Occasional papers, no. 4

For some years the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University has been engaged in an intensive study of the area of the Eastern Province of the Union of South Africa known to South Africans as the Border Region. By a singular chance an invitation from the East London Divisional Council to investigate the condition of a Border village arose when, in the course of a visit from its Secretary, sufficient data was shown concerning the conditions of village life in the region, to suggest that a special study should be made of rural problems on an intensive basis. In the first instance the enquiry directed to the Institute was administrative in the sense that difficulties were arising in the villages to warrant the establishment of sufficient authentic facts to point the way to methods of solving the immediate difficulties of the Council. While this object has not been overlooked, and it would have been less than courteous to have overlooked the demand that brought-the research into being, it has been thought necessary to widen the scope of the investigation to include materials that go beyond the administrative needs of the Council. The scope of the investigation has been widened to include an analysis of the village community as well as a co-ordinated body of brute fact. While "irreducible fact" is the basis on which the investigation rests, the attempt has been made to isolate meaning and significance of the data; it is in the latter field that deeper aspects of administrative decisions lie more often than in mountains of fact no matter how reliable. A community is an organised unit; there is no simple explanation of the way in which human social institutions work except by analysing the behaviour of people in their everyday activity. The manner in which the organisation works and be more or less efficient and there was prima facie evidence that the community of Macleantown was not organised to yield maximal efficiency. The causative factors involved in this drop in efficiency thus becomes one of the basic tasksDigitised by Rhodes University Library on behalf of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER