Pentecostal studies has been one of the most vibrant areas of research in Africa for over twenty years, but is it time we started to look past Pentecostalism? Using some of the most important work in this tradition as a point of departure, this article offers both a critique of and supplement to the Pentecostal literature. It focuses in particular on how we should understand the relationship between Pentecostalism and African Independency by pushing the debates on how to frame their oft-shared desire to ‘break with the past’. Every rupture is also a realignment and how each is conceptualized and understood is a matter not only of discourse but decisions and dilemmas faced in everyday life.

This article explores the making of gendered and religious identities among a group of Ghanaian Methodist women in London by bringing to the fore the complex and irreverent ways in which the women of Susanna Wesley Mission Auxiliary (SUWMA) negotiate their recognition within the predominantly patriarchal settings of the Methodist Church. If, on the one hand, the association and its members conform to Christian values and widely accepted Ghanaian constructions of womanhood, on the other hand, flouting expectations of pious femininity, they claim a unique, elevated position within the church. Their transgressive hedonism can thus be read as a performative assertion of their claims to respect, recognition and leadership beyond the narrow parameters of gendered modesty. Many of the women are senior church leaders and respected members of the diaspora. All are successful professional career women and economically independent. Their association is simultaneously about promoting the Christian faith while being recognized as successful, cosmopolitan, glamorous middle-class women. It is this duality which the present article highlights by showing how members of the association negotiate and construct their subjectivities both within the Methodist Church and the Ghanaian diaspora, while they also negotiate their relationship with the Methodist Church in Ghana.

The 1990s saw the emergence of a thriving Nile perch export market from East Africa. This commercial table fish species is landed by migrant fishermen at villages that have sprung up along the shores of Lake Victoria, and then exported to overseas markets. By analysing the Ugandan perch fishery as a set of careers, the article shows that, although some fishermen have benefited from the perch boom, most face an uncertain and marginal existence. Few of them, however, move away in response. Analysis of an anthropological case study reveals that this is because the fishermen value the urban culture characterizing prominent village landings, expressed in particular clothing and hairstyles, the prevalence of non-kin ties, and a prospering leisure industry epitomized by the proliferation of pool tables. Hence, a cultural preference for life at the landings, rather than a universal quest for economic opportunity, drives their economic decision making.

Using ethnographic and historical approaches, this article examines unplanned, peri-urban settlements on Dar es Salaam's northern and western fringe, where urban farming is central to many residents’ household economy. Contrasting with conventional models of African urban migration, these new districts were established by a vanguard of educated urban professionals, utilizing farming as an economic diversification strategy. Despite disjunctures arising through decolonization and implementation of state socialism in the 1960s and 1970s, this peri-urban vanguard not only engaged in agricultural activities reminiscent of regions on the borderlands of Tanzania, but also contributed to the reproduction of configurations of socio-economic inequality characteristic of other kinds of urban communities. With critical infrastructural improvements and a pool of urban labourers supporting their endeavours, these districts attracted additional, economically influential urban in-migrants following capitalist reforms following the implementation of the Zanzibar Declaration in 1991.

This article demonstrates that the struggle over the Muslim ‘veil’ in public schools, which is related to tensions between the norms of secular democracy and principles of religious tolerance, has also become a topic of debate in Cameroon. I take the life of a young woman, Maimouna, whose life I have followed for 22 years, as a point of departure, and place it in the historical and social contexts of her society. I try not only to negotiate presuppositions about women and Islam in order to challenge notions of Muslim women as a homogeneous category, but also to challenge the automatic association of Islam, fundamentalism and the debate on veiling. In this debate it is often taken for granted that women have no say over their own lives. I show not only that the wishes of diverse groups of women living in Muslim societies may vary, but also that in a single woman's life her views may change. I explore how aspects of the new fundamentalist discourse (in which education for women is of importance) – against a background in which political and religious leaders, as in the past, cooperate closely – come to the fore in the subject of veiling. Religious and political councils initiate the foundation of private Islamic schools that are built with money from Saudi Arabian NGOs. In these schools women may wear headgear, which they have to take off in public schools in accordance with the laic prescriptions of Cameroon's constitution. The incessant change of views on veiling is linked to local, national and international contexts, but in a different way at each level. The story of Maimouna indicates that modernity is gendered. In the fundamentalist discourse in Cameroon in which veiling has acquired significance, men opt for another type of school where veiling is allowed, while women opt for education.

There is evidence to show that the institution of marriage, particularly customary law marriage, has served as an important framework for the extraction of conjugal labour as a factor in cocoa production since its introduction in the Gold Coast in 1879. This was necessitated by the abolition in 1874 of slavery and pawning, and the consequent need to replace an illegitimate and coercive system with a legitimate one. By virtue of a pre-existing customary obligation placed on women to assist their husbands in their economic pursuits, the marriage institution provided a basis for this transition. It has been argued, however, that some forms of economic relationship in Ghana revolve around expectations of reciprocity, and that human beings are not altogether altruistic in their dispensation of labour. Hence, women who provide labour support to their husbands expect to be rewarded with land or cocoa farms. In this article, I argue that the pivotal role of cocoa in the rural economy intensified the use of conjugal labour and the consequent expectation of land by wives from their husbands, resulting in a situation in which cocoa, marriage, labour and land rights eventually evolved as ‘institutional quadruplets’. Through case studies extracted from field work conducted in six communities in the Brong Ahafo, Western and Volta Regions of Ghana I demonstrate the continued interplay between these forces in modern times, and outline some policy-centred concerns for the future direction of the cocoa industry.