Indeed …

… A Simpler Life - Taki's Magazine - Taki's Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The question arises as to why his books about an amateur detective agency in Botswana, run by a lady of “traditional build,” should have become so popular. To this I think the answer is clear: He depicts a society that is in many respects better, more free, gentler, and in a sense more civilized than our own, namely that of Botswana. No doubt his Botswana is partly mythological, a land in which people are naughty rather than wicked, and where even the bad tend to be polite, but Botswana is indeed the most successful country in Africa, free since independence of the political pathology that has plagued so much of the continent. Botswana has all the virtues of African societies without their vices; its people indulge in those peccadilloes without which life would be very dull indeed, and which furnish the subject matter of that most important of all human activities, gossip, but are mostly free of the vicious hatreds that seem more than ever to gnaw into our own societies like a cancerous ulcer.