The Restorative Genius of Zambian Women

Zambian women are pioneering a new museum culture that is revolutionizing cultural preservation through a fusion of digital technology and indigenous knowledge systems, challenging Western colonial institutions’ claims to being rightful custodians of African heritage.

In the British Museum sits a headdress that once belonged to the Nawaitwika, a chieftainess of the Namwanga people. Displayed simply as an artefact, it is stripped of its story—how the role of Nawaitwika emerged when colonial borders divided our people, how her leadership sustained our communities and how the headdress embodies not just authority but our ways of knowing and being. This silence around African women’s power and cultural knowledge is not unique to my people’s heritage. Across museums and institutions worldwide, Western frameworks continue to shape how African women’s stories are told or are left untold. While Western feminism has traditionally focused on achieving equality between men and women through individual rights, this framework, though crucial, fails to address how colonialism destroyed indigenous cultures and collective communities. This erasure matters for two key reasons: human identity forms through cultural relationships, and when cultures are erased, we lose essential frameworks for understanding ourselves.

In matriarchal societies, where women lead, and matrilineal societies, where knowledge and titles pass through women, we find practices that fundamentally recognize women’s full humanity. These cultural frameworks offer models for creating societies that better protect women and vulnerable groups. Indeed, these indigenous systems, where women’s knowledge holds equal or greater importance than men’s, preceded modern feminism in establishing paths toward gender equality. Some African approaches to gender justice were rooted not in individual rights but in women’s roles as keepers and transmitters of cultural knowledge. Indigenous scholars in the Global North call this process ‘rematriation’, a feminist paradigm that returns to and embodies indigenous practices and laws.

However, while a ‘return’ to the indigenous is central to achieving equality for women around the world, it is also necessary that we describe the ways in which these pre-colonial systems created space for women’s power without romanticizing past inequalities. This process, which I term ‘rematriarchization’, involves more than simply recovering lost traditions. It requires us to critically examine how cultural systems can be reclaimed and reimagined to empower women while acknowledging historical inequalities. Zambian women are leading this work today through academic and practical efforts to transform our museums, rewrite our histories, and reclaim our cultural artefacts. Their work challenges the Western assumption that progress only moves toward Western models of civilization...

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