While We Wait: Songs, Shields, and the Land That Remembers | CollabFund
An insight into the CollabFund project Beyond the Objects: The Battlefield Landscapes of “While We Wait” by Deonis Mgumba.
Under a tree at Lugalo where German forces first fell to the Hehe, an elder began to sing an old initiation song, and history stopped being a place on a map. It became a living memory carried in voice and bodies.
Our project Beyond the Objects, followed that thread: from battlefield songs and re-acted memories in Isseke to reclaiming mistranslated places names in Nkonko, to standing at the grave of the German officer linked to Hehe shields now held in Hannover's Landesmuseum. We learned that oral tradition isn't secondary to the archive; it's a different, often deeper, form of evidence.
Interview with Deonis Mgumba
Video insight into the project group’s oral history documentation.
Video insight into the project group’s oral history documentation.
The Author
Deonis Mgumba
Curator
Regional Museum and Cultural Centre Iringa Boma
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