During this time he became interested in the ethnography of Southern Africa, and lived in a Zulu kraal for a period of ten months.

In 1945, he left the civil service and, after a brief stint as an art director at a film company, was appointed a Beit Research Fellow at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Lusaka in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

He briefly worked as a curator at the Queen Victoria Memorial Museum in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare in Zimbabwe) before accepting a management position in the Department of Native Affairs of Bulawayo and Wedza.

Here he conducted research into urbanization, and also made several recommendations to the Southern Rhodesian government regarding legal protection for migrant labourers.

Between 1957 and 1962, he was a professor and director at the Institute of Social Research of the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa.

He was invited by the Southern Rhodesian government to participate in the Mangwende Commission on the administrative and agricultural issues in the Murewa region.

As a result of this report, the government of Southern Rhodesia passed legislation requiring all colonial administrators to take courses in ethnography and management.