Joe Slovo Park, a housing development in a white middle-class suburb of Cape Town, was designed to replace the shack settlement of Marconi Beam with an orderly working-class suburb. This article focuses on the vicissitudes of post-apartheid housing development schemes, and raises troubling questions about the failure of planners, policy makers and developers to take into account the complexities of the everyday lives they sought to transform. Had they done so they might have anticipated the ‘re-informalisation’ of the newly formalised suburb. The article explores the disjunctures between the planners' model of ‘suburban bliss’ and the reality. The messy, improvised character of low-income housing development in South Africa is contrasted with their Utopian and technocratic vision. This is not to deny that dreams embodied in blueprints may often be shared by the intended ‘beneficiaries’, only that for a variety of social, economic and cultural reasons poor communities are generally unable to realise such ideal visions of modern urban living.

Studies of born-again Churches in Africa generally conclude that they help members embrace modernity. Their teachings provide the ideological bases for members to embrace changing material realities. Such studies are rather silent on the demands of this ideological frame on women and men. This article looks at two Zimbabwean women's organisations, Gracious Woman and Precious Stones, affiliated to Zimbabwe Assemblies of God in Africa and Family of God respectively. Using ethnographic methods, it argues that such organisations teach women domesticity and romanticise female subordination as glorifying God. They discourage individualism by exalting motherhood, wifehood and domesticity as service to God. These demands emerge at a time when life is changing drastically in urban areas as women get educated and enter the professions. Economically a small but growing number of black families have experienced some upward mobility—something these Churches encourage through ‘the gospel of prosperity’. Although accumulation and upward mobility free families from (traditional) kin obligations which the Churches encourage, women are discouraged from resisting the patriarchal yoke even when material circumstances make it possible. The organisations repackage patriarchy as Christian faith. The article concludes that if these Churches are concerned with managing modernity, then they see modernity as female subordination.

This article examines the relationship between the environment, society and the state in the Gash–Setit region of western Eritrea. Through an analysis of the environmental narrative of the local communities and the state, it explores the factors that have contributed to the environmental crisis in the region. These factors include population resettlement, the agricultural development policy of the state, war, drought and the collapse of traditional management of the environment. The combined effects have created environmental stresses which have far-reaching implications for state–society and inter-community relations. The analysis draws on historical, cultural and political dimensions in seeking to understand relations between the environment, society and the state.

This article analyses the conversion process and the experiences of the Sidāma, in being proselytised by Protestant missionaries in an attempt to integrate them into the modernising Ethiopian state. The conversion process is considered in terms of reasons for accepting or rejecting the new religion. A minority of Sidāma are shown to have changed from old beliefs and practices, partly because of the ease of moral reinterpretation and secular incentives, but primarily because of dissatisfaction with reciprocal exchange relations with indigenous spirits and a desire to transcend the finality of death. In advancing this proposition it rejects the possibility of Sidāma beliefs as constituting a closed system of cosmology. Though Islam is also present in the region, for political and economic reasons it has been less attractive to prospective converts than Christianity.

All over sub-saharan Africa, menstruating women, pregnant women and sexual relations are seen as incompatible with productive activities (hunting, blacksmithing, cattle herding, agriculture, pottery, beer brewing, etc.). The article argues that there is a certain rationality or logic behind the prohibitions which is independent of the social contingencies found in the different societies, and which is linked with the fact that all these activities are metaphorically compared to human reproduction. The metaphors help us to understand mysterious and delicate biochemical processes, characterised by recurrent misfortune, but they also introduce a cognitive threat by creating similarity between things which are very different. The taboos then try to prevent the conjunction of the things metaphorically compared, in order to forestall the possibility of misfortune related to them.