Adebowale Oriku

Several months ago, the film No 1 Lady Detective was well-advertised before it was shown on BBC, it was the usual bubbly buffer between programmes. It was unusual to see a feature film set in Africa on British TV, not even on freewheeling Channel 4. I prepared myself to watch it, if not when it was shown, then later on iplayer.

I knew about the director a bit. I’d seen his brilliant The English Patient and Cold Mountain. The late Anthony Minghella was one of the most accomplished of British film directors, so I thought it was fine for artistic balance that he’d pictorialised a novel set in Africa, with Africans playing all the roles, lacking a white man or woman winging in as deus ex machina.

The Lady Detective novels are written by the Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith. I remember lucking onto the well-borrowed third novel in the series - Morality for Beautiful Girls - in a South London library, a paperback with a sort of neo-impressionist depiction of an African scene.

I thought it wasn’t really a bad book, decidedly too chummy, if not yummy, for me, quite a departure from the hardboiled crime fiction I’d been used to, a not so guilty pleasure that began with James Hadley Chase many years ago. Anyway, I had for some time been weaned off crime and mystery fiction before I saw the novel. However, the African theme and scene in Morality had made me to read two more of the novels. Then I’d found no time really to read them again, even though there are ten of the series now. I would certainly have devoured everything if the books had come out when I was a teenager. At my age, you can only spread yourself so thin.

Minghella’s small-screen interpretation of the Lady Detective is not bad. Not the director’s best shot at filmmaking, though. The picture is competently, even strikingly, made, with funny bits here and there, and I think one can forgive it a lot of its bagginess, considering it’s only TV. 

Buxom American soul and gospel singer, Jill Scott, plays the lady detective. She is ably, or over-ably, supported as secretary/personal-assistant by Anika Noni Rose, an American stage actor. I am still intrigued by these two women’s verisimilitude of delivery. They nail to a T the Southern African distinctive tonemes. These two are perhaps the only actors from so far a place. There is the South African actor/entertainer, Desmond Dube, who plays a gay character, a rarity in African drama. And Lucian Msamati, the Britain-born Zimbabwe-raised actor, plays a mechanic called JBL Matekoni, this character is also major in the film as friend and torch-carrier for the lady detective.

And there is the British-Nigerian David Oyelowo. Oyelowo is one of the visible black theatrical performers in Britain. Besides being a Shakespearean actor, he’s done a lot of feature films and television drama. He starred in BBC’s Kill the Messenger, sustaining the role of an anguished black man, hagridden by writhing identity crisis. I don’t think Oyelowo does justice to his part in No 1 Ladies’ Detective. For one thing, he fails to be accentually convincing as a Batswana.

Just like the person who plays a Nigerian in the first of the episodes of 13 begun last Sunday - for which the one shown several months ago was a taster - failed to be tonally convincing.

My desire to see the first in the series was not damped by my slight disappointment at the taster. Why not see it if I could – wasn’t it about Africa? I had to put aside my feelings that the series might be a further simplification of the uncomplicated primary-coloured Africa in the novels.

No, Botswana’s capital Gaborone is neither Lagos nor Johannesburg, but the sort of crimes the Lady Detective solves are quite tame, and you’d know the author is making a conscious effort to serve Africa as a cake overdressed with icing, although with a slightly dark earthy core. With my knowledge of three of the novels and the film pilot, I hoped against excessive schmaltziness in the series, especially the first that I was about to watch.

There are two subplots to the first TV episode. The lady detective is hired to find a lost dog; she is also hired by a woman to find her lost husband – a common motif in the novels. But the main plot is catching a crooked Nigerian dentist – sorry, no pun. The detective, Mma Precious Ramotswe, wants her teeth checked and someone mentions a Nigerian dentist.

When Precious Ramotswe (Jill Scott) tells her assistant/secretary, the pernickety, prim-and-proper Mma Grace Makutsi (Anika Noni Rose), the latter flinches at the mention of the word Nigerian. She repeats the N-word quizzically, and when the detective waves aside her objection to visiting a Nigerian dentist, she says something about the possibility of the Nigerian dentist stealing something from her bag – a line obviously thrown in to elicit a smile or chuckle from those who are not Nigerians. Because for one reason or the other, I do not find the innuendo that a Nigerian dentist in a foreign country might filch something from his client funny. This statement is the tone-setter, it tells you Nigerians are on trial again.  

But hey, I told myself, this is only a TV drama. Suspend your disbelief, man! And am I not a believer in artists taking liberties?

Anyway, the female detective goes to the Nigerian dentist, curiously called Dr Komoti, a name that does not sound ‘Nigerian.’ (I might not be correct here, certain Nigerian names - like my surname, a dialectal Yoruba word - may be surprised on you. You’d find it among Japanese and, nearer home, among Kenyans too.) 

After a lie-down on the couch, worked over by the dentist, the detective is convinced the Nigerian has done a professional job with her teeth, and I begin to think: maybe this is all meant to redeem the reputation of Nigerians.  

