For 14 months – between 2016 and 2018 – I lived in Enugu-Ezike, an Igbo village group, for an ethnographic exploration of their filiation (or, offspring recruitment) custom, which I had found to be unique among what obtained in the northern Igbo village groups, today called, ordinarily, ‘Nsukka cultural zone’. I was visiting a customary court in a nearby village to understand the nature of disputes there. With the benefits of court registers running a few decades back, it could be seen that cases bordered consistently on contestations around land and marriage. Each case was peculiar but some interesting factors jumped out as I perused the court records. 1) The patterns of land disputes were shaped by their filiation custom in which paternity is purely biological, as against most other village groups in these parts where paternity is flexible and negotiable; 2) it was often the case that group members who dared to challenge land ownership customs were those who had acquired power and money and such other influences connected with the imposed, western-style political economy; 2) most applications for marital separation were filed by women, with few exceptional cases by men such as one that was ongoing during my time in the field; 3) most applications for separation concerned marriages in which the couples lived outside the community – in the big Nigerian cities; 5) faith differences and extramarital affairs were common reasons for separation applications. The pattern in which translocal forces are shaking up the cultural tapestry of this group is what this account will use these case accounts to highlight, making out of this an example of how the locale gets inexorably drawn into the world system, and how it continually resists and/or negotiates that incorporation.