Keiskammahoek Rural Survey 1948-1950

In 1947 South Africa's National Council for Social Research initiated and funded an investigation into the social conditions in a "Native Reserve" in South Africa. The Keiskammahoek District in the Ciskei, in the eastern part of the Union of South Africa, was selected as a sample native rural area for this study. The region was about 220 square miles with a population of approximately 18,000 inhabitants. The survey was directed by Lindsay Robb of the Native Affairs Department, and carried out by voluntary workers from South Africa's universities and staff from various government departments. The study became known as the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, and was a series of studies of the region. The dataset provided here is from an economic survey from a sample of 227 households 5 villages in the Keiskammahoek region. These were Chata (households with the prefix K), Gxulu (T), Lenye-Burnshill (S), Mthwaku (J) and Rabula (M). DataFirst, supported by the Neil Agget Labour Studies unit at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and the Corey Library for Historical Research at Rhodes University, digitised the contents of the KRS questionnaires housed in the library. DataFirst has prepared the data in a research-ready formats and publish these to open them data up for further analyses.

The study includes:

1. A Family Budget Survey, which as conducted from 1948 to 1950 on a sample of 277 households in five villages in the area (Chatha, Gxulu, Lenye-Burnshill, Mthwaku, and Rabula). The findings from this survey were summarised in an "Economic sheet". A field study was undertaken of cultivation and crop yields during the survey by measuring areas sown and weighing harvest yields of households in the Family Budget Survey during the 194-1950 seasons.
2. A Survey on Migration, Urbanisation, Employment, and Marriage of a subset of these villages. Data for this was collected with a questionnaire and an employment sheet.

The migration study included the collection in 1950 of genealogies from households in three of the villages (Lenye-Burnshill, Mthwaku, and Rabula). These family histories were updated in 1986 by researchers in the Department of Anthropology at Rhodes University. The 1948-1950 genealogies have been scanned, and also reproduced in R (Note: In the R versions, squares are for male and circles for female, and solid shapes are for deceased family members). The 1986 updates to these genealogies have also been scanned. Because these genealogies contain disclosive data, they are only available for analysis in our secure research data centre in the School of Economics at UCT. Researchers can contact us at support@data1st.org to use these data.

Other studies also undertaken for the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey, for which we don't have the primary data, include:

1. An investigation of trade in the district, based on the analysis of the books of twenty-four of the thirty traders in the District
2. A study of the physical environment, including climate data, a geological survey, a soil survey and a botanical survey. The botanical survey report, compiled by the Department of Agriculture of the Union of South Africa, is included with this dataset.
3. A land tenure study undertaken in three villages (Burnshill, Chatha, and Rabula), from October 1949 to July1950, which also collected data on freehold and quitrent villages.
4. An inquiry into family structure and women's work in two communal villages, (Gwili-Gwili and Upper Nqhumeya), including:
5. A survey on illegitimacy
6. An agricultural survey (Upper Nqhumeya only)
7. A survey on school education, conducted by the Bureau for Educational Research of the Union Education Department
8. Collection of data on male initiation (done during the land tenure study).