01 A city read before it is seen
The author, Alexander McCall Smith, was not writing from outside. In 1981 he returned to southern Africa to help found the law school at the University of Botswana and to teach there. That university's main campus sits beside the Main Mall, in the drawn centre of the city. Which is to say: the books came out of this place, not out of remote research.
That origin explains why the city of the books is recognisable on the ground. It is not a generic capital with the names changed: the geography works, the distances work and the weather works. What you need is to know where the map ends and the invention begins.
02 What is real and what is not
Tlokweng Road exists. It is a main road running east out of the centre towards the village of Tlokweng, across the river. In the books, the garage belonging to the protagonist's husband stands on that road. The garage is invented; the road can be driven, and it is exactly what you would expect: dual carriageway, dry-grass median, low brick blocks and a hill at the far end.
The President Hotel, which appears in the series, also exists: it stands in the centre, a step from the Main Mall. Zebra Drive, on the other hand — the street where the protagonist lives, and probably the most-quoted address in all the books — does not appear in the open mapping databases. It is best treated as what it almost certainly is: an invented street with a plausible name.
The rule is simple and it holds: the streets are real, the businesses are not. You can drive where the characters drive, but you cannot walk into anywhere of theirs.
03 Kgalewood
There is one more layer, and it is physical. The BBC and the American network HBO shot a series based on the books, starring Jill Scott, and they shot it in Botswana, not in a studio somewhere else. The pilot was written by Richard Curtis and Anthony Minghella, and directed by Minghella.
Filming was set up at the foot of Kgale Hill, on the city's south-western edge, and the set earned the nickname "Kgalewood". It is the only case I know of a television set giving a nickname to a 1,287-metre hill.
04 How to use it on the ground
First, a warning against literary tourism of the wrong kind. There is no signposted route, no plaques, no house to visit, and hunting the locations one by one leads to quick disappointment: half of them do not exist. This fact is not for building an itinerary; it is for adjusting how you look.
What does work is the opposite: read one book in the series before you come, and then look for nothing. Walk the Main Mall, drive Tlokweng Road, climb Kgale one morning. What you recognise is not addresses but harder things to manufacture: the pace of the city, the short distances, the way people here talk about rain.
And there is a side effect that pays for the whole trip. Gaborone receives few visitors and almost none come because of something they read. Saying you are here partly because of some books tends to open a conversation, because the series is known here — and because anyone who has read it knows exactly which parts the author made up.
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