ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the maintenance of homestead production in Shixini can be properly understood only if this wider context, both its contemporary nature and its historical development, is taken into consideration. It discusses that it is necessary to place the reader in a position to assess the ethnographic material in terms of the position of Shixini in the wider South African society, including its political and administrative history. The basic economic data indicate that Shixini people, like many other rural people all over South Africa, depend very heavily on a cash income from the developed urban-industrial sector, or from the state in the form of old age and other pensions. But it is also evident that rural residence provides Shixini people with access to valuable agrarian resources and at least a partial subsistence.
