In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

It was International Women’s Day (IWD). I was sitting on a chair at my colleague’s house, idly scanning their bookshelf, when I saw In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, and the title piqued my interest. Perhaps it was because I was quite literally in the company of cheerful ladies myself, or maybe it was the IWD spirit, but I hoped it might offer the kind of deep, resonant female friendship vibe I had found in Everything I Know About Love.

When I asked my colleague about it, their response only fueled my curiosity. So when they kindly offered me the book in exchange for a review, I jumped at the chance.

My colleague was particularly curious about my thoughts on the writer’s (who, by the way, is not African) accuracy in depicting life in Botswana. Since most of my experience with African literature is centred on Nigeria, I was curious too. I knew from the start that my limited knowledge of Botswana meant I couldn’t truly judge the cultural accuracy. However, I still wanted to see how the story unfolded. To be fair, I will take any opportunity to read African literature—dem dey write good books, mehn!

So, what about the book?

Well, first, I was amused by the car-scraping story and the driver running away. It reminded me of a similar story I had read on the Amsterdam subreddit just days earlier. Humans are the same everywhere, whether in Botswana, Amsterdam, or even Antarctica…

So, yeah, the beginning felt promising… until it wasn’t! Overall, I finished the book disappointed. I struggled to see the connection between the title and the storyline itself. The “cheerful ladies” felt almost secondary in a narrative that seemed to move everywhere and nowhere at once.

There was no single, clear plot to follow. Everything seemed to be happening simultaneously, from the pumpkin situation to the Charlie issue, the Zambian embezzler, and the stolen van. Instead of building toward something substantial, the book felt more like a scattered “week in the life” of these characters.

What made this more frustrating was that the book introduced genuinely interesting topics, only to abandon them. For example, the girls-and-teacher situation could have been a strong, central element of the story. Yet just like the other threads in the book, it faded away before it could fully develop. For a book centred on a detective agency, even the detective work itself felt oddly shallow and underexplored.

Then there’s the relationship aspect between Mma Makutsi and Phuti Radiphuti, which felt so sus. It made me wonder if this is a reflection of how relationships are portrayed or even approached in Botswana? At one point, I wondered whether Grace would have accepted his proposal if he hadn’t owned a furniture company. It gave the typical, practical, safety-first arrangement, which, given the author’s portrayal of Grace throughout the book, felt like a huge injustice to her and made you wonder how different she really is from the “50 percent girls” she criticised earlier.

On the positive side, I did enjoy some of the linguistic touches, such as the use of Mma and Rra as salutations, which were new to me. The author also did a decent job of grounding the setting without overwhelming the reader with descriptions. However, as I read through the names, I couldn’t help but wonder if people from other countries feel the same mix of curiosity and confusion when they try to pronounce my own name. lol

In the end, I finished the book partly because, as with Past Perfect, I have a stubborn habit of not leaving books unfinished. Perhaps the other books in the series are better, because this one simply wasn’t my vibe. I’m also slightly amused that it has a rating above 4.1 on Goodreads. Maybe my standards are too high, or maybe you need to be part of the Alexander McCall Smith fan club to appreciate it fully.

At one point in the book, the author writes that “a life without stories would be no life at all.” The idea is that stories bind us to one another and to the land. In that sense, perhaps the narrative’s scattered nature was intentional, a collection of small stories mirroring the rhythms of everyday life.

But if that was the goal, it didn’t quite work for me, because, more than anything on the last page, I was pissed and relieved to be done and ready to forget I’d ever read it.