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Ladies’ Night
Courtesy of HBO
Three cheers for HBO’s No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, a brilliant new show that captures Africa in all of its complexities, and its majestic sleuth, Jill Scott.
HBO’s continual success comes because it is able to maintain unbending faith in the human powers of art while remaining shrewdly aware of the public’s perpetual appetite for fluff, vulgarity, and bloated trivia. In The Corner and The Wire, HBO also led in the complexity of how Negroes were rendered, from high-minded, officious, and cynical all the way down to slimeballs competing for high positions in the drug world of absolute corruption.
In her form and confidence, Jill Scott embodies Bessie Smith’s proud claim of being a big fat mama with the meat just a-shaking off her bones.
Now, the cable channel has taken on Africa, bringing forward what makes the continent both troubling and inspiring. In Sunday night’s first look at the new series The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, we see exactly what makes that land so intriguing. Like the old American West of cities and technology contrasted by ruthless desperados and wild Indians, modern African functions in two time periods. One can turn around in a modern African city and be right inside of our contemporary moment, then drive for a half an hour or so and go back to the Middle Ages. Out there in the bush, life is as rough as the skin of a horny toad, witchcraft is practiced and believed in, and the pervasive quality of unsanitary conditions proves that the germ theory has not made the cut.
So the truth is that black Africa is as savage as it is overwhelmingly beautiful, as backward in its superstitions and genocidal tribal hatreds as it is modern and sophisticated. That is too much for most to make anything out of other than an airbag full of indigestible atrocities or a fairy-tale continent of such impossible goodness that it becomes as inhuman as Marxist or racist simplifications.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, however, has on its side the same thing that Africans and every other people in the world know: Life is not self-destructive by any means. Life is always more on the side of itself than against itself, no matter how hard things can be or can get. If there is a way to prevail over destruction, life will find it, which may finally be its ultimate definition.
That affirmative sense of life pervades The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, perhaps most in the many special surprises of nuance and feeling offered by pop singer Jill Scott, one of those least diminished by the protracted adolescence that tends to characterize pop music and the people who make it. Perhaps naturally, her Botswana detective Precious Romatswe is a woman, not an overgrown child.
Scott does not come off as a conventionally conceived gigglebox made of blubber. In her form and confidence, this African sleuth embodies Bessie Smith’s proud claim of being a big fat mama with the meat just a-shaking off her bones: and every time she shook, sang Bessie, a skinny girl lost her home.
Black women in film or on television, exactly like black men, are rarely given an epic range of human feeling. Scott’s part provides room for the supple mind as well the variegated heart, and she brings it. Her accent is very good and the detective's moods have the particularity of Africa while remaining universal in the way that art intended to speak to the world does if its makers are good enough. This is particularly true of her relationship with her assistant, Grace Makutsi, who is conceived and played by Anika Noni Rose with extreme brilliance, ranging from a comic and suffocating primness to the almost tearful passion that comes of grand camaraderie. Rose is one of those phenomenal Negro American actresses who can do just about anything. She has certainly arrived at the right time. Forty years ago, Rose would have been lost in the shuffle like Gloria Foster and Abbey Lincoln were, or, even 20 years later, denied the majestic reception and the roles appropriate for a talent the magnitude of Angela Bassett's. But this is the Obama era and anything now seems possible.
It is fitting that this is the last work of writer and director Anthony Minghella, who was especially good at going where others had not. Under his direction, Kristin Scott Thomas became an alabaster hot mama and made it clear to us in The English Patient that all of the heat and scalding tenderness basic to a tormented romance had not ignored the hearts of highly refined English ladies. Now Minghella shows us an African woman and a black cast that does what the detective story is supposed to do: Treat the facts of life the way the blues does.
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Paul Schrodt is a writer living in New York City. He has contributed to New York magazine, Radar, and Esquire.com.
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As vice chairman of Public Strategies and president of Maverick Media, Mark McKinnon has helped meet strategic challenges for candidates, corporations and causes, including George W. Bush, John McCain, Governor Ann Richards, Charlie Wilson, Lance Armstrong, and Bono. McKinnon is co-chair of Arts & Labs, a collaboration between technology and creative communities that have embraced today's rich Internet environment to deliver innovative and creative digital products to consumers.
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. Next year the first volume of his long-awaited biography of Charlie Parker will appear.
The Trouble with Soul Train
Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. Next year the first volume of his long-awaited biography of Charlie Parker will appear.
Shut Up, Scarlett!
Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. Next year the first volume of his long-awaited biography of Charlie Parker will appear.
snapdragon
hooray!
oldsocialworker
One of the best book series I have ever read. I hope the show is as enjoyable.
siouxtexas
Love the books! I hope HBO does them justice and can't wait to see this laudable series come to the screen.
flyoverland
Just watched it, or at least 20 minutes of it. Thank God The Tudors start next Sunday.
socialworklady
Just finished watching the show. Loved it!
Visually stunning, funny, sweet, tender, heart-wrenching and hope-inducing.
And the acting is stellar.
Brava, Ma Ramatswe!
GREGORYABUTLER
Earth to Stanley Crouch, come in Stanley!!!
Maybe somebody forgot to tell you - but it's not 1965!
We're not "Negroes" anymore, we're African American now!!!!!
Oh yeah, and they let us vote now too (one of us is president now, you know - maybe you've seen him on TV - that man named Barack Obama?)
As far as all that racist garbage about how savage Africa is - if I didn't know you were African American, I'd say you were a damned Klansman!
Botswana is one of the most modern and developed nations on the continent of Africa - they have a stable government, regular democratic elections, the best public school system on the continent (better than South Africa's) and they are managing the AIDS crisis as well or better as any other African country.
As for the series - I've actually had South African friends, so I had to turn away after about 2 minutes of Ms Scott's terrible impression of a Tswana accent!
Hey, HBO - how about making a TV series about Africa with ACTUAL AFRICAN ACTORS in the lead parts?
Stanley, as usual, you are a cultural reactionary and a self hating African American - you've lived down to my already low expectations of you!
GREGORYABUTLER
And another thing - as far as the poverty, disease and war that has made life so horrible in much of the continent, we cannot forget the slave trade, colonialism and the IMF.
Much of Africa was ravaged by slave traders - and slaver-inspired wars, for about 300 years.
This was followed by a full scale military invasion (the "Scramble For Africa") and 100 years of colonialist looting of African resources.
When independence was won in the 1960's, most African countries were burdened with massive foreign debt (and, in the case of the Congo, Angola, Mozambique and Sudan, full scale foreign military intervention) - a debt burden that the International Monetary Fund made even worse in the 1980's.
THAT's why Africa is doing so poorly, Stanley.... foreign meddling and oppression, not "African savagery"!!!!
This comment has been removed by The Daily Beast's editors.
smdunne
GREGORYABUTLER, the savagery in Africa - children being dismembered in witch craft rituals, baby girls being raped as a supposed cure against AIDS etc., have nothing to do with the IMF, foreign meddling or the business of slavery. There is savagery in Africa, it is a fact.
That is not the whole story though. I love the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books, and I very much enjoyed the first episode of the dramatization. Jill Scott and the rest of the cast are wonderful.
Mr. Crouch, please never desert us, the rantings of the GREGORYABUTLER's of this world would be a poor substitute.
drkaza12
"Life is always more on the side of itself than against itself, no matter how hard things can be or can get. If there is a way to prevail over destruction, life will find it, which may finally be its ultimate definition".
Stanely what you said in those two sentences was worth the entire article, and bless you for calling attention to a great show which i hope everyone gives a chance. the shows a jewel attempting through a series of gordian events tethering innocence to corruptions, and life to destruction, not only within the same scene, but also sharing the same breath, and I couldn't take my eyes off of it.
and as for flyoverland; keep flying till you find a reason to touch ground; and GREGORYABUTLER; keep digging, till you either find your spot or your pony.
pricklypear
"Life is always more on the side of itself than against itself, no matter how hard things can be or can get. If there is a way to prevail over destruction, life will find it, which may finally be its ultimate definition".
-------------------------------------------------------
Choose Life!
terry23
Please pay no attention to the Gregory's of the world. Thanks for another great article...
Softshade
Stanley's review is very telling, although there is some truth somewhere between GREGORYABUTLER's comments and what Stanley has to say. (Drop the foolish word negro, Stanley!) A lot of Africans cringe when African Americans play African roles, because the subtleties of language are very hard to approximate and Setswana is one of the most intricate and difficult African languages to pronounce! It leaves them feeling like the rest of the world tells their stories and in a media and image sense, they are once again colonized by the West. There are a lot of great actors in Southern Africa, and they feel slighted in not being given opportunities in major productions about Africa. That being said, "The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency" does capture the positive humanity, culture, issues, rhythm and beauty of Africa, and it's comedy as well. It's a breakthrough production... I must also say that the reality of child-kidnappings and muti killings is a sad, strange and brutal reality of Africa, although it is only a miniscule part of the vast mosaic of African society. Nonetheless Africa has much to teach the rest of the world, and a production like this is just the beginning of opening a door on Ubuntu and cultural expressions that Africans practice in common and sometimes astounding ways...
Thank you.
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