Between 1953 and 1968 much of the information he gathered was published in eight paperbacks, known as the Tswana ‘tribes’ series. Unfortunately, all of these volumes are currently out of print.
His immense effort resulted in additional publications culminating in his 1989 self-published compendium, “A history of the Batswana and origin of Bophuthatswana: a handbook of a survey of the tribes of the Batswana, S. Ndebele, QwaQwa, and Botswana.” While Breutz’s various works have served as a gold mine for many scholars, his legacy has been relatively neglected. His obscurity is undoubtedly due in part to his upbringing as a Nazi social scientist and subsequent status as a state ethnologist working for the Apartheid regime. Notwithstanding this baggage his accounts endure as invaluable evidence for reconstructing early Setswana society. In the words of Jan Boeyens and Fred Morton: “Though Breutz’s mind was skewed by racism, his craft of recording the past was systematic, based on knowledgeable informants he interviewed and guided by the ethnological and language tradition of his doctoral studies at the Hamburg School.
