Occasional papers, no. 8

The town chosen for examination was King William’s Town, in the Border region of the Cape Province. Dating back over a century and more to the days of the old British Kaffraria, the town has existed long enough to build up an apparently stable population with its own way of life. Today about fourteen-and-a-half thousand souls live in the borough, of whom under seven thousand are Whites. The community lie s in a region of small towns, dominated by the nearby city of East London, which is about 40 miles away on the coast, and provides one of the smaller of the harbours on the eastern coastline of the Republic. King William's Town is a compact, apparently static community, and seems to be typical of many small inland towns in South Africa. Its ways of life and problems probably match those of not a few other towns in the Republic. What types of people live in a small town such as King William’s Town, and what do they think about their community? Where have the people in the town come from, and are they likely to stay on in the community, or leave it? How do they earn their living, and does the town provide a living for the younger generation, or must they leave to seek work elsewhere? These are key questions, involving important aspects of town life, which there search project attempts to answer. The study concentrates on the Whites living in the community, and analyses them in some d e tail. It describes the different types of people to be found in the town, and shows how they earn their living. Attitudes towards life in the town are investigated.Digitised by Rhodes University Library on behalf of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER