Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T22:27:05.109Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“The Duty to Act Fairly”: Ethics, Legal Anthropology, and Labor Justice in the Manual Workers Union of Botswana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2014

Pnina Werbner
Pnina Werbner*
Affiliation:
Keele University
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper analyses the significance of the Botswana High Court and Court of Appeal judgments of a case in which the Manual Worker Union, a blue-collar public sector union, challenged the Botswana Government to reinstate dismissed workers with all their past benefits. I examine the role of public ethics and morality in Botswana as reflected in key notions used by High Court judges, such as “the duty to act fairly” and “legitimate expectations,” and argue that legal anthropologists have neglected such ideas, despite their having become a bedrock of contemporary judicial reasoning. While anthropology has shown a renewed interest in ethics, issues of public ethics and morality remain relatively unexplored in contemporary legal anthropological debates. One has to go back to the work of Max Gluckman on reasonableness in judicial decision-making among the Barotse to find foundational anthropological insights into the morality and ethics of law in non-Western societies. In the legally plural context of Botswana, notions of equity and fairness, this paper argues, “permeate” the legal landscape.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 479 - 507
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bohannan, Paul. 1957. Justice and Judgement among the Tiv. Oxford: The International African Institute for Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bohannan, Paul. 1969. Ethnography and Comparison in Legal Anthropology. In Nader, Laura, ed., Law in Culture and Society. London: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Botswana Court of Appeal. 1995. National Amalgamated Local & Central Government and Parastatal Manual Workers Union, Appellant, versus Attorney General, Respondent. Civil Appeal No. 26/93 of High Court Civil Case No. 1604/91. Delivered 19 Jan. [The month is missing in the document's text.]Google Scholar
Botswana Government. 1990. The Revised National Policy on Income, Employment, Prices and Profits. Government Paper No. 1, Sept. Gaborone: Government Printer.Google Scholar
Botswana High Court. 1991. National Amalgamated Local & Central Government and Parastatal Manual Workers Union, Plaintiff, versus Attorney General, Defendant. Civil Case No. 1604 of 1991.Google Scholar
Cardozo, B. J. 1928. Nature of the Judicial Process. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Carolan, Eoin. 2009. The New Separation of Powers: A Theory of the Modern State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chwaane, Thato. 2005. Judge Leaves as Court of Appeal Session Ends. Mmegi Online, Archives, 1 Feb. At: http://allafrica.com/stories/200502010663.html (accessed 17 Jan. 2014).Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John. 2007. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Social Anthropology 15, 2: 133–52.Google Scholar
Comaroff, John L. and Roberts, Simon. 1981. Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context. Chicago: the University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Conley, John M. and O'Barr, William M.. 2004. A Classic in Spite of Itself: The Cheyenne Way and the Case Method in Legal Anthropology. Law & Inquiry 29, 1: 179–217.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 1996. Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dagan, Hanoch. 2005. The Realist Conception of Law. Tel Aviv University Law Faculty Papers, No. 21.Google Scholar
Dow, Unity, ed. 1995. The Citizenship Case: The Attorney General of the Republic of Botswana v. Unity Dow. Gaborone: Lentswe la Lesedi.Google Scholar
Englund, Harri. 2006. Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Epstein, A. L. 1973. The Reasonable Man Revisited: Some Problems in the Anthropology of Law. Law & Society Review 7, 4: 643–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ernst, Daniel R. 1993. The Critical Tradition in the Writing of American Legal History. Yale Law Journal 102, 4: 1019–76.Google Scholar
Ernst, Daniel R. 1995. Lawyers against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism. Champagne: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Frank, Jerome. 1930. Law and the Modern Mind. New York: Coward-McCann.Google Scholar
Garbers, Christoph. 2004. Labor Law. In van der Merswe, C. G. and du Plessis, Jacques E., eds., Introduction to the Law of South Africa. The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 399–429.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective. In Local Knowledge. New York: Fontana Press, 167–234.Google Scholar
Gluckman, Max. 1963. The Reasonable Man in Barotse Law. In Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. London: Cohen and West, 178–206.Google Scholar
Gluckman, Max. 1967 [1955]. The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). Manchester: Manchester University Press for African Studies University of Zambia.Google Scholar
Gluckman, Max. 1973. Limitations of the Case-Method in the Study of Tribal Law. Law & Society Review 7, 4: 611–42.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Anne. 1997. In the Shadow of Marriage: Gender and Justice in an African Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Horwitz, Morton J. 1992. The Transformation of American Law 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hunt, Alan. 1986. A Theory of Critical Legal Studies. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 6, 1: 1–45.Google Scholar
