Higher educationObituaryIsaac Schapera
Pioneering anthropologist who documented African lifeIsaac Schapera, who has died aged 98, was perhaps the last surviving member of the seminar run by Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics (LSE) during the 1920s and 1930s, where central elements of modern social anthropology were hammered out. He became one of his generation's leading specialists in African anthropology.
A formidably skilled and patient ethnographer, Schapera worked for the greater part of his career on the Tswana people of the Bechuanaland protectorate (now Botswana), building up over successive field trips a detailed picture of almost every area of Tswana life. He was a true Malinowskian in that he took the participant "plunge into native life", while remaining a careful, distanced man of science.
Born at Garies, in Namaqualand, South Africa, where his father kept a general store, he went to school and university in Cape Town. After enrolling to study law, he soon switched to anthropology, completing his master's degree in 1925. He then took a doctorate on the history, languages and culture of the Hottentot and Bushmen peoples, under CG Seligman at LSE, at the same time participating in Malinowski's seminar and working twice as his research assistant.
After a year as an assistant LSE lecturer, he went back to South Africa in 1929, teaching briefly at the University of the Witwatersrand before returning to Cape Town, where he was promoted to professor in 1935. Appointed to an anthropology chair at LSE in 1950, he remained there until his retirement in 1969.
During the 15 years after his return to Cape Town, Schapera would take the train north to Bechuanaland at the beginning of most teaching breaks and settle down to work in Mochudi or one of the other Tswana capitals. A stream of articles, books and reports soon began to flow, and he also published important historical work, editing Robert Moffat's journals and letters (1951) and the papers of David Livingstone (1959-61).
Like many anthropologists of his generation, he worked closely with a colonial administration. Less typically - and this must be one of his lasting achievements - his work openly portrayed a group of societies already encapsulated in the colonial world, and so avoided any impression of presenting a pristine culture.
Some of his best work - including A Handbook Of Tswana Law And Custom (1938), Native Land Tenure In The Bechuanaland Protectorate (1943) and Migrant Labour And Tribal Life (1947) - was commissioned and subsidised by the protectorate administration, though he managed to handle these sensitive subjects without damaging complicity in the business of rule.
Much of what Schapera wrote was strongly critical of the administration, and of European agricultural and commercial interests. Influential ecclesiastical authorities were also sometimes deeply angered by his frank accounts of Tswana family life and sexual activity. The publication of Married Life In An African Tribe (1940), for example, provoked agonised telegrams from the Anglican bishop in Cape Town to the resident commissioner in Mafeking.
Schapera's integrity and independence appears clearly in his scholarship, providing a sure foundation for the affection and respect he enjoys in contemporary Botswana - a street is named after him in Gaborone and he received a DLitt from the University of Botswana. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1958.
Despite having abandoned law for anthropology at university, Schapera retained a lifelong interest in the subject; the handbook of Tswana law and custom is perhaps his best known work. From its original publication, it has enjoyed a dual status - as a master ethnography, one of the classics of legal anthropology; and as an indispensable tool of government. It has remained in print and can still be found in most courtrooms across Botswana.
But it is not just a text used in neo-traditional courts. What Schapera wrote in the 1930s was fed back into Tswana culture, and the book remains part of that culture, a source to which Tswana turn when reflecting among themselves about their world or talking to outsiders. That they recognised themselves so clearly in Schapera's writings is an enormous tribute to his work.
Schapera seems to have been as interesting to his Tswana informants as they were to him. Arriving at Mochudi as a newcomer from England in the 1960s, I was immediately asked if I had recently seen "the boy" Schapera. How was he? Had he married? These questions were, of course, about a relatively young man, last seen some 20 years before, not the genial, senior figure still busy at his typewriter and, off-duty, entertaining graduate students and younger colleagues at Italian restaurants in Soho.
While some answers to these questions could be reassuring - "Yes, he was fine" - others troubled the questioners: "No, Schapera had never married."
Increasingly frail, he retained his sharp mind, warm heart and acerbic tongue. He lived alone until his death in the tiny flat off the Euston Road that he had taken after his return to England in 1950. Visitors would find him interested in their work, ready with advice and generous with his field notes. When he died, there was still work in progress, notably a collection of superb photographs from his field trips and a book on the procedural aspects of Tswana disputes.
ยท Isaac Schapera, social anthropologist, born June 23 1905; died June 26 2003
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