This article contains editions of three new copperplate charters of the kings of Valkhā who, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries ce, ruled a territory situated to the north of the Vākāṭaka kingdom along the Narmadā river. Ramesh and Tewari, the editors of the famous Bagh hoard of plates discovered in 1982, furnished a straightforward chronology of five successive Valkhā rulers on the basis of 32 plates known to them. However, one of the plates edited here flatly contradicts the sequence they proposed. It turns out that the dating of several previously known Valkhā charters is also controversial. It has been suggested by other scholars that there were, in fact, two kings of Valkhā by the name of Rudradāsa as well as two by the name of Bhuluṇḍa. A reinvestigation of old data combined with the newly edited plates confirms the former and shows a high likelihood of the latter.

This is an extended review of Jonathan Owens, Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) that addresses several important issues in the methodology of historical Arabic linguistics.

This article explores how internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Benue State, Nigeria, reconfigure everyday life under conditions of governance deficits, insecurity and institutional neglect. Drawing on ethnographic research in Naka, Daudu II and Abagana camps, I examine how displaced populations mobilize social networks, religious ties, informal economies and everyday improvisations as infrastructural responses to life in displacement. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of people as infrastructure and camps as urban political space, I situate IDP camps not as peripheral sites of humanitarian crisis but as laboratories of African urbanism. By foregrounding the ordinary – cooking, parenting, trading, negotiating aid – the article shows how IDPs enact governance from below, transforming camps into dynamic sites of infrastructural negotiation, resilience and survival. The study contributes to scholarship on urban governance and displacement by reframing camps as enduring socio-political spaces where infrastructure, power and agency are constantly reassembled.

This article explores African identity through the lens of incompleteness and motion. By challenging the traditional nation state-centric view of belonging, it offers a nuanced framework for analysing diasporic cultural production. This framework acknowledges the complex realities of individuals with multilayered identities shaped by interconnected geographies and hierarchies at both local and global levels. The discussion expands the concept of diaspora beyond the confines of nation states, recognizing the multiplicity of ‘homes’ and ‘dislocations’ in the contemporary world. It highlights how ongoing conflicts and liberation struggles blur the lines between home and diaspora, demonstrating the fluidity of belonging in an ever shifting global landscape. Ultimately, it encourages a critical reassessment of diasporic experiences and emphasizes the interconnectedness of ‘frontier homes’ and ‘frontier diasporas’ within and beyond the nation state.

A central theme in Francis Nyamnjoh’s rich IAI lecture at the 2025 ECAS conference in Prague, as in his work in general, is the ongoing struggle over exclusion and closure all over the continent (and throughout the modern world). But in this lecture he adds a new term: nimble-footedness. My question is: to what extent can this poetic term provide a counter-weight to the powerful tendency towards closure that he illustrated with such cogent examples in his lecture?

Through an ethnographic study of ageing Italians in Tunisia, this article explores the historical development of the Italian diaspora community in Tunisia from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It compares two distinct yet interconnected Italian communities: the ‘lost colony’ of La Goulette and the ‘vacation colony’ of Hammamet, emphasizing the daily lives, social interactions and ageing experiences of Italian pensioners in Hammamet alongside those of long-established Italian descendants in La Goulette. The analysis highlights the duality of the Italian community’s identity, torn between its colonial heritage and modern migration patterns, providing a deeper understanding of the relative privilege enjoyed by the Italian diaspora and its complex relationship with the local Tunisian population. The findings emphasize the continuity between historical and contemporary forms of colonization without colonialism, offering insights into the nuanced interplay of race, class and national identity within the context of postcolonial Tunisia. This contribution is in dialogue with ethnographic and historical research on the European diaspora in Africa, which has demonstrated how (neo-)colonial inequalities can arise and evolve beyond the framework of political colonialism.

African historiography is most persuasive when it refuses to let the state’s archive dictate the story of the nation. Across the last two decades, historians and historical anthropologists have widened the evidentiary field beyond bureaucratic texts—toward oral histories, ritual grammars, sacred ecologies, newspapers, vernacular maps, and the grainy everyday of rumor and reputation. This scholarly review exemplifies that methodological turn while voicing a shared theoretical wager: African political and social life is not best explained by models of institutional consolidation but by moral economies, spatial counter-imaginaries, and religious idioms through which communities fashion accountability and meaning.