as his mouth piece. The article explores how McCall Smith constructs colonialising feminism through the paradigm of saving brown women from brown men. The article highlights that such a strategy depends on a colonial portrait of black men as docile and over-sexed. While The Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series has won worldwide popularity, this article highlights its dependence on colonially-cultivated tastes of constructing Africa as the Other and a readership that still yearns for such literature in the Western world. McCall Smith thus indulges in colonial images, metaphors, and narrative designs of the Other and through them sates the reading appetites of millions in the Western world.