In this volume we return to one of the treasures of our contributors' anthropological heritage: the study of kinship in Africa. We have chosen to focus on the intertwined lives of grandparents and grandchildren because they raise so clearly fundamental issues of temporality and relationship. While grandparents and grandchildren live together in shared time, their lifetimes overlap only partly. They have different pasts and different futures, and they share a present that in many countries is being radically affected by historical transformations such as urbanisation, impoverishment and the scourge of AIDS.

This article focuses on relationships between grandmothers and grandchildren in an urban society in East Cameroon. It argues that despite fluid generational demarcations between grandmothers and mothers, women perform their grandmotherhood differently from their motherhood. As a result of the claims grandmothers often make on their children's children, grandmothers easily replace mothers but they do not rear children in the same way. The sharing of home, food, and bed is central in the performance of grandmotherhood and differs from relationships of sharing in the mother-child bond. The article also argues that grandmotherhood in East Cameroon is not a clearly bounded, unambiguous life stage but that it contains multiple trajectories that do not occur in the same time or in the same order. Multiple trajectories, characterised by both agency and constraint, are explained in terms of differences within and between grandmothers’ life courses. The article shows that grandmothers play vital roles in complex practices of marriage and descent and, in contrast to previous studies in the area, that matrilineages are closely linked to patrilineages.

This article deals with an aspect of the special relationship between grandparents and grandchildren: the fosterage of grandchildren by their (classificatory) grandparents. By becoming social parents with full responsibility for their social children, grandparents—as foster-parents—take upon themselves the characteristics typical both of parental roles involving authority, and grand-parental behaviour involving joking, warmth and proximity to their fostered grandchildren. The practices of grandparental fosterage, as well as changes in them, need to be understood in the broader context of widespread fosterage among Baatombu, where the majority of children grow up not with their biological parents but with foster-parents. The gradual decline of old forms of fosterage is affecting foster practices between grandparents and grandchildren. The grandparents’ generation evaluate this decline negatively and fear that changing fosterage patterns may adversely affect their social security in old age.

This description of relations between grandparents and grandchildren in a rural Ghanaian community argues that the quality of these relations varies according to age and gender. Literature on African kinship has almost entirely focused on very young grandchildren. This article draws attention to changes that occur when those children grow into adolescents and adults. Grandchildren—both young and old—speak respectfully about their grandparents, but older people regret that their grandchildren do not come to them for advice once they have grown up. Older men seem more ‘neglected’ by their grandchildren than older women. The second argument is about performance: respect, affection and relatedness between grandparents and grandchildren are demonstrated in public even when their ‘contents’ have dwindled. The article is based on anthropological fieldwork over a period of almost ten years.

This article is concerned with the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren in changing Tswana society. It argues that, in order to understand this relationship and how this has been changing, we have to look at different sets of relationships separately. The relationships between grandfathers/grandmothers and grandsons/granddaughters have quite different qualities depending upon whether their sons/daughters are married or unmarried. Moreover, these qualities are influenced in different ways by changes taking place in society. The data are analysed using Charles Taylor's concept of moral space and discussed in terms of ideals of respect, meaning and dignity.

This article brings two analytic perspectives to bear on temporal aspects of relations to children's children. The first, which we call processual time, is the long-term, ‘experience-distant’, view of household developmental cycles over a historical period. Beginning with this approach, we describe the arrangements of family and marriage that provide the framework for people's relations to the children of their sons and of their daughters in Bunyole County, eastern Uganda. Household survey material collected over thirty years in one village shows an increase in the number of grandchildren being cared for, as expected in an era when parents are dying of AIDS. However, it also qualifies the hegemonic historical narrative of AIDS by showing that other factors have been and still are at work in influencing the patterns of caring for grandchildren. The second analytical perspective is that of the intersubjective time of shared biographies and common experience. The emphasis here is on the ‘experience-near’ qualities and practice of relatedness as they are lived and talked about in the lifeworlds of social actors. They are evident in the dyadic relations between grandparents and grandchildren and also in the ways that these relations are embedded in other connections to children and in-laws. When grandparents take on the care of a daughter's children, they are mindful of the past, present and future of her relation to her husband and his family. The concept of ‘intersubjective time’ points to the intertwining of the lives of three generations and provides a rich complement to the more abstract concern with developmental cycles and historical processes.

This essay explores the relationships between three Luo grandmothers and their grandchildren with particular attention to forms of address and of sharing as practices of amity. Classic Africanist kinship studies identified these as central to the relations between alternate generations. We argue that they are also crucial to our understanding of some aspects of the notion of ‘love’ (hera) that old and young Luo describe as constitutive both of grandmotherhood in particular and of sociality in general. We shall intertwine these concerns of the first generation of social anthropologists, in what were then imagined as pre-modern societies, with the concerns that contemporary, modern Luo grandmothers and grandchildren have with love. Love or amity, and their attendant everyday practices of sharing, retain their importance both for the grandmaternal bond and for broader Luo sociality. Rather than providing an unquestioned and unequivocal prescriptive framework, these practices of relatedness are situated within an imaginative field which is often explicitly dichotomised. Some practices stress individual selves and autonomous subjects, while others emphasise the sharedness of the self and the primacy of relations over subjects. Rather than adhering to one or the other of these poles of relatedness and personhood, modern Luo grandmothers and grandchildren create their everyday lives between them, drawing on divergent ideas and practices, while enjoying, where possible, the pleasures of'love’.