Book Worm

Published on Friday 21 March 2008 19:11

Uneasy truths

IS Alexander McCall Smith guilty of stereotyping the Kalahari bushmen in his best-selling No 1 Ladies Detective Agency books?

That's the claim made by Survival International, a London-based pressure group which campaigns on behalf of the bushmen and other tribal peoples. It takes particular exception to the notion that the nomadic bushmen have been known to bury their infants alive if the baby's mother dies – a practice McCall Smith briefly mentions in Tears of the Giraffe, the second novel in his best-selling series set in Botswana.

Perpetuating such myths, Survival argues, has the effect of stereotyping tribal people as barbaric and primitive.

Unfortunately for Survival, there is plenty of evidence of this practice. Indeed, I have seen it with my own eyes in the medical reports on two bushmen children at the SoS Children's Village orphanage at Twokleng, near Gabarone. Apart from the fact that both are girls, their story perfectly mirrors those of the children McCall Smith's protagonist, Mma Ramotswe, adopts from the "orphan farm" in Tears of the Giraffe. One of them, aged six, rescued her sister, then 18 months old, from being buried alive after their mother had died in the Kalahari.

Before I saw their medical records, I had assumed the story was made up. "Not a bit of it," the orphanage's director told me. "Every word of it is true."

Survival International, it seems to me, owe McCall Smith an apology.

AYE WRONG!

THERE are so many book festivals these days that perhaps it's inevitable that writers get them mixed up. Just before finishing his reading a week ago at the StAnza poetry festival in St Andrews, Michael Schmidt politely thanked Glasgow's Aye Write! festival (at which he'd read the previous week) for inviting him. Embarrassment all round, before StAnza festival director Brian Johnstone reminded everyone that they were in St Andrews, and that anyway, his festival had booked Schmidt first.

CLEVER MOVES

TOO late for inclusion on this week's children's books page, but no picture book has intrigued us half as much as Gallop! a "scanimation" book by American Rufus Butler Seder, in which various animals "move" across the page as you open it. At 9.99 from Workman Publishing, it's good value too. – DR