Kaplow, Louis. 1992. Rules versus Standards: An Economic Analysis. Duke Law Journal 42, 3: 557–629.Google Scholar
Kiragu, Kithinji, Mukandala, Rwekaza, and Morin, Denyse. 2004. Reforming Pay Policy: Techniques, Sequencing, and Politics. World Bank Report on the Public Sector, 109–48. At: http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/civilservice/ACSRCourse2007/Session%204/BSC_ch04.pdf (accessed 15 Apr. 2011).Google Scholar
Klare, Karl E. 1982. Critical Theory and Labor Relations Law. In Kairys, David, ed., The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Korobkin, Russell B. 2000. Behavioral Analysis versus Legal Form: Rules vs. Standards Revisited. Oregon Law Review 79: 23–60.Google Scholar
Kuper, Adam. 1970. The Kgalagari and the Jural Consequences of Marriage. Man n.s. 5: 466–82.Google Scholar
Laidlaw, James. 2002. For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 8: 311–32.Google Scholar
Lambek, Michael. 2003. The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1926. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Maurer, Bill. 2005. Due Diligence and “Reasonable Man,” Offshore. Cultural Anthropology 20, 4: 474–505.Google Scholar
Mogalakwe, Monageng. 1997. The State and Organised Labor in Botswana: Liberal Democracy and Emergent Capitalism. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Molaudi, Samuel K. 1992. Chronological Events of 154% Wage Increase Demand. National Amalgamated Local and Central Government & Parastatals Manual Workers Union, Gaborone, Jan.Google Scholar
Molosiwa, Phutego Phutego. 2007. Re Neeland Ditsa Rona!—the Great 1991 Manual Workers Union Strike. In Makgala, Christian John, ed., History of the Botswana Manual Workers Union: A Story of Courageous Struggle for Democratic and Economic Advancement in Southern Africa. Botswana: Manual Workers Union, 72–98.Google Scholar
Moore, Sally Falk. 1978. Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Moore, Sally Falk. 2001. Certainties Undone: Fifty Turbulent Years of Legal Anthropology, 1949–1999. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7, 1: 95–116.Google Scholar
Otlhogile, Bojosi. n.d. (ca. 1994). A History of the Higher Courts of Botswana 1912–1990. Gaborone: Mmegi Publishing House.Google Scholar
Prins, Gwyn. 1980. The Hidden Hippopotamus: Reappraisal in African History, the Early Colonial Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Riggs, Robert E. 1988. Legitimate Expectation and Procedural Fairness in English Law. American Journal of Comparative Law 36: 395–436.Google Scholar
Robbins, Joel. 2013. Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19: 447–62.Google Scholar
Saugestad, Sidsel. 2011. Impact of International Mechanisms on Indigenous Rights in Botswana. International Journal of Human Rights 15, 1: 37–61.Google Scholar
Schapera, Isaac. 1955 [1938]. A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Schapera, Isaac. 1956. Government and Politics in Tribal Society. London: Watts.Google Scholar
Schapera, Isaac. 1970. Tribal Innovators: Tswana Cheifs and Social Change 1795–1940. London: The Athelone Press.Google Scholar
Schler, Lynn, Bethlehem, Louise, and Sabar, Galia. 2009. Editorial: Rethinking Labor in Africa, Past and Present. Special issue, Rethinking African Labor, Past and Present. African Identities 7, 3: 299–325.Google Scholar
Selolwane, Onalena D. 1998. Equality of Citizenship and Gendering of Democracy in Botswana. In Edge, W. A. and Lekorwe, M. H., eds., Botswana: Politics and Society. Pretoria: J. L. van Schaik Academic, 397–411.Google Scholar
Simmonds, N. E. 2007. Law as a Moral Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Solway, Jacqueline S. 2009. Human Rights and NGO ‘Wrongs’: Conflict Diamonds, Culture Wars and the ‘Bushman Question.’ Africa 79, 3: 321–46.Google Scholar
Subramanian, Ajantha. 2009. Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Tamanaha, Brian Z. 2009. Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Tate, Winifred. 2007. Counting the Dead. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher L. 1985. The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher L. 1993. Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher L. 2007. How Autonomous Is Law? Annual Review of Law, Society and Science 3: 45–68.Google Scholar
Watson, Alan. 1993. Legal Transplants: An Approach to Comparative Law. 2d ed.Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Werbner, Pnina. 2009. Dialogical Subjectivities for Hard Times: Expanding Political and Ethical Imaginaries of Elite and Subaltern Southern African Women. African Identities 7, 3: 299–325.Google Scholar
Werbner, Pnina. 2014. The Making of an African Working Class: Law, Politics and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers Union of Botswana. London: Pluto Press (in press).Google Scholar
Werbner, Richard. 1977. Small Man Politics and the Rule of Law: Centre-Periphery Relations in East Central Botswana. Journal of African Law 21: 24–39.Google Scholar
Werbner, Richard. 1980. The Quasi-Judicial and the Experience of the Absurd: Remaking Land Law in North-Eastern Botswana. Journal of African Law 24, 1: 131–50.Google Scholar
Wilson, Richard A. 2001. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar