Category: Family Law

One hopes it doesn’t come knocking in the neighbourhood, or worse, on the door of a loved one. Death is taboo in many cultures around the world. It is not a subject to unwind over after a long day at work. This is because very rarely do we feel ready for it, even though it is an eventuality for all of us.

Read more “Cometh the hour, will your Will be done?”

In traditional Tswana society there was an over-emphasis on ‘marriage’ as constituting the basis of the family. Thus it was rare for a man and a woman to raise children together outside wedlock. Where a child was born outside wedlock, such a child was not recognised by the man’s family as being one of them until the parents of the child married each other. Indeed, the discrimination and plight of children whose parents were not married to one another was entrenched in our Tswana society. These children were often derogatorily referred to in Setswana as ‘bana ba dikgora’, which literally translates to ‘children of the fence’.[1]

Read more “A new broom in the form of a court of appeal decision in the Kelaleboga case has swept clean an old legal principle that ‘children born out of wedlock cannot inherit from their father’”