Tribal Innovators by Isaac Schapera

Author:Isaac Schapera [Schapera, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780391001152
Google: bXALAAAAIAAJ
Publisher: Athlone P.
Published: 1970-01-15T05:06:29+00:00

ADULTERY AND DIVORCE

Chiefs also made laws affecting rules of conduct between married people. Bathoen II (1935) regulated among the Ngwaketse the practice of wife-beating (common in all tribes). He said that any man beating a wife at her parents' home would have to pay them two head of cattle (instead of the one usually awarded elsewhere in such cases), and he also forbade any beating at all of a pregnant wife (see p. 95). Much earlier Sechele I (Kwena) had ordered husbands to slaughter more meat for their wives; this rule soon ceased to be observed (see p. 217).

Most of the other laws about married lite concerned infidelity and divorce. One of the earliest was said to have dealt with the 'removal' (tloso, abduction or enticement) of a married woman from her husband. Because the Kwena chief Motswasele II sometimes took other men's wives for himself, and also allowed his favourites to do so with impunity, he was publicly assassinated by his people at a veld assembly (c. 1823).1 His son Sechele I, on becoming chief in 1831, therefore 'prohibited' the practice and 'instituted' the rule that in such cases the woman's husband, if she did not return to him, could take all her abductor's cattle and other property. Ngwaketse informants said Gaseitsiwe made the same law for them (see p. 222). Informants in other tribes, however, said that the penalty allegedly instituted by Scchele was in fact ancient and universal Tswana usage. This, if correct, suggests that all he really did was to enforce it regularly and strictly because of his father's fate. But he also made one exception. It was fairly common, as late as 1858, for men to exchange wives temporarily (cf. Hermannsburger Missionsblatt 1859: 38). Sechele denounced the practice, and said that if a wife in such cases preferred to remain with her lover her husband would not be given redress.

1 Other contributing factors were that he helped himself freely to the cattle and other property of his subjects, and also that he often imposed the death penalty (Schapera 1940b: 43-4).

In ordinary cases of adultery a husband was traditionally entitled to claim damages from his wife's lover. He stated how many cattle he wanted, and if payment was refused would sue for it in court. He could also divorce his wife, though he seldom did unless she was often or persistently unfaithful. By 1940, however, tribal courts sometimes denied a husband satisfaction if his wife had committed adultery during his prolonged absence abroad (say for three years of more); they argued that he was himself to blame for neglecting her all that time (cf. Bathoen II, in Schapera 1947a: 185). Such judgments are known to have been given by chiefs in all tribes except the Kwena.

A wife originally had no legal redress against an unfaithful husband. Informants said that with the decline of polygamy (see p. 135) such infidelity became much more common; in particular many a man who for religious or other reasons was unable or unwilling to have more than one wife kept a concubine (nyatsi), whom he visited at her own home.

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