If We Are Too Small to See or You Have Forgotten: A postcolonial response to modern representations of the San in Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alexander McCall Smith’s enormously popular fiction series set in Botswana (2000-11) appears on superficial analysis to represent the San people benignly, even affectionately. Neil Graves (2010) submits that The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency achieves an image of “untainted and uncorrupted” Botswana through a “three-stage process of engagement, disarmament and dismissal, leaving behind a saccharine utopian Western fantasy of primitive primordial Africa” (15). However, deconstruction via a postcolonial lens shows the depictions in this text to be insidiously harmful in the light of the San’s social and political disenfranchisement in Botswana since independence. Six tropes from David Spurr’s seminal work The Rhetoric of Empire (1993) are deployed to position the various representations of the San children in this series firmly within a postcolonial critique, since such classifications clearly define the particular nuances and levels of the characters’ literary depictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".