The legal rights of women to inherit and own property, independent of husbands or male guardians, were first established a century ago among the BaNgwato by Khama's Law. It applied to royal women but afterwards spread to commoners and other parts of Botswana. However, after a series of property disputes raised by defiant women in colonial courts in the 1920s, these advances were reversed. "Traditional" laws and customs expunging such rights were imposed by the colonial authorities on the reactionary advice of Western-educated men such as Tshekedi Khama, and were codified in Isaac Schapera's Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom (1938). Women's property rights in customary law and their access to colonial courts were not fully restored until the 1950s, by a combination of new colonial legislation and female activism.
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