The opening sentence in Botswana Time, the new book by Will Randall, the author of the much-praised Indian Summer, reads like a parody of travel writing: “Sliding slowly towards sleep, I closed eyes that stung with delicious heat-induced torpor.”  By the bottom of that first page we have a tin roof that “clattered and crackled”, “fat, warm raindrops”, “the African sun—surely the fiercest in the world”, a “percussive rumble of sound”, and “hill ranges of black, potent clouds rumbling and rolling.”  For all this exhaustive description—and Randall is unable to pass an elephant without burbling about this “colossal, graceful beast” or its “luminously white tusks”—there is little perception at work here.

Randall gives the game away at the outset. Botswana Time, he announces in his dedication, “is a book for optimists.” And sure enough he makes for a genial companion, always ready with a gentle quip, a jolly anecdote; he’s a bracing, Panglossian figure always eager to look on the bright side of life.

In many ways he and Botswana are made for each other. Botswana is a small, outrageously beautiful country with a lot to be pleased about. Four decades of unbroken civilian rule, progressive policies and diamonds has meant that Botswana’s economy is one of Africa’s most robust. Randall’s portrait is flushed with warmth. But the ‘Wooster in the bush’ style is inimical to complexity. There are real people here, and a real country, but they’re obscured in the good-natured fog that surrounds this book.





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