Seven years ago, the production team promised it would be a tourism site for Gaborone, but today the temporary model village where the internationally renowned No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency was shot stands a dilapidated and unsecured site.
The movie and series set was said to be a good development for the country’s movie industry as the international spotlight was shining on Botswana.
The series was broadcast on one of the world’s leading Networks, the BBC, and it was based on a series of novels of the same name by author Alexander McCall Smith. The movie/series was the first international movie to be shot in Botswana.
In an interview with a local weekly in 2007, Johnny Breedt, who was the Head of Production Design, responsible for setting up model villages, market areas and infrastructure where certain sets of the movie were shot, was quoted saying that when the movie was complete, “the infrastructure shall be protected so that tourists from all over the world could visit and generate revenue for the country”.?”After the movie is complete, the infrastructure shall be kept and protected for tourist attraction. The plan is to have the No.1 Ladies tour and in the future, the locations will be able to take in a lot of people who visit the country. This film has generated a lot of interest for Botswana and from my knowledge, tourists are already coming here to view the sites. Botswana will be like Rome, where a lot of people are visiting to see the Da Vince Code movie setting locations,” said Breedt.
The movie as well as the series are said to have received a lot of positive reviews from the international community. The Botswana government invested about P30 million pula into the project.
According to Botswana Tourism Organisation (BTO) spokesperson, Keitumetse Setlang, the BTO has in the past expressed interest in developing the location into a tourism site but faced financial difficulties because this was around the time of the global recession.
“However it’s not like all is lost because we have tourism packages planned around the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency experience in Gaborone and the rest of Botswana, so tour operators can still sell tours of the places that were mentioned in the first book,” said Setlang.
She explained that although it would have been ideal for it to be turned into a tourism site, the location is not exactly part of the book, and it doesn’t mean that a tourist cannot have the full Mma-Ramotswe experience as described in the book.
