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