This article offers new insights on Africa-China relations and discourses of authenticity and intellectual property by examining the trade and consumption of Chinese-made fashion goods in Mozambique from an ethics perspective. Ethnographic fieldwork in southern Mozambique between 2017 and 2024 shows that many traders and consumers see Chinese counterfeits as beneficial and desirable, enabling them to participate in fashion systems from which they have long been excluded. For traders and consumers in Mozambique, it is ethically right to supply and purchase functional, adequate-quality, and aesthetically pleasing counterfeits. These goods are evaluated less in terms of legality than through pragmatic, everyday judgments about quality, care, and access. The Mozambican case complicates dominant narratives of Chinese-African trade and global intellectual property governance, showing how ethics of access and quality shape everyday globalization.

Both armed groups and civilians have evoked historical memory in the Katiba Macina and Boko Haram related conflicts. Although not a cause of the conflicts, historical memory informs the perceptions and choices of both fighters and civilians. Based on interviews with members of the armed groups and local civilians, the authors demonstrate that how an individual perceives their own positionality within society and how they perceive their ancestors’ positionality affects how that person reacted to the armed groups’ evocation of historical memory, how they interpreted the source of greater threat, and their own self-protection strategies.

South Africa’s democracy is 30 years old, and for 30 years the courts have been interpreting the right of access to adequate housing found in section 26 of the Constitution. Many parts of this right have been developed; one such development is that courts have found that the right includes a duty on the state to provide (temporary) emergency alternative accommodation in eviction matters to those facing homelessness. Throughout the years, courts have grappled with the suitability of this alternative accommodation; it finally seems like some clarity has been reached regarding when alternative accommodation would be considered suitable, due to the courts’ recent acceptance of alternative accommodation offered by the state as suitable. This article considers how the courts currently determine the suitability of emergency accommodation and what types of alternative accommodation has been accepted; it further explores the issues arising from these findings.

This paper is situated within the context of the onset of British imperialism in Nigeria at the end of the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the conquest of the Ijebu Kingdom. The episode, as discussed in the paper, is intended for stage or screen theatrical adaptation. It demonstrates the value of historical dramatization based on data foregrounded by standard historical and relevant research methodologies. The principal text in the paper, derived from primary and research-based sources, is outlined in a chronological narrative. The general idea is to enable the development of a script to create a historical drama.

Cross-border remittances from South Africa have played a central role in the food availability and well-being of migrant labour households in semi-arid Zimbabwe. However, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and containment measures introduced by both the South African and Zimbabwean governments hampered the cross-border remittance system and the movement of goods. This paper explores the food provisioning and availability impacts of the changes brought by the cocktail of policy measures on migrant sending households, and whether these households were able to find alternative food sources locally. The study highlights a precarious situation for affected households, which saw their main source of food provisioning curtailed. It argues that the situation was further aggravated by the risk associated with alternative remittance channels, and the non-availability of local alternatives for these households, which were excluded from accessing food parcels/aid by the criteria used to determine beneficiaries. The paper demonstrates the vulnerability of migrant labour households to economic and labour market changes.

This paper investigates the connection between political settlements and foreign policy in Tanzania, focusing on how domestic power shifts impact external relations. Utilising Political Settlements Analysis (PSA), it examines the transition from John Magufuli’s presidency to Samia Suluhu Hassan’s, uncovering how elite configurations and intra-party dynamics shape foreign policy choices. The analysis draws on fieldwork, interviews and document reviews, revealing how changes in Tanzania’s political settlement – from Magufuli’s centralisation and populism to Hassan’s return to cooperative diplomacy – have influenced policies on resource management, international legal commitments and regional engagement. By illustrating the reciprocal relationship between domestic political configurations and foreign policy, this paper not only enhances the understanding of Tanzania’s case but also contributes to broader debates on the significance of political settlements in shaping the foreign policies of African states.

Women’s labor in African urban centers permeates every sphere of urban life, yet its full scope remains understated in scholarly accounts. Akinwole introduces “holistic articulation” as a method for reading African women’s discursive labor. Holistic articulation names an analytical strategy of linking discursive fragments about women’s labor across multiple archives: social history, African literature, popular journalism, mythography, and everyday expressions. By tracing these connections, holistic articulation highlights the breadth of African women’s space-making and performative labor. This approach extends existing frameworks for analyzing African women’s labor by foregrounding its discursive and imaginative dimensions.

In this article, we combine anthropological and legal approaches to interrogate the position and status of “victims” during Prosecutor v Al Mahdi at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Anthropological work on ontology and distributed agency provides a potential model for a broader reading of the category of victim. We then consider the war crime committed and propose an adapted application of international law sources on victimhood in order to develop a new legal-doctrinal approach that considers material objects and heritage as “direct victims” of violence and expands the range of possible “secondary victims” in ICC proceedings.

In the early 1980s, a group of radical African economists working at the Dakar-based Institut Africain de Développement Economique et de Planification (IDEP) were dismissed. Among them were three Ghanaian economists, Tony Obeng, Cadman Atta Mills, and Kwame Amoa, who applied a neocolonial analysis of global political economy to critique international development policies. Although the precise circumstances of their dismissal remain unclear, it was evident that their revolutionary approach to development clashed fundamentally with IDEP’s methods. Inspired by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah’s theory of neocolonialism and the Latin American school of dependency theory, these Pan-African scholars refuted the dominant, anti-political, dehistorical, and simplistic Western explanation of Africa’s underdevelopment and urgently searched for better explanations. Drawing on institutional records, working papers, interviews, memos, and published and unpublished papers, this article centers Africans and African institutions engaged in development thinking in the larger history of economic thought in the 1970s and 1980s.

The procedure for mandatory reviews, also known as confirmations, has existed in Malawi since the colonial period. It requires that when a subordinate court convicts a person and imposes a punishment that passes a prescribed threshold, the case record be forwarded to a higher court for review. This article examines the evolution of this procedure in Malawi from the colonial era to how it is being currently understood and applied. It argues that the understanding that courts have recently attached to the procedure does not align with how this procedure has historically developed. Moreover, this understanding diminishes the procedure’s effectiveness in its function of protecting convicts’ rights. The article suggests ways of improving the procedure to ensure it remains relevant and suitable for the purpose for which it was originally established.

Two new folios from the Old Khotanese epic Buddhist poem the Book of Zambasta have recently come to light. One folio contains the word dīñu which is thrice attested elsewhere in both Old (dīñi, dīña) and Late Khotanese (dīñä) and has been puzzling. The new attestation provides context which helps to establish the approximate meaning of the word. It also provides a new shape (-u) which establishes the morphology. Most shapes (-u, -i, -ä) attest a second singular imperative middle of dīñ- “to overthink”. This finding improves the translation of several passages. dīñ- appears to be a denominal verb from *dīnā- “thought”, cognate to Avestan daēnā- “view, vision” and related to Vedic dhī- “think, reflect”. The semantic development appears to be “see” → “think” → “overthink”.