A Reply to Vilakazi's Comment on "Toward a Sociology of Africa"

Abstract

persons born and bred, at least fully settled town, as distinct from migrants, and according to Reader, they constitute 14 percent (excluding children under 15) of East London's African population. percentages would be higher Johannesburg, Capetown, Durbain and some other African cities. Insofar as the Indians are concerned, I should have thought that we also have enough documentary evidence to show that they, like the other groups, cannot be said to have, and to share, a common set of values. As Dr. Cooppan12 has pointed out and Professor Hilda Kuper13 has amply documented, they are a society undergoing very rapid social change, and all the forces operating the South African situation have been strongest on this group to conform to the Western patterns, as the Uplift clause of the 1927 Capetown Agreement between India and South Africa will show. As a single, but by no means isolated, example of this pressure to conform, caste status is practically a dead letter South Africa; and individual merit and achievement are now the basis for the achievement of status. I suggest that Smith's14 negative reactions against the loose usage of pluralism as a concept are order, and his suggestions that the word be restricted to societies that contain incompatible institutions, coupled with Braithwaite's definition of the word in terms of diversity of values, would appear to be the most fruitful frame of reference for research. 12 S. Cooppan, The Education of the Indian Natal-1860 to 1947, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Capetown University, 1949. 13 Hilda Kuper, Indian People Natal (Natal University Press, 1960). 14 Op. Cit.