In South Sudan, the rumor that the Murle people suffer from infertility evolved into a politically instrumental myth used to justify child abduction, securitization, and systemic exclusion. Rooted in colonial misrepresentations, the claim pathologizes Murle reproduction and legitimizes violence. Drawing on ethnography and archival, medical, and humanitarian sources, the article conceptualizes this narrative as a rumor-myth: a necropolitical discourse that transforms speculation into governance. Though lacking evidence, the infertility narrative endures through repetition and political utility. Counter-oral histories challenge these racialized fictions, revealing how communities contest exclusion and expose the broader structures of power that sustain scapegoating, violence, and inequality.

Studies on Chinese cultural and religious engagement abroad are often framed through the lens of state-driven soft power. Drawing on the case study of the Zambia Shaolin Cultural Center (ZSSC), I challenge this state-centric interpretation, emphasizing the collaborative, relational, and fluid nature of China–Africa cultural and religious encounters. Inspired by “assemblage thinking” and based on fieldwork observation and interviews, I examine the heterogeneity, fluidity, and adaptability of Shaolin’s operations in Zambia. I argue that ZSCC should be viewed as an evolving assemblage where diverse actors and elements interact and co-create meaning through adaptation and negotiation.

As a language of religious and administrative importance in the early centuries of the common era, Gāndhārī came to be a donor into its neighbouring languages, such as Tocharian and Chinese. Consequently, advances in Gāndhārī historical phonology can help us discover new loanwords, refine our understanding of the historical phonology of its neighbouring languages, and eventually improve our understanding of the relationship between the communities that spoke those languages. One unresolved problem in the study of Gāndhārī phonology is the development of Sanskrit unaspirated velar stops: the relative paucity of data and variation in spelling have left previous researchers hesitant regarding the developments of those stops and their phonetic realization. In the present article, we take a bird’s eye view and analyse the development of these velars across the whole edited corpus; our main contribution is the discovery of the phonetic environment conditioning the development of /k/ and /g/, thereby fully explaining the seemingly chaotic spelling observed in previous publications.

The writer, Chimamanda Adichie, was sent out of an Nsukka chapel for wearing a short-sleeved blouse. The TV presenter, Funmi Iyanda, was harassed by police for wearing a knee-length dress. Nigeria’s response to a suit at the ECOWAS Court of Justice brought by an actress, Dorothy Njemanze, included that she “dress[ed] naked or half naked”. Firdaus Amasa was initially denied call to the Nigerian bar because she wore a hijab beneath her lawyer’s wig, and several young women have been decamped from the mandatory National Youth Service Corps programme for wearing skirts instead of trousers and shorts. Analysing the above incidents, alongside the Supreme Court’s decision in Lagos State Government v Abdulkareem, this article finds that though it is easier to enforce women’s rights to choose their dress when religious liberty is engaged, the constitutionally guaranteed protection against degrading treatment is one thread that runs across all instances of policing women’s dress. Consequently, prioritizing dignity rights for Nigeria’s womenfolk will shield them from indignities associated with policing their dress choices.

South Africa is the most unequal society in the world, and this is exacerbated by the enduring legacy of apartheid. Policy and statutory interventions have been introduced to address inequality, albeit with minimal success. This article argues that the persistence of inequality necessitates a more profound normative recalibration within corporate law. It proposes incorporating the values of transformative constitutionalism, distributive justice and Ubuntu into corporate law, conceptualized as transformative corporate law. This reorientation enhances the enlightened shareholder value (ESV) model by shifting its emphasis from a predominantly shareholder-centric focus towards a more inclusive stakeholder model. The article situates shareholder primacy as occupying “the right”, stakeholderism “the left” and the ESV model “the centre” of the corporate governance spectrum. South Africa’s extreme inequality demands a paradigm shift that moves decisively towards the centre-left, a position embedded in the African philosophy of Ubuntu and termed the “progressive ESV” model in this article.

ʔAbbā Garimā I and III (AG I and III) are the oldest manuscripts written in Geez (Old Ethiopic). According to a recent radiocarbon analysis they are dated to the Aksumite period. The present paper confronts the orthography of these manuscripts with that of the epigraphic corpus of the Aksumite period (the comparison is restricted to the roots containing gutturals and/or sibilants, since the preservation of these consonants is the hallmark of pre-seventh-century Geez). The investigation demonstrates remarkable agreement in spelling roots with gutturals/sibilants – an additional argument in favour of dating of AG I, III to the Aksumite period. The paper also discusses the general problem of periodization of the Geez language, focusing on the early post-Aksumite period (eighth–thirteenth century) and providing a preliminary survey of direct and indirect Geez sources pertaining to this period.