Social forms of age in South Africa - Position of the elder Black African during historical changes

The paper explores both the past and contemporary status of elderly blacks in South Africa and considers how the choices and opportunities of the aged were shaped by processes of modernisation and industrialisation. A major concern of this paper is the question to what extent the generational inequalities and the intergenerational relations of exchange and control were transformed during the 20th century and the investigation of the effects of these changes on old age. Finally, the sociopolitical implications of the socioeconomic position of the older Africans in the context of social change are examined. The paper concludes that, all things considered, today's black elders have less power than in precolonial times, but they appear to be still held in very high esteem. The modernisation theory, as a predictive model of the status of the elderly, is inappropriate for understanding the differential effects of modernisation on the elderly.