This is an exciting but also frightening collection of articles. The central issue is how people in postcolonial Africa try to come to grips with ‘modernity’ – its premises and disappointments. The contributors come from the Africanist circle around Jean and John Comaroff at the University of Chicago, who have collaborated for some time…Together the essays give a powerful image of the creativity and dynamism with which African societies use their cultural heritage in order to deal with modern changes. The collection is all the more exciting since most contributions are based in recent fieldwork, using vivid scenes from the field. This makes them also quite frightening. Together they convey a forceful image of the depth of disappointment about modernity on the continent – of desperate struggles to participate at least to some degree in its dreams and the fierce internal tensions that follow from this.The introduction by the Comaroffs is overwhelming in the speed and riches of its ideas.