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After two decades of research in East and East Central Africa on early precolonial history, the authors of this article began a collaborative project focused on gender and identity with an aim of addressing and rectifying categories that commonly appear in anthropological and historical studies. Our position is that present day gender and identity categories applied to the deep past are problematic because they too often miss the nuances of gender, identity, and power dynamics in Africa. This has resulted in a common perception that African women have been perpetual victims and that identity is universal and static. We acknowledge that the corpus of nineteenth and twentieth century anthropological and historical works are a rich resource for researchers if critically reexamined in light of more recent research on gender and Downloaded from identity. We posit new approaches that might inspire a conversation to create more culturally germane categories for particular African contexts. Anthropology and history have greatly influenced public understandings of women and ethnicity in Africa. Thus it is well worth a more vigorous reexamination of how we can construct more accurate historical representations both of African women's statuses in societies and identities as represented in ethnicity, traditions, or other relevant expressions.

Over the last century, girls in Africa, long ignored as sources of knowledge, have, nevertheless, engaged vocally and publicly in activism and artistic endeavors to express their visions and aspirations for a future society inclusive of their needs. Only recently have scholars begun to examine the complicated nature of girlhood in relation to capacity, competence, and knowledge layered with vulnerability and inexperience. In the last decade, the flourishing of girls’ inventive acts of agency and their use of their own incisive voices have given impetus to the growing scholarship on girls’ vibrant historical and current political, economic, creative, and cultural pursuits.

Stanlake John William Thompson Samkange, historian, novelist, and author of 17 books, was active in mid‐twentieth‐century Zimbabwean (Rhodesian) politics. Born in 1922 to socially progressive, politically active Christian parents, Stanlake was one of nine children (seven of whom survived beyond childhood). The children were Betty and Hilda, who died as infants, followed in order by Ernest, Stanlake, Norah, Evelyn, Don, Edgar, and Sketchley. Thompson Douglas Samkange (1893–1956) and his wife Grace Samkange (née Mano), part of an educated elite in colonial Zimbabwe, struggled economically to ensure that Stanlake and their other six children were well educated in both the Methodist and scholarly traditions.