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Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

This article is a good summary of why this is interesting: https://theconversation.com/ancient-dna-is-restoring-the-ori...

1. The DNA is consistent with the Kilwa Chronicle, a text probably recorded from an earlier oral tradition that was written off as being not based on history

2. There's a strong sexual bias in the admixture. Often that happens as an unpleasant side effect of colonization by patriarchal societies (eg Spaniards go to Latin America, impregnate a lot of local ladies, and as a result the Spanish DNA tends to be passed down from the male side and the indigenous DNA from the female side). There's a similar effect here, but it might be caused by traders trying to ingratiate themselves with the local matriarchy.

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> Our best guess is that Persian men allied with and married into elite families and adopted local customs to enable them to be more successful traders.

It's well known Persians had been trading along the Horn of African for millennia. What makes the perfunctory woke preamble in TFA even more insufferable than usual is that a significant aspect of this trade was in slaves. Peoples along the Horn of Africa trafficked slaves from Central Africa, constituting what's known as the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, which IIRC even preexisted the Arab Slave Trade. Moreover, the Persians had been sailing between the Horn of Africa and India for perhaps nearly as long as they had been sailing to East Africa, so there are traces of Persian trade and cultural links all along the coastline from Africa to as far away as Indonesia and perhaps even the Philippines, and long before the NW Europeans took to sail.

And if you go back far enough, it's also well known that the Bantu peoples were colonizers in their own right, and there still exist tensions between ethnic Bantus and indigenous peoples--e.g. pygmies.

>Peoples along the Horn of Africa trafficked slaves from Central Africa >It's well known Persians had been trading along the Horn of African for millennia.

Swahilis don't live in the Horn (outside of a few cities) .You are thinking about Eastern Africa.

>What makes the perfunctory woke preamble in TFA even more insufferable than usual is that a significant aspect of this trade was in slaves.

I’m curious which portion of the article you’re referring to? I’m not sure what point from the article your comment is meant to address.

Sorry, I was reacting to the The Conversation article linked above, not to the actual Nature paper, which seems much less patronizing to the group under study.

I assumed you were referring to ‘The Conversation’ piece actually. I’m not sure which part of the article you find woke and/or patronizing? I didn’t read it that way personally. One of the authors of the piece, Chapurukha Kusimba, is East African and seems to be a part of a group of self-described “post-colonial” scholars from the region. To me I just read actual pride for the region and its history and a desire to study it from a point of view distinct from western archeology.

I’m not sure why you talked about the pre-colonial slave trade specifically, but it read like you felt this article neglected the point in favor of a rosier image of the region’s history. The article does mention the perpetuation of colonial structures by East Africans after the British left (and cites an article by Kusimba). There’s no specific mention of the pre-colonial slave trade in this piece, but Kusimba has written about the “ancient practices that can be traced back more than two millennia in Africa.”[1] I find it unlikely he meant to gloss over this, and instead probably just focused on another time period.

Just to say so explicitly, I’m genuinely curious about how you perceived this article and why!

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chap-Kusimba/publicatio...

Uh, TFA refers to what exactly? Lost here.

> And if you go back far enough, it's also well known that the Bantu peoples were colonizers in their own right, and there still exist tensions between ethnic Bantus and indigenous peoples--e.g. pygmies.

It's not necessary to go back particularly far. The Bantu Expansion took place within the historical period. The ancient Egyptians wrote about (and painted) the African peoples of Kush to their south; those peoples are now extinct.

The Bantu reached South Africa at roughly the same time the Dutch did.

> The Bantu reached South Africa at roughly the same time the Dutch did.

That's a common misconception because the Bantu expansion didn't reach the Cape. But we have iron artefacts from Natal dating from the 400s.

> But we have iron artefacts from Natal dating from the 400s.

I'm open to learning more, but that doesn't seem like very strong evidence. Iron artifacts reached e.g. Mongolia long before anyone there was capable of making iron. Iron is very durable and very useful; it is one of two materials that is, as far as I know, universally traded for in every known culture that might conceivably have had access to a trade network featuring the object(s), the other being salt.

The idea that bantu poplations are not native to south africa stems from colonial propaganda, to sanitize the land grab. Xhosa groups are known to have reached the Cape by the 11th century

Where does "wokeness" come into this? And why the diatribe about the slave trade?

I know.. Talk about insufferable and perfunctory... This word is the worst, not least of all because its a reference to the matrix films that comes to us via the neonazis of fourchan.

Plus it was always males taking the ships to these countries and being the risk taking adventurous traders. Colonizers aren’t bringing their daughters and unmarried sisters along for the ride.

unpleasant to whom, in this context?

In any context the colonized, of course. But in this case rebel gecko is drawing a contrast and even hypothesizing that it more likely have been consensual, but either way the admixture not being by a colonizer.

ah that's empathic, presumptuous, reads more like a disclaimer but maybe it affects them personally.

could just as easily be "aspirational". or happenstance. unnecessary feeling toward this observation.

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