By RONAMBER DELONEY, Columnist & Culture Editor
Published: Issue 1, Summer 2009

This spring, HBO debuted The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. The show follows Ma Marotswe, a detective in Botswana who investigates crime. She is Botswana’s only female detective and is played by the American neo-soul superstar singer Jill Scott. Many of the actors in the show are African-born; however two of its main stars—Jill Scott and Annika Noni Rose (who plays Marotswe’s secretary)—are black American- born actresses.

The casting of these leading characters begs the question: what is the effect of portraying Africans by black Americans? What’s more, leading characters in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency defy traditional heteronormative gender roles. As an ambitious, single yet sought after female detective, Marotswe and BK, the flamboyant male hairdresser played by South African actor Desmond Dube, can be read as two radical responses to homophobia and gender-based hierarchies in Africa. A critique of conservative African culture could be read through the show’s casting of Scott and Dube. If casting African-Americans as Africans, and employing humor and stereotypes are used to invite audiences to re-think Western ideas about Botswana, and Africa (a widely misrepresented cultural landscape in Western and European history of the world), is exploiting black American identity, homosexual identity, and feminist platforms the only way to engage/entertain Western television audiences around Africa and black bodies?

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, the HBO series, is based on ten novels under the same name by British author, Alexander McCall Smith. The plot of both the novels and the television series centers on the professional and personal life of Precious Marotswe, Botswana’s only female detective. As “Ma” Marotswe, as she is addressed on the show, investigates crime in her country, viewers are introduced to African life through the adventures, moral lessons and life circumstances of the show’s characters. In the show, the prescriptive, imaginary deck of cannibals, loincloths and emaciated babies that often saturate media representations of Africa do not emerge as icons signaling what normative Western ideology has interpreted as the continued decay of an intrinsically failed continent.

Rather, one could argue that we are instead invited to look or gaze upon Africa from our living room couches by the “natives” Scott and Rose, allowing us to know and visit Africa through the show’s two main protagonists, played by African-Americans. With Scott and Rose passing as African, Botswana is transported to American households via HBO—just as the World Fairs and exhibitions of the 19th-and-20th century did to excerpts of the African continent (e.g. Hottentot Venus). The result: a reinforcement of stereotypes about Africa, African people and African culture as an easily recreated space.

Non-white bodies have been embellished within race, gender-and-class-specific frameworks throughout the history of American film. The old ways—commodity racism campaigns (Pear’s Soap) of the Reconstruction era through The Birth of A Nation’s propaganda strategies in the early 1920s to Marlon Brando’s Golden Globe nomination for his stained skin portrayal of a Mexican in The Appaloosa—did much to stifle self-authorship by minority groups, as the interests and imaginations of colonial white Americans guided on-screen portrayals of minorities. Even though countless minority filmmakers such as Oscar Mischeaux and Melvin van Peebles created work seeking to represent an authentic cultural voice, assumptions and stereotypes about black behavior continued to penetrate national psyches across the globe via contemporary television and film [see Robert Downey Jr.’s Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of Kirk Lazarus, an Australian actor in blackface portraying a black American solider in the 2008 film, Tropic Thunder.]

To cast African-Americans as African people treads thin ice on boundaries where reifying concepts of the other can easily become trendy network programming. Yes, well-known entertainers Scott and Rose act in roles that clearly intend to represent an ethnicity not their own as a strategy for attracting an audience. But it is important to remember: being African or being in Africa is not as simple as taking on a role as an African even if you are African-American.

While casting African-American actors as Africans could be a form of activism towards corrective self-authorship and a statement of solidarity through collective identity (as these two groups of people have indeed been forged through a similar trajectory of oppressive, uneven social positioning) a question of hierarchy still emerges where the culprit lies beyond the marginal boundaries of both groups.

I like The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. The show’s writing is innovative and refreshing. I cannot recall ever seeing a cable television network reach out to a Western public from within the nuanced African cultural perspective in this way through a television show. The set is believable albeit compact (one city center holds a school, beauty shop, the detective agency and other marketplaces) and the storytelling element narrated by the local people who employ Marotswe reminds me of didactic African fables told in grade school. Every episode ends with a moral lesson and the depictions of rural Botswana life and women in nontraditional occupations feels as if the show achieves a fair blend of what is familiar and what is unknown in contemporary social discourse about Africa. I, however, have never been to Botswana and cannot confirm what is real and what is TV, which is ultimately the danger in a show like this. TAP