I've been reading the first book in the long-running series, "The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency" by Alexander McCall Smith. It's not something I would normally pick up, but my late mom was very fond of the series so when I found the first book for a dollar in a thrift store, I couldn't say no.
It's wonderful. Honestly. The whole thing is a testament to simple living, but this evening I came across one passage that really resonated with me and I think you'll enjoy it too.
Before you read it, a quick note - the series is set in Botswana, so most of the characters are black Africans. When they refer to white people in this passage and most other times it comes up, I take it to be a generalization about Western culture. Basically what I'm saying is that if you're going to cry racism, please just keep it to yourself. I don't think that's what's going on here; it's a tremendously empathetic book with tremendously empathetic characters.
"She would go back there, she thought, when she had worked long enough to retire. She would buy a house, or build one perhaps, and ask some of her cousins to live with her. They would grow melons on the lands and might even have a small shop in the village; and every morning she could sit in front of her house and sniff at the wood-smoke and look forward to spending the day talking with her friends. How sorry she felt for white people, who couldn't do any of this, and who were always dashing around and worrying themselves over things that were going to happen anyway. What use was it having all that money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle eating grass? None, in her view; none at all, and yet they did not know it. Every so often you met a white person who understood, who realised how things really were; but these people were few and far between and the other white people often treated them with suspicion."
(If you're looking for it: page 162 of the paperback copy of the "First Anchor Books Edition")
Submitted November 21, 2019 at 08:37PM by homestead-dreaming https://ift.tt/35sx6yP
