Contract in Tswana Case Law

The material presented in this paper has been selected from records of nearly 1,950 cases tried by Tswana tribal courts in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, mainly during the period 1935-1940. The Protectorate Administration in 1935 made the keeping of written case records obligatory in all the courts officially recognized in that year as "tribunals"1; previously only the Ngwaketse had done so systematically, for 19Io-19i6 and 1928-1934. As opportunity arose while I was doing anthropological fieldwork among the Tswana (intermittently, in 1929-1943), I made an abstract, and occasionally a complete copy, of every case recorded by the chiefs' courts ("senior tribunals") and a few district courts ("junior tribunals") in the nine tribes I was able to visit.2 Of those cases, 310o related directly to breach or alleged breach of contract. I have already described in some detail elsewhere the main features of the Tswana law of contract.3 This paper should therefore be regarded primarily as a collection of case material illustrating those features; it does not profess to cover the topic fully. I hope, nevertheless, that it will serve to convey some idea of the kinds of legal issues relating to contract with which Tswana courts usually have to deal. I state briefly, in each section, the rules normally recognized by the courts, and then cite a few cases that seem to be relevant.