This article focuses on the ancestral human remains of Indigenous peoples that were taken by European invaders during the colonial era. It begins by considering the notion of human remains. It then describes the two types of heritage that result from the removal of human remains: the tangible heritage made of the remains exhibited or stored in the museums or universities of former colonial States, and the intangible heritage made of the collective memories of the surviving communities and their descendants about the removal (and the absence) of the stolen remains. The article next examines the role of national and international laws with respect to the restitution of human remains by exploring the concept of transitional justice. This article argues that transitional justice can facilitate the meaningful repatriation of ancestral human remains and hence the healing of past injustice.

The ‘title deed fix’ – resurgent globally since the 1990s – is part of a wave of market-led agrarian reforms whose outcomes have been mixed. Kenya was the first African country to experiment – starting six decades ago and continuing today – with state-mandated formal land registration and private titling. Today it is among a handful to begin a transition to a digitized land registry. Behind both paper and electronic land documents, however, is a persistent temporal fiction that undergirds state-backed title registries – namely, a constructed present that is out of sync with intersecting biographical and structural temporalities, and that can efface socially recognized pasts, commitments or testimonials. We analyse some consequences of those temporal dissonances, unstable rights durations, and an ensuing limbo that can last decades, through family land stories shared with us during long-term ethnographic research in Kenya’s fertile central highlands. Especially vulnerable to temporal erasure and dispossession when title deed limbo spans decades are divorced or single women and their children, particularly as farmland and non-agricultural employment become more scarce and land markets overheat. Multitemporal family narratives powerfully illustrate why title deeds of any age are best taken as provisional truths rather than legal certainties, and why tenure security is an unstable and reversible process rather than a present or absent condition.

Leather markets are critical nodes in the leather industry value chain. They attract manufacturers and small and medium enterprises that facilitate social interactions and opportunities, leading to increased availability of finished leather goods. This study explores the social transformation and organization of Mushin leather market in Lagos megacity based on data collected through observation and in-depth and key informant interviews with traders, association and community members, transporters and customers in the market. Mushin leather market evolved from a shop owned by an indigenous woman known as Iya Ijebu (Ijebu woman) into a leather trading community. State and local governments intervene minimally in the market affairs through sanitation rules and revenue collection. Routes to market socialization include mentoring and apprenticeships, with visible gender disparities. Associational membership guarantees full integration to traders. Strong business, personal and group networks structure ethnic dynamics and occupational specializations. The article reveals the inherent interdependence of social institutions in understanding the organization of the leather market, particularly in terms of how capital, associational norms and networks shape the formation of a heterogeneous market in an indigenous Yoruba community. Mushin leather market is transforming the domains of ethnic trade speciality and patterning intergroup social relations in Lagos megacity.

This article explores trajectories in the politics of water patronage in N’Djamena, Chad. Water appears as a malleable and elusive commodity, at once ubiquitous and somewhat overlooked. Drawing on ethnographic field research in peripheral N’Djamena, I argue that relational distance is skilfully handled by water patrons for monetary rewards and influence. Such handling swings the making of water value in contradictory directions unaccounted for in much of the existing literature on water patronage. Present or absent, hidden or on display, funders or profit makers, patrons may leverage water supply through material, symbolic or entrepreneurial labour that places them in conflicting spaces. Ultimately, these leveraging processes based on the manipulation of relational distance create a multifaceted water valuation. The various positionalities of the water patrons and their use of relational distance point to the existence of multiple water values, rather than a single one. Therefore, I argue that water may have either a ‘distant value’ or an ‘anchored value’, depending on the relational distance strategy implemented by the patron who provides it.

This article examines the development, early operation and subsequent failure of the Tot-Kolowa Red Cross irrigation scheme in Kenya’s Kerio Valley. Initially conceived as a technical solution to address regional food insecurity, the scheme aimed to scale up food production through the implementation of a fixed pipe irrigation system and the provision of agricultural inputs for cash cropping. A series of unfolding circumstances, however, necessitated numerous modifications to the original design as the project became increasingly entangled with deep and complex histories of land use patterns, resource allocation and conflict. Failure to understand the complexity of these dynamics ultimately led to the project’s collapse as the region spiralled into a period of significant unrest. In tracing these events, we aim to foreground the lived realities of imposed development, including both positive and negative responses to the scheme’s participatory obligations and its wider impact on community resilience.

This study documents three chapel furnishings dating from around 1500 belonging to the Edgcumbe family at Cotehele, Cornwall, south-west England, and discusses their survival during the Protestant Reformation and beyond. The textiles were exhibited to the Society of Antiquaries of London by W H St John Hope, FSA and the text of his presentation was published in the Proceedings of the Society in 1912–13. The present article brings together the numerous other historic writings concerning the textiles. Their possible origins are explored and assessed in context with pieces of similar date. Observations of their original making and later changes are recorded, while interpretations by historians of this period are put forward for consideration. The rarity of survival of the textiles and their documented history is acknowledged.