The Women’s History Museum will create a 20-minute podcast that explores female ‘hidden figures’ in Zambia’s history, who have contributed to the narrative of Zambia’s historical and contemporary trajectory. The group wants to explore how this narrative challenges the notion that gender inequality and women’s exclusion from leadership positions is a cultural norm. The podcast will examine how women held leadership positions in pre-colonial Zambia and the country serves as an example of how its culture has been gender-inclusive rather than exclusive. It will also attempt to show that women’s inequality is a learned culture. Zambia has a history of women in leadership positions who contributed to Zambia’s formation, but are ‘hidden figures’ because they were not documented and the history has passed out of knowledge. The podcast will be a thirteen-episode documentary-style series exploring the leadership roles women held, who they were, and how these women contributed to Zambia’s development. The narrative will date back to the 18th century and will be researched and sourced from handwritten anthologies and oral archives. The podcast will also look at how the paradigm shifted to a space where women were excluded from participation in decision-making roles and how this might be addressed.

The Women’s History Museum in Zambia was set up in late 2016 with the mission of researching, interpreting, restoring, documenting and disseminating African indigenous knowledge and living histories focused on women. These are histories that have been excised from the mainstream socio-economic and cultural historical narrative as a result of the continent’s colonial legacy and post-colonial tensions. The vision of the museum is to contribute to the knowledge production industry by examining and developing epistemological systems of cultural learning in the local and regional context for a greater appreciation of how women have contributed to knowledge production in Africa.