ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the layout of purchase areas, the household composition of farms and family relationships, and the social ties of people in these farming communities with each other and with outsiders. Since social relationships determine the labour problems of peasant farmers, they greatly influence the productivity of purchase area farms. When government surveyors plan a purchase area, they place at regular intervals between farms tracts of crown land, designed to become community centres. Schools, stores and mills, depots for cooperative societies and community halls, as well as the homes of junior government servants, may be erected. Purchase area farmers are also bound by many ties to tribal trust lands. Most maintain close contacts with the tribal trust lands from which they came and in which their relatives still live. They sometimes visit their old villages, but more often receive visits from their kinsmen on their farms.
