Although South Africa's total fertility rate is one of the lowest in sub-Saharan Africa, high rates of early childbearing remain a concern. Most teenage pregnancies occur among poor black and coloured South Africans. The majority of these pregnancies are said to be unwanted and unplanned and the teenager's relationships, unstable. Becoming a mother during one's teenage years is perceived to be socially, economically and physically deleterious for the teenager and her baby. This paper presents ethnographic data collected over a five-year period in the South African township of Nyanga East in the Western Cape. It draws attention to the circumstances that surround teenage pregnancy and discusses reactions to teenage pregnancies in this community. Findings highlight that despite the negative perception of teenage pregnancy within the township, particular social and cultural circumstances provided fertile ground for its occurrence. Furthermore, the paper argues that in this particular community the management of a teenage pregnancy played a functional and critical role in maintaining and reproducing social norms and ideals regarding intergenerational relationships, which ultimately ensured that the rates of early childbearing remained high.

Data from many high- and low- or middle-income countries have linked exposures during key developmental periods (in particular pregnancy and infancy) to later health and disease. Africa faces substantial challenges with persisting infectious disease and now burgeoning non-communicable disease.This paper opens the debate to the value of strengthening the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) research focus in Africa to tackle critical public health challenges across the life-course. We argue that the application of DOHaD science in Africa to advance life-course prevention programmes can aid the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, and assist in improving health across generations. To increase DOHaD research and its application in Africa, we need to mobilise multisectoral partners, utilise existing data and expertise on the continent, and foster a new generation of young African scientists engrossed in DOHaD.

As the world undergoes rapid ageing, informal support from friends and relatives is becoming especially important among older adults in middle- and low-income countries, where formalised social protections may be limited. We use new data from a cohort of adults aged 40 and older in rural South Africa to explore how receipt of emotional support differs by gender and marital status. Our findings suggest that women are more likely to get emotional support than men and have more sources of support. Moreover, women are more likely to get emotional support from relatives, whereas men are more likely to get support from friends. In regard to marital status, married people are more likely to get emotional support and have more sources of support than people who are not married. However, separated/divorced and widowed people are more likely to get emotional support from relatives and have more sources of non-spousal support than married people. These findings point towards gaps in informal systems of support, and the particular importance of considering men and unmarried (especially never-married) people when designing policies to offer social protections to older populations.

In South Africa over the last two decades, births to girls under the age of 20 years of age have steadily declined. The reason for the decline has been attributed to progressive social and educational policies and more accommodating reactions from families. This paper uses ethnographic data collected in 2001-2002 and again in 2013 in order to compare young women's perceptions and experiences of early childbearing at the turn of the twenty-first century with those of young women a decade later. It makes two main contributions to the literature on early childbearing in South Africa. First, it provides insight into the changes that have occurred regarding how young women experience pregnancy and motherhood over the last decade. Second, it considers changes not only in relation to time but also in relation to the significant social and ideological changes.

In the growing number of publications in medical anthropology about sub-Saharan Africa, there is a tendency to tell a single story of medicine, health, and health-seeking behavior. The heavy reliance on telling this singular story means that there is very little exposure to other stories. In this article, I draw on five books published in the past five years to illustrate the various components that make up this dominant narrative. I then provide examples of two accounts about medicine, health, and health-seeking behavior in Africa that deviate from this dominant narrative, in order to show the themes that alternative accounts have foregrounded. Ultimately, I make a plea to medical anthropologists to be mindful of the existence of this singular story and to resist the tendency to use its components as scaffolding in their accounts of medicine, health, and health-seeking behavior in Africa.

HIV and AIDS have impacted on social relations in many ways, eroding personal networks, contributing to household poverty, and rupturing intimate relations. With the continuing transmission of HIV particularly in resource-poor settings, families and others must find new ways to care for those who are living with HIV, for those who are ill and need increased levels of personal and medical care, and for orphaned children. These needs occur concurrently with changes in family structure, as a direct result of HIV-related deaths but also due to industrialization, urbanization, and labor migration. In this special issue, the contributing authors draw on ethnographies from South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zambia, and - by way of contrast - China, to illustrate how people find new ways of constituting families, or of providing alternatives to families, in order to provide care and support to people infected with and afflicted by HIV.

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