The German soldiers did not expect the sky to move. They had rifles, uniforms, and orders. What they did not have was an answer for the sound that began as a tremor and then thickened into a swarm — bees rising like a living wall between empire and the people it sought to break.
Somewhere behind that living shield stood Liti Kidanka of the Nyaturu, calm, deliberate, and unafraid. Oral histories from north-central Tanzania remember her as the woman who could command bees to descend upon German troops in the early 1900s, disorienting them long enough for Nyaturu fighters, armed mostly with spears and bows, to strike and retreat. To colonial observers, such accounts were quickly catalogued as superstition — witchcraft and primitive belief, nothing more.
In 1901, German colonial forces were consolidating their rule in what was then German East Africa, a territory encompassing present-day Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi. Resistance movements were rising across the region. This was the era that would soon produce the Maji Maji War of 1905 to 1907, one of the largest anti-colonial uprisings on the continent.
Born in the 1860s into a family of traditional healers, Liti inherited not only spiritual authority but considerable social influence. According to researcher and writer Halima Geuya, who documented much of Liti’s oral history, she openly opposed German authority around 1901, questioned why the Nyaturu people should serve foreign rulers, and confronted local collaborators. She mobilised fighters and relocated her community to defensible terrain.
In October 1904, German authorities captured and executed her alongside her husband. Her skull was taken to Germany — part of a documented colonial practice of collecting African remains for racial “science.” Her body was not merely killed. It was claimed as imperial property.
The bees, whether understood as spiritual symbolism or tactical environmental knowledge, functioned as a strategy. Bees are territorial; they respond to disturbance. A leader who understands terrain, ecology, and timing can weaponise the environment without ever touching a rifle.
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That is not mysticism. That is intelligence operating under conditions of profound asymmetry. Yet history preferred the simpler label: witch.
Witch or warrior?
The reason for that label is not difficult to locate. Acknowledging African military intelligence — especially from a woman — would have destabilised the colonial narrative of superiority.
Liti Kidanka’s leadership did not fit European models of command: she held no colonial title, had not been schooled in Berlin, and derived her authority from a tradition that the empire had no framework to respect.
But she organised resistance, used underground cattle hideouts to protect community wealth from seizure, and sustained morale in the face of modern weaponry. She relocated her people strategically to Mikuyu, a position of defensible advantage. These are the decisions of a military and political mind.
When we celebrate women’s leadership today, we often default to corporate and parliamentary spaces. But leadership is fundamentally about influence, risk, and consequence.
Consider President Samia Suluhu Hassan, Tanzania’s first female president, who, since taking office, has navigated economic reform, diplomacy, and regional leadership within East Africa, whilst facing gendered scrutiny that male leaders rarely encounter.
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Consider Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the first woman and first African to lead the World Trade Organisation, negotiating global economic tensions in spaces historically dominated by Western male power structures.
Consider Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who mobilised environmental resistance in Kenya and was once dismissed as disruptive before being globally celebrated. Each of these women operated in systems designed to diminish them.
The thread connecting them to Liti Kidanka is not metaphorical — it is structural. Liti was called a witch. Modern women are called emotional, weak, too ambitious, or too loud. The language evolves, but the resistance to women’s authority does not.
The mechanisms of dismissal are updated for each era; the underlying impulse remains unchanged. What shifts is the vocabulary. What persists is the refusal to grant women the full weight of their own authority.
The archive problem
One might ask: where are the written archives proving Liti’s battlefield tactics? The answer exposes a second injustice. Colonial records were never neutral — they documented taxation, labour extraction, and administrative control with meticulous detail, but rarely dignified African resistors, especially women, with analytical depth.
The absence of a written record is not evidence of absence. It is evidence of who held the pen. The same German administration that executed Liti Kidanka in 1904 was the one responsible for deciding what would and would not be recorded about her.
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To demand that her story conform to the evidentiary standards of the very system that destroyed her is to extend that system’s logic into the present. Oral history, community memory, and indigenous scholarship are not inferior sources. They are counter-archives.
Counter-archives are necessary precisely when official archives were built to erase you. The colonial practice of collecting African remains for European institutions was widespread and systematic.
German anthropologist Felix von Luschan, who headed the Africa and Oceania department of Berlin’s Royal Museum of Ethnology, amassed a collection of over 6,300 skulls by the time of his death in 1924.
Liti Kidanka’s skull entered this machinery of imperial possession. Her story exposes how colonial violence not only targeted bodies but also narratives, systematically erasing African women leaders from formal history whilst preserving colonial records instead.
When we recover her story, we are not reopening the past for symbolism. We are correcting the record.
An anticipated end
Liti’s final act is perhaps the most powerful. Oral accounts say she anticipated her death. When German forces came for her in October 1904, she did not flee.
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She faced them. She was executed. Her skull was taken overseas — a violent attempt to claim even her remains as imperial property. And here we are, more than a century later, speaking her name.
Women’s Day should not be reduced to hashtags and corporate panels. It should force uncomfortable historical questions. How many girls in Singida today learn about Liti Kidanka in school textbooks?
How many understand that a Nyaturu woman once stood against German rifles without formal weapons? How many are taught that environmental knowledge can be power, and that leadership does not require permission?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are a measure of how seriously any society takes the history it claims to honour.
If we truly honour women past and present, we must integrate figures like Liti into curricula, museums, public discourse, and academic research. We must fund local historians and document oral traditions before they disappear. We must stop reducing African women’s resistance to folklore.
The bees are the perfect metaphor. Individually small. Collectively unstoppable. Protective of their ground. Power does not only come from superior weapons — it comes from unity, terrain, belief, and timing.
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Today’s women leaders operate in boardrooms instead of battlefields, in parliaments instead of valleys. But the principle is identical. Systems resist them. Narratives attempt to diminish them. And still, they lead.
Memory as justice
Liti Kidanka was a political actor in an anti-colonial struggle. She was executed for it. Her body was desecrated for it. And her memory survived it.
The German soldiers may have feared the bees. History should fear forgetting her. The work of remembrance is not sentimental — it is political, and it is urgent.
To remember Liti Kidanka is to insist that African women’s resistance was real, strategic, and consequential. It is to insist that the colonial archive’s silence on her does not diminish her. It is to insist that the measure of a leader is not the records left behind by those who sought to destroy her.
She organised. She resisted. She was killed for it. She was robbed of her remains. And still the story endures — passed down not through the institutions that erased her, but through the communities she died defending.
That is the kind of leadership Women’s Day should be built around: not the polished, the permitted, and the palatable, but the defiant, the dispossessed, and the deliberately forgotten. Liti Kidanka was all three. It is past time the record reflected that.
Mariam Gichan is an archaeologist and journalist based in Dar es Salaam. She can be reached at mariamgichan@gmail.com or on +255 754 215 690. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.
