ABSTRACT
I CO M E FR O M A F A M IL Y O F LA W Y E R S, and through my childhood I constantly heard my father and his colleagues discussing their cases at the family-table. Later I intended to go to the South African Bar, and besides reading Law at the Univer sity I worked in my father’s office in Johannesburg and attended on him in court. Therefore when, diverted by a desire for the exotic, I became an anthrolopogist and began to study African social life, I hoped I might make some contribution on the prob lems of African law. But I found that, though the setting of this law might be exotic, its problems were those which are common to all systems of jurisprudence. I can still recall vividly how I was
sitting in my deckchair one day listening to a trial in a Barotse Court, when I recognized an old friend. He is inscribed in huge letters on the blank page opposite my notebook’s record of the process of cross-examination: ‘Hullo, the reasonable man!’
