Building on the discussion started in Chapter 1 of how invisible agents can shape young women’s lives, Chapter 2 focuses on how young women engage with Pentecostalism to realise auspicious futures. Calabar is well-known for its numerous churches, which render the city a highly competitive and cacophonous religious marketplace. The chapter details how young women, simultaneously enticed by and fearful of novel charismatic practices, must learn to navigate the city’s plural church landscape. Ever curious, young women are often left wondering whether, by attending certain ministries, they are unwittingly harming their attempts to realise the destinies they believe God has planned for them. Drawing on local discourses of ‘spiritual confusion’ and ‘fake pastors’, the chapter highlights how unknown forces might cause deep-seated anxieties in young women as they attempt to grow up but that doubts over what cannot be seen do not stop young women from participating in what they themselves see as questionable Christian practices.

Chapter 5 examines the popularity of sewing shops and apprenticeships amongst fashion-conscious young women on tight budgets. Focusing on materiality, the chapter develops the book’s discussion of how uncertainty is employed in future-making strategies by considering how young women engage with counterfeit commodities and use skilful artistry to reveal – or bring forth in material form – the individuals they believe God intends them to be. Focusing on young women’s desire for bespoke clothes, which they often create for themselves after learning how to sew, the chapter highlights how young women avoid clothes sold in the market not because they are fakes or imitations of global brands but because, as mass-produced commodities, they deny young women their uniqueness and risk making them a counterfeit of someone else. As the chapter explores, making bespoke clothes that are fashionable does not depend only on individual inspiration but, ironically, requires young women to carefully imitate others’ designs. Detailing how young women make clothes by skilfully copying current trends and mirroring the contours of their own bodies, the chapter discusses the art and ethics of imitation.

Developing the previous chapter’s focus on the artistry involved in imitation, Chapter 6 focuses on how young women’s skilful use of make-up palettes and other beauty practices can simultaneously transform their physical appearance and social status. The chapter follows young women’s efforts to evoke a particular urban feminine beauty ideal, which is summed up not in one particular ‘look’ but rather in the ability to constantly transform the self. While appearing effortless, this cosmopolitan aesthetic requires young women to navigate confusing make-up markets and the undesirable effects of fake cosmetics, as well as the infrastructural and social stresses that shape the beauty salon experience. It also requires them to avoid being instantly ‘made down’ by the gazes of other young women. Showing how young women’s beauty practices not only sit within an ever-shifting social and material terrain but also actively contribute to the inconsistencies and ambiguities of urban life, the chapter argues that beauty and uncertainty, far from being incongruous concepts, play a significant role in shaping each other in Calabar.

The Introduction sets the scene by outlining the lives of the book’s main protagonists, young women in Calabar, and the types of uncertainty that shape their lives. The discussion builds up an understanding of the complex and opaque social terrain that these young women must deftly navigate as they work towards a future marked by marriage. In urban Nigeria, the belief in the unseen compounds other political, economic, and physical uncertainties that shape everyday life, contributing to an understanding that nothing is ever quite as it seems. The discussion outlines how young women, far from only falling victim to the irregularities of life in Calabar, turn uncertainty into a resource that they can use to manage their reputations and realise their much hoped-for futures. As well as establishing how the book contributes to anthropological and Africanist literature on uncertainty, the Introduction also opens the debate on the time of youth in Africa by focusing on feminine livelihoods and respectability. The Introduction also provides context of fieldwork and research methodology and provides a chapter outline of the rest of the book.

Chapter 1 explores young women’s experiences growing up in their fathers’ households to situate this group in a broader understanding of social reproduction in urban Nigeria. At the heart of the chapter lies young women’s recognition that they must live up to their parents’ expectations of becoming eligible ‘wife material’ but that this process is complicated by their desires to conform to particular cosmopolitan identities as well as by interferences coming from ‘the village’. The chapter details young women’s childhood memories and the domestic challenges faced by the ‘girl child’ in urban Nigeria, before moving on to describe the various strategies young women have for managing their reputations as they seek to have fun in the city and look towards a future shaped by marital responsibility. Illuminating how social reproduction in Calabar is governed by the tensions of visibility and invisibility, the chapter highlights how it is not only the boundaries of feminine respectability that start at home but also the ways in which feminine identities can be shaped by uncertainty.

Chapter 3 continues to explore young women’s engagement with Pentecostalism by focusing on the advice given out by pastors about dating and marriage. Complicating analyses that suggest Pentecostalism’s popularity with young women across Africa is attributed to how the religious movement equips them with clear guidance on relationships, the chapter shows that this new ethical counsel only contributes to the uncertainties this group encounter in daily life in urban Nigeria. As the chapter’s ethnographic material details, against pastors’ very straightforward and frank advice, young women find that their relationships with men are often ambiguous. Not only are young women aware of the possibilities that the men they date might have other girlfriends, but they are also shown to participate in less than transparent activity as they engage in intimate relationships that are not intended to lead to marriage. Examining how young women engage in gossip and rumour to conceal their actions, which often take place in plain sight on the streets of Calabar, the chapter shows how young women use unverifiable information to forge their own image of respectability.