Finding Our African Hearts
Last night, unable to sleep and too tired to read I surfed through my television’s On Demand selections to find, to my delight, that HBO has made a series of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. A serial series of ten novels written by British author Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is located in Gabarone, Botswana. Founded by a Motswana woman, Mma Precious Ramotswe with funds from cattle left to her following her father’s death, the stories take us through the adventures of the each character, in the process teaching us as much about their lives, peculiarities and triumphs as it does about the factors surrounding the mysteries that Precious must solve.
Last night’s installment was called The Boy with the African Heart and featured an American woman who had, after ten years of sadness, her husband’s death and retirement from her job, returned to Botswana to investigate the disappearance and likely death of her only son, Michael. A Stanford graduate with a bent for social justice and commitment to the creation of a better world, Michael had moved to Botswana to help build an environmental sustainable garden and community outside the Kalahari Desert. He wrote home glowing letters about his successes, the garden community’s absolute beauty, his friendships, and unexpected his inner peace. This he called his African heart. It was a concept that his mother intrinsically believed herself to understand. An African American young man had moved to Africa and felt at home.
Trying to investigate a ten year old disappearance is a challenge. Precious Ramotswe began by visiting the now decimated garden community with Michael’s mother. Abandoned for years, it appeared to the naked eye that an investigation would not necessarily find much. So close to the desert, were Michael to have died, a body, sadly, would long ago have been a treat for desert animals.
As I watched Precious work, it soon became clear exactly what an African heart entailed. As a detective, Precious listened closely to the echoes of the past in her attempts help the American mother heal. Healing, not solving the disappearance, was her first objective. Precious used all five of her senses as tools in her work. She looked, smelled and stopped to feel what it was like to be in the garden. When she listened it was to what might be heard on the wind. She began to poke around through the detritus of the abandoned garden community and found a few atypical clues to Michael’s disappearance. She asked his mother if she was willing to forgive potential perpetrators of the crime – where to be any - no matter who they might turn out to be. Michael’s mother looked at Precious as if she were crazy. “Of course not”, she said. “I’m an American!”
Precious explained to her that Africans work diligently to extend their hearts to those who have done wrong and to forgive them. This, Precious said, is the “African heart.” As it happened Michael had died accidentally but his death had been covered up by a woman he had married unbeknownst to all but one person in the garden community. Michael’s wife was ashamed to have covered up the death but was pregnant at the time and had been blackmailed by a man jealous of Michael’s successes and in love with her. In meeting her daughter-in-law and grandson, named for her son, Michael’s mother uncovered the capacities for love and forgiveness in her African heart.
While in the American system of jurisprudence it is illegal not to report potential crimes, it is interesting to think about the possibility of an alternate system of justice, one that operates in on the extension of forgiveness. And certainly, without breaking the law, there is no reason not to do it. In our families, in our workplaces, in all of our social relationships. American society is filled with contention. The courts are clogged with small claims cases made by mean-spirited people. Discovering our African hearts might just change how we together, love each other and forgive. Each other and ourselves.