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The paper argues that there is a serious rupture between the attempt to create a post-Apartheid social system in South Africa and social action. This affects four areas of sociality: gendering systems, livelihood systems, signifying systems and value/normative systems. The consequence of this is that actions and actors in 'civil society', in their attempt to respond to social pressures, fragment and dissipate efforts to steer the society towards what its normative and institutional designs intended in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the claims of sociological monogenetic theory (SMT) and sociological polygenetic theory (SPT) about the originators of sociology. It adopts the evolutionary monogenetic theory (EMT) and evolutionary polygenetic theory (EPT) of human origins to explain the selection of the originators of sociology. The article reviews secondary data on the contributions of scholars worldwide to sociological progress. It observes that the SMT excluded non-western scholars from the exercise and concludes that the SPT has stronger explanatory values than the SMT. Based on comparative competence, therefore, it suggests that the SPT should select originators of sociology from across the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the utility of the concept 'civic spaces' for analysing postcolonial African cities. Civic spaces, namely places potentially accessible to all urbanites, are often seen as inherently accessible and democratic, however a case study of how residents in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, create and use civic spaces reveals that social class deeply shapes the character of any given space, notably those of middle-class professionals. By showing that civic spaces in Dar es Salaam operate at various levels of scale and exist temporally in life event celebrations, we develop a more nuanced conceptual framework for understanding postcolonial African urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]