The Women’s History Museum of Zambia (WHMZ) was founded in 2017 by two Zambian women—author, playwright and public intellectual, Mulenga Kapwepwe, and new media expert and consultant, Samba Yonga, with the aim of highlighting the various contributions of women to Zambian society. Indeed, WHMZ works more explicitly in and with women’s history. This already challenges the traditional museum and history narratives centred on ‘Big Men Stories’. Through popular digital tools like social media, and now web3 and blockchain, the museum has outmanoeuvred the bureaucratic processes that can hinder cultural preservation. This digital strategy works in three key ways.

First, the Women’s Museum’s digital repatriation project engages source communities to add local knowledge about stolen Zambian artefacts—knowledge often missing from Western museums. Once this data is gathered, these artefacts are archived on the museum website, making them accessible to writers like me with no formal institutional affiliation. This promotes critical thought and practice about the histories and cultures shaping women’s lives today through local knowledge. In all my past cultural essays, I have consulted their growing catalogue for insights into topics ranging from meat to language. Like the Zamrock Museum at Modzi Arts, WHMZ makes historical and cultural knowledge accessible while still preserving the accuracy and depth of meaning of artefacts. In fact, it could be argued that opening up the archive to the digital has enabled unexpected layers of local knowledge to emerge in unexpected places and from unexpected sources.

Second, to further expand how artefacts can be interpreted in novel ways through digital experiences, the Museum has begun placing these artefacts on the blockchain for viewing. This opens up the potential for digital collection—without the purchase of the original artefact. The Museum’s forward-thinking approach to cultural preservation using blockchain technology, in partnership with local web3 communities, demonstrates how artefacts currently held in Western museums can retain their cultural meaning while generating revenue for source communities. This allows local institutions and communities to maintain physical care and custody of the artefacts still in their possession, while also enabling digital access to their cultural artefacts held in foreign museums through blockchain technology.

One could say we are now countering the imperial project through the creative application of new technologies, allowing us to benefit from digital systems while simultaneously critiquing colonial structures and promoting critical thought among a global audience. This is enabled by the web3 marketplace which, despite its challenges with coding accessibility, does not rely on advertising revenue or single donors. Thus, there is no obstacle to radical critique of the systems and structures that prop up the traditional museum even while hoping to make revenue. Ideas, like artefacts, can be exchanged freely even if not necessarily for free. For rematriarchization, this enables a robust conversation around women’s experiences unfettered by discourse and institutions that still consider Africans solely as consumers rather than creators of philosophies, ideas, and practices in the advocacy space.

 Finally, in addition to preserving historical artefacts, the Museum has created contemporary archival material specifically for a generation immersed in digital media. Take for instance their animated podcast series, Leading Ladies, which highlights the biographies and impact of Zambian women both pre and post-colonialism, such as the high priestess of the Lumpa Church, Alice Lenshina. Alice Lenshina was born in Northern Zambia. Reflecting a pre-colonial Bemba cultural norm that emphasized women’s importance in spiritual life, she led the Lumpa Church, which advocated for this as part of its doctrine. Though state forces crushed her movement, she continues to serve as a powerful example of how women using indigenous knowledge systems can counter cultural erasure. Similarly, the women of the WHMZ embody this application of indigenous methodologies such as collective information sharing and storytelling with community researchers. This notably challenges and offers an alternative to the outsider-coming-in approach common in social sciences. Such traditional approaches can lead to inaccuracies and distortions, creating a spectacle of the cultures and experiences of women in the Global South. ‘Under Western eyes’, to borrow from the apt title of Global South Feminist Scholar, Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s seminal essay and Joseph Conrad’s book, the nuances of feminine life outside Western centres of knowledge are often missed in scholarship, mischaracterized as oppression or infantilism. Rematriarchization and its nascent methodologies, as practised by the Museum, offer an alternative by centring the subjective experiences of women who live within and with these cultures. In practical terms, this enables more accurate policies and action in addressing oppressive elements of present-day culture—the violence, economic and political oppression that women face. This is most evident in the visual and literary storytelling of Zambian women creatives who illuminate the political and sociocultural histories shaping Zambian women’s experiences—something the Western museums’ positivist approach, as suggested earlier, fails to do.