The waning of sociology in South Africa

Abstract

The paper describes the traditions of sociological scholarship in South Africa. It traces how an inter-disciplinary and often varied project responded to the rise of social movements in the Apartheid period and discusses the turning of this “discourse” into a scholarly discipline. It finally describes the difficulties sociologists and sociology departments encounter in the post-apartheid period due to a range of unforeseen circumstances that have weakened both research and the lecturing in the subject.