But on her way out the dentist’s secretary whispers to the detective about the strangeness of Dr Komoti, she says the man sometimes behaves as if crazed, agitated and jumpy, carrying out painful and bloody jobs on clients’ teeth. This amazes the detective who then decides to investigate further.

She discovers that the Nigerian dentist flits between South Africa and Botswana, a to-ing and fro-ing too fleet as to defy everything Einstein says about time and space in his General Relativity. The detective follows the Nigerian across the border into South Africa and discovers that he has an identical twin who is obviously not a dentist. She even finds the lookalike twin in the process of drilling the teeth of an agonised client and letting so much blood. Apparently one of the twins is a dentist and the other is a quack.

The crime is solved and the Nigerian dentist is handed over to the police. Now if the dentist had been made out as anyone from anywhere except Botswana where the film is set, it would certainly have raised my eyebrow a bit. Not that a dentist or doctor from one country cannot go to another and behave badly, even a Nigerian dentist or doctor.

But a Nigerian is often fair game when picking anyone as vector of fraudulent behaviour, even among Africans in Africa. Now South Africa, Botswana’s neighbour, is in the grip of extreme and violent crimes and sundry vices, so is there not any chance of a South African twin dentist doing such a subtle diddle? Or a Zimbabwean dentist? Or even a Botswana whose common temperament is that of laidback simplicity, according to the Ladies’ Detective novels.

This is not the first TV drama in Britain that has shown Nigerians as being the great crooks or shysters of the continent, if not of the world. I think the slick BBC drama Hustle had once slipped fiddling Nigerians into one of its episodes. And there was one about a Nigerian child-ritual ring operating in the UK and Ireland. 

And in all of the dramas it’s always as if they couldn’t get a Nigerian to play any of the ‘Nigerian’ roles. Of course, why can’t a Ghanaian or a Senegalese play a Nigerian in a film; or a Nigerian play a Sierra Leonean? And, certainly, they can do it well with enough talent. But the guy who plays Dr Komoti in the Ladies Detective only hams it up, very bad acting indeed. (This is even pardonable, considering that the drama is meant to be a dumbed down African version of CSI.)  

I still hope a day would come when British - read Western - filmmakers would deign to go to Nigeria to seek Nigerian talents for films about Nigeria. After all, the very British film that is Slumdog Millionaire sourced the majority of its cast from India. And I am pretty certain that if such time came Nigerian actors would not mind the dollops of negativities the script might pack about Nigerians.

Are such negativities justified? Could there be a Dr Komoti from Nigeria in Botswana, playing Dr Jekyll to his twin’s Mr Hyde. Possibly not. And possibly. There is no labouring it that we have contributed - and are still contributing - to the Nigerian behavioral status quo. Of course tens of thousands yahoo-yahoo boys are still finding ways to send their daft crapshoots through the internet and there are other folks devising other artifices.

And the drama about child-killing ritualists is not altogether fictional, it is only art imitating life. The yet unsolved case of a boy’s torso found on the banks of the Thames together with accoutrements of ritual, with a cloth bearing a Yoruba name, had indeed inspired the drama.

No, I don’t feel any indignation that a Nigerian dentist is shown up as a crook in a British-made film, it’s really pointless working oneself into a lather about these things. In spite of the odds, I believe there are people out there who know that Nigeria has an army of talents in various walks of life. Fuming about the existence of a cabal of BBC, CNN, FOX and other broadcasters out to sully the image of Nigerians seems rather paranoid to me. It brings on the image of Don Quixote battling at the windmill, an immense windmill for that matter. And though this may sound rather millenarian, perhaps the scarlet impression of Nigeria as avaricious ‘hell’ will be mellowed one day. We must also remember that for every crooked Nigerian dentist there are several thousands who are just ordinary professionals.

TV dramas, like most newspaper articles, are ephemeral stuff. Even as I write, few viewers would be having bad dreams about the mock-sinister Dr Komoti, the Nigerian dentist. But then again, even the two media I mentioned above have a suggestibility that runs deep, something that might make an introduction of myself as a Nigerian bring up the rather inane image of Dr Komoti.  

Robot  # 1 | 24.03.2009 07:46

Adebowale Oriku Several months ago, the film No 1 Lady Detective series was well-advertised before it was shown on BBC, it was the usual bubbly buffer between programmes. It was unusual to see a feature film set in Africa on British TV, not even on freewheeling Channel 4. I prepared myself to watch it, if not when it was shown, then later on iplayer. I knew about the director a bit. I’d seen his brilliant The English Patient and Cold Mountain. The late Anthony Minghella was one of the most accomplished of British film directors, so I thought it was fine for artistic balance that he’dpictorialised a novel set in Africa, with Africans playing all the roles, lacking a white man or woman winging in as deus ex machina. The Lady Detective novels are written by the Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith. I remember lucking onto the well-borrowed third novel in the series - Morality for Beautiful Girls...Read the full article.