In this study we interviewed members of a small, predominantly Muslim community in Johannesburg, South Africa, in order to ascertain attitudes towards people who engage in same-sex practices. We were interested in ascertaining whether community perceptions of homosexuality match the common (Western) assumption that Islam is profoundly homophobic. Our research, while preliminary, shows that although most people condemn same-sex practices on the grounds of religious principle, they also in practice did not act upon these views. Respondents held different views on whether a person is gay or lesbian as result of same-sex behaviour, on the one hand, or same-sex desire, on the other hand. This distinction accords with what was, for them, the difficulty of proving the same-sex practices had occurred given strict Muslim standards of proof. Community attitudes to homosexuality usually involve denial and secrecy in order to maintain the social fabric of daily life and relationships between community members.

Discussions of church weddings are not standard in accounts of African marriage in South Africa in the early twentieth century. However, from the 1890s onward, church weddings were becoming more common, and by the 1930s more Africans married in church than elsewhere. Indeed, these wedding ceremonies provide insight into how black families experienced and created their own social status in a context in which white South Africans viewed black weddings as a symbol of racial misappropriation. Via weddings and their associated commodification, families held on to and proclaimed the value of family life, and importantly, broader social networks as well as status-based associational life in an era of familial disintegration. At the same time weddings were often a double-edged indicator of status through their reference to sexual purity by means of white frocks.Résumé: Les discussions sur les mariages religieux ne sont pas standard dans les comptes-rendus de mariages africains en Afrique du Sud au début du XXe siècle. Cependant, depuis les années 1890, les mariages religieux sont de plus en plus

In this article I focus on two central tensions around gender. In the first place there exists a tension between the broad, sometimes vague commitments to women's liberation that are rooted in the ANC's history as a national liberation movement and the specific policy directions that it adopts as a party in government. In the former strand there is an emphasis on radical structural change and an overturn of the systemic legacies of apartheid. In the latter, the party's focus on the creation of a black middle class and its failure thus far to deal with the economic marginalization of women make addressing structural inequalities difficult. In order to unpack the first tension, I trace the conflicting meanings of national liberation within the party. Attempts to accommodate this tension are reflected in the way gender as an issue becomes a concern to be addressed through developmentalism, in such a way that the radical or substantive content, which was a feature of the liberation struggle, is lost. In the process, gender concerns have been delinked from feminist concerns. The transfer of gender to development leads us into the second tension in ANC thinking around gender. The ANC's projection of itself as a modernizing force is reflected in gender concerns which locate gender in development, with consequences for what is possible in terms of substantive gender change. This position, though, is often contradicted by the presence within the party of socially conservative and traditional discourses of gender, for whom gender equality is often little more than a rhetorical commitment. In the article I examine why this is so. Cutting across both of these tensions and finding space as a result of them are the party's achievements with respect to gender equality. Both historically and in comparison with other developing countries, the ANC has done more to champion issues of gender equality than any other former national liberation movement. I argue that this track record could have been better. In the final section of this article I examine the history of gender activism in the party over the last 11 years, in order to examine the constraints to further gains.

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