Schapera's Tswana Studies and the Ancestors They Describe

Sotho-Tswana religion in this atlas is documented chiefly through the work of a South African born anthropologist whose fieldwork spanned much of the twentieth century. Isaac Schapera, who studied the Tswana of what is now Botswana and South Africa from the 1920s onward, published The Tswana in 1953 as part of a wider International African Institute survey series, alongside decades of further study of Tswana law, kinship and custom, describing Modimo, the remote creator divinity rarely addressed directly, and the badimo, ancestors who receive the tradition's ordinary prayer and offering through the household head.

Schapera's work is distinguished within the colonial era ethnographic record by its close attention to Tswana law as practised in Tswana courts on Tswana terms, rather than as a subject reshaped for a colonial administrative audience, and by long term relationships with specific chiefdoms that let him revisit and correct his own earlier observations across decades of return visits. Later southern African scholars have used his material as a baseline against which to measure change in ancestor practice through the twentieth century, including the effect of labour migration, which drew many Sotho and Tswana men away from the homestead where badimo observance is centred, on how that observance was maintained across distance.