In a letter attempting to discredit Fort Hare and Rhodes universities (February 22 2002), Bambihlelo Hlwattika declares that “during the 1960s and later” the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Rhodes was responsible for “some of the most racist research”. He refers particularly to research in urban communities in East London in the 1950s. These communities were subsequently forcibly relocated to Mdantsane after 1964.
It is an extraordinary judgement of the series of studies that became known as the Xhosa in Town Trilogy. This work, which focuses on the social, economic and cultural life of migrants and urban residents in the old East and West Bank locations of East London is one of the most sensitive and detailed studies of urban African life in South Africa in the 1950s. Updated and revised in 1971, it provides a devastating critique of urban forced removals.
The quality and academic rigour of these studies has allowed the current generation of ISER researchers to verify more than 8 000 land-restitution claims in the city. The urban poor of East London, who have received more than R270-million through the land-restitution process, owe these scholars a great debt for providing a window into East London’s neglected locations prior to the forced removals of 1960s. In working with the claims, ISER researchers have found that the early studies were particularly useful in focusing attention on the plight of tenants, also receiving compensation under the Restitution Act.
Hlwattika might be interested to know that the ISER’s tradition of detailed community studies “during the 1960s and later” has had a significant impact on restitution and development outside the city. Research by the ISER in the Keiskammahoek district since the 1950s, for example, has contributed directly to the restitution of land rights there. It has also provided the groundwork for the argument being advanced by the Border Rural Committee that all households removed under agricultural betterment planning should be entitled to restitution. Other communities in the Eastern Cape, such as those at Dwesa/Cebe, on the Transkei Wild Coast, have recently been beneficiaries of the ISER supposedly “racist” research traditions.
Detailed long-term historical and ethnographic studies within and with local communities in the Eastern Cape, rather than once-off questionnaires, remains the institute’s most enduring achievement.
Hlwattika would do well to do some research of his own before he leaps into accusations of “racism”. Leslie Bank, ISER, East London