Colonial violence in German East Africa not only displaced communities but also dismantled indigenous systems of knowledge, authority, and spirituality.
Using the life and legacy of Li’ti Kidanka, a resistance leader and healer from central Tanzania, this piece reflects on how colonialism distorted gendered authority that centred women as custodians of knowledge.
What today appears as ‘secretive’ was, in fact, a sophisticated system of protection and relational care, misunderstood through both colonial and modern patriarchal lenses.
Li’ti Kidanka is remembered by the Wanyaturu not as a chief, for their society had no chieftaincy before German colonial interference, but as a healer, protector, and woman of extraordinary power.
From the Kilimatinde military station, German colonial forces carried out violent campaigns against communities in the Singida region, destroying homes, murdering inhabitants, and looting ancestral belongings.
Hundreds of these belongings, now labelled as ethnographic ‘objects/artefacts’ or ‘human remains’, were sent to Germany. Yet the removal of these ‘objects’ was never simply material theft; it was an attack on knowledge systems, gendered authority, and spirituality that sustained indigenous life.
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Li’ti Kidanka’s legacy reveals, among many others, how knowledge, gender, and material culture were inseparable.
To the Wanyaturu, power was knowledge enacted through people and the belongings they entrusted. Li’ti Kidanka’s authority derived not only from her wisdom in warfare, natural ecology, and sacred practices but also from her ability to animate her sacred belongings. Her knowledge functioned through her belongings.
These belongings were connected to knowledge derived from a sacred age-set system and a private institution that existed exclusively among Wanyaturu women. The Germans, unable to comprehend this gendered cosmology, failed to see the intangible embedded within these belongings.
Material culture
Today, the location of Li’ti Kidanka’s belongings and her skull remains unknown, yet their absence signals the depth of colonial disruption. What was taken was more than ‘objects’; it was the foundation of community knowledge and protection.
European museums now categorise looted belongings as simply ‘objects/artefacts’ of a people. Yet for those who created and used them, they were living companions in a relational and spiritual world. A stool was not merely furniture; it was a seat of dignity.
A gourd carried medicine, lineage, and ritual prayer. A bracelet held protection, memory, and identity. Each ‘object’ was a fragment of a gendered cosmos in which knowledge, secrecy, and authority intertwined.
As Rassool (2015) notes, the modern museum is a site of epistemic extraction, where not just belongings but knowledge systems were uprooted. These collections became reminders of pain and domination, preserving the absence of life rather than its essence.
Restitution, then, should not be simply the return of ‘objects’. It should constitute initiatives to regenerate the relationships between people, memory, and belongings that once made their worlds whole.
Secrecy as protection
The gendered nature of knowledge among the Wanyaturu highlights how secrecy served as a form of protection. Li’ti Kidanka’s healing abilities positioned her at the centre of her community’s survival, yet even her power was relational.
Her confidant, another woman, was the only person who could see, touch, and use her sacred belongings. Men, including her husband and soldiers she went to the battlefield with, could not access her knowledge through these ‘objects’.
Attempts to disarm her had to occur through women, reflecting both indigenous gender protocols and the limitations of both colonial and patriarchal authority. The disruption of these networks by colonial violence was, therefore, not merely physical but intellectual and spiritual.
Colonial violence erased the roles women played as custodians of knowledge, severing the flow of information embedded in relationships, rituals, and material culture. Cataloguing by colonial officers and anthropologists imposed a masculine lens that misrepresented women’s knowledge.
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Healing became ‘witchcraft’, protection became ‘superstition’, and women like Li’ti Kidanka were recast as exoticised threats. Her skull, removed to Germany, mirrored the seizure of her belongings.
Erasing spiritual frameworks
Both acts aimed to possess, study, and dominate, reducing living knowledge and power into static ‘objects’ or ‘specimens’. In the Wanyaturu cosmology, the head embodies spirit, memory, and will. Therefore, the removal of both Li’ti Kidanka’s skull and her belongings silenced both the healer and the relational archive she maintained.
The epistemic violence of colonialism extended beyond material loss. It dismantled women’s intellectual authority, disrupted rituals, and decimated knowledge systems encoded in ‘objects’, language, and practice.
Every calabash, drum, or herb gourd was a small library, a vessel of ecological and spiritual intelligence. Colonial removal transformed these living archives into inert ‘objects/artefacts’, erasing the gendered and spiritual frameworks that gave them meaning.
Today, European museums preserve bodies but not knowledge, life, or relationships. Restitution, therefore, must not be measured in legal ownership alone but in the restoration of relational, spiritual, and gendered knowledge.
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Restitution should be regarded through a lens of a living provenance that reconnects belongings with the communities from which they were taken. Li’ti Kidanka’s remembered practices offer a lens for rethinking restitution.
Rethinking true restitution
Her bees, whether literal or metaphorical, symbolise interdependence, collective intelligence, and resistance to capture. Just as bees return to their hives, knowledge too can find its way home.
Restitution should not be just the shipment of static ‘objects’ across borders but a ceremony, a process of reanimation. Through Li’ti Kidanka’s legacy, we acknowledge that ancestral belongings were never mere ‘objects’; they were pathways between the visible and unseen, living extensions of memory, power, and gendered authority.
Colonial violence distorted gendered authority by misrepresenting indigenous women’s custodianship of knowledge as secrecy, when in fact secrecy was a vital system through which gendered knowledge moved within communities.
It failed to understand this, and in attempting to impose its worldview, it belittled and devalued indigenous systems of gendered knowledge flow.
Today, through the lens of Li’ti Kidanka’s life, we see how indigenous systems of care, protection, and wisdom were encoded in relationships, ‘objects’, and ritual practice.
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What appears ‘secretive’ today was a carefully structured system of protection and knowledge transfer.
Understanding this allows restitution to move beyond transactions, toward relational, ethical, and ceremonial restoration. By listening to the silence left in the wake of colonial violence, we create space for knowledge, memory, and life to return.
Li’ti Kidanka teaches us that the restoration of belongings is inseparable from the restoration of the knowledge, authority, and balance they once embodied.
Halima Geuya is a Tanzanian creative writer and researcher. She is available at halimageuya@gmail.com. These are the writer’s own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of The Chanzo. Do you want to publish in this space? Contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com for further clarification.
