Between 1964 and 1975, development politics in Tanzania came to be organized around a version of ujamaa that normalized distinct gender roles and celebrated a generic ideal of the nuclear family. Yet as ujamaa villagization unfolded on the ground in the south-eastern region of Mtwara, rural people's practices rarely conformed to the ideas about gender and family implicit in official discourse and policy. Just as the institution of the family on the ground proved to be a complicated and fractured one, the Tanzanian state's understanding of familyhood and the larger project of ujamaa were deeply riddled with internal tensions.

Twentieth-century Natal and Zululand chiefs' conversions to the Nazaretha Church allowed them to craft new narratives of political legitimacy and perform them to their subjects. The well-established praising tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Zulu political culture had been an important narrative practice for legitimating chiefs; throughout the twentieth century, the erosion of chiefly power corresponded with a decline in chiefly praise poems. During this same period, however, new narrative occasions for chiefs seeking to legitimate their power arose in Nazaretha sermon performance. Chiefs used their conversion testimonies to narrate themselves as divinely appointed to their subjects. An alliance between the Nazaretha Church and KwaZulu chiefs of the last hundred years meant that the Church could position itself as an institution of national stature, and chiefs told stories that exhorted unruly subjects to obedience as a spiritual virtue.

Propaganda from Biafra and pro-Biafran rhetoric generated by its supporters drew heavily on ideas of modernity. This continued a pattern of associations rooted in colonial-era policies and ethnic stereotypes, and also represented a deliberate rhetorical strategy aimed at both internal and external audiences. During the second half of the Nigeria–Biafra War, the concept of race assumed an increasingly prominent role in both Biafran and pro-Biafran discourse, in part because of the diminished persuasiveness of Biafran claims about Nigeria's genocidal intentions. Arguments about race dovetailed with established claims about modernity in ways that persist today.

Amid assumptions of a hegemonic Igbo Christian identity, conversions to Islam began in the late 1930s in the Igbo territory of south-east Nigeria – the only region in the country that was not touched by the nineteenth-century Islamic jihad and subsequent efforts to extend the borders of Islam in Nigeria. Four decades after the emergence of Islam in the Igbo homeland, and with the mixed blessings of a civil war, Igboland began to manifest clear evidence of indigenous Muslim presence. A key aspect of this article is how one can be both Igbo and Muslim. It considers the complex interplay of religious and ethnic identities of Igbo Muslims (including the mapping of religious values onto ethnic ones) until the 1990s, when Igbo Muslims began to disentangle ethnicity from religion, a development that owes much to the progress of Islamic education in Igboland and the emergence of Igbo Muslim scholars and clerics. Igbo reactions to conversions to Islam and the perceived threat of these conversions to Igbo Christian identity also receive some attention in this article.

In late-seventeenth-century Morocco, Mawlay Isma‘il commanded his officials to enslave all blacks: that is, to buy coercively or freely those already slaves and to enslave those who were free, including the Haratin (meaning free blacks or freed ex-slaves). This command violated the most salient Islamic legal code regarding the institution of slavery, which states that it is illegal to enslave fellow Muslims. This controversy caused a heated debate and overt hostility between the ‘ulama’ (Muslim scholars) and Mawlay Isma‘il. Official slave registers were created to justify the legality of the enforced buying of slaves from their owners and the enslavement of the Haratin. An equation of blackness and slavery was being developed to justify the subjection of the free Muslim black Moroccans. To prove the slave status of the black Moroccans, the officials in charge of the slavery project established a fictional hierarchy of categories of slaves. This project therefore constructed a slave status for all black people, even those who were free.