Introduction

One afternoon in Alemanha market, I was leaning on the edge of Jamba and Flavio's stall chatting to some of the younger male sellers as they played draughts. Wilson, a roguish young UNITA veteran in his late twenties, was boasting about his relationships with women. He had two women at once living in his house, he claimed, and was not married to either, an arrangement he said he had no reservations about, playing to the gallery as ever. This brought disbelieving laughter from his two interlocutors, who, despite being active Christians, found this open defiance of respectability funny. They repeated what Wilson had said, looking to me for a reaction. I was not sure what to say, so I just grinned. Wilson turned the subject to religion, ‘I don’t want to go to church’, he said, ‘because I don't want to be tied down’. At this the conversation turned more serious: Flavio's younger brother said that Christians ought not to be fanatics, that they did not understand church doctrine if they were, and that different denominations ought to get on with each other, a statement with which everyone agreed. The third young man, Pedro, said that religion wasn't about being tied down, but rather that he saw all the church as his family. At this point a young man walked past in low-slung trousers that showed his underpants, and Wilson shouted over to him, ‘How are you doing, Pastor?’ ‘I’m fine thanks, Papa’, he replied. Not immediately getting the joke, I asked a stupid question: ‘Is he really a pastor?’ Everyone collapsed in laughter: ‘Yeah right, a pastor with an ear-ring!’

Such conversations were regular occurrences amongst the men I worked with, touching on different views of what it meant to be a good Christian man, and the contrast between these styles and those that defied Christian propriety. The key differences included how sexual relationships were conducted and the consumption (or not) of alcohol, and also took in aspects of embodied style and particular ways of employing commodities in these styles.