Published in 1966 by The Institute of Social Research of the University of Natal, Blood Donation: The Attitudes and Motivation of Urban Bantu in Durban represented the most thorough and intensive study of its kind yet undertaken. It was commissioned by the Natal Blood Transfusion Service and carried out in Durban and its immediate environs by H. L Watts and C. D. Shearing of the Institute. Much of the fieldwork was done by six trained Bantu graduates which, no doubt, helps to explain the perceptive nature of some of the interview data elicited from poor and semi-literate Bantu workers.

The report runs to 210 pages and we can do no more than describe the research design and summarise some of the main findings.

The project comprised a group of inter-related studies. The main study (a sample of 250 adult Bantus) investigated attitudes and motivations by means of interviews and projective tests of two types: a story-type and a pictorial-type. A parallel study was made of a sample of 49 Bantu blood donors. Group discussions were conducted to obtain information on Bantu ideas and concepts of blood with Bantu medical students, domestic servants, high school girls, factory workers and labourers. Unstructured interviews were held with a variety of selected informants, e.g. school teachers (both White and Bantu), a medicine man (inyanga), a diviner (isangoma), factory officials and others. Essays on ‘Blood – what it means to me’ and ‘Good and Bad Blood’ were obtained from Bantu high-school children. Team observations were made at a number of bleeding sessions. Finally, studies were made of responses to posters used by the Natal Blood Transfusion Service and advertisements of patent medicines sold to the Bantu for ‘blood complaints’ were examined.

The main findings were as follows:

• • The Bantu donor is statistically rare (a total of 1,756 donors in an estimated population of about 167,400 Bantu adults aged 18-64).

• • They come mainly from institutional groups such as factories and schools and tend to be younger, better educated and with higher incomes than the average Bantu adult in Durban.