Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval people of the Swahili coast
nature.com
nature.com
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.
could just as easily be "aspirational". or happenstance. unnecessary feeling toward this observation.
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.
Swahilis don't live in the Horn (outside of a few cities) .You are thinking about Eastern Africa.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> Our team generated data from more than 80 people, mostly elite individuals buried in the rich centers of the stone towns. We will need to wait for future work to understand whether their genetic inheritance differed from people without their high status.
Considering that the ruling class in a society often genetically differs from the population in general, it seems that these findings may not have as surprising implications as it seems initially.
Zanzibar was part of the Sultanate of Oman until the late 19th century and there was always a large amount of cross-ocean trade between Swahili Coast, the Safavid Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Omani Sultanate, and the Gujarat Sultanate and the Mughals.
There was an interesting book I found once at a used book store that specifically translated Gujarati language Ismaili papers and sermons brought by traders that spread Islam into SEA. Sadly I didn't get around to buying that book, but could probably find it.
That said, there was a decent amount of Shia polysterization as well in SEA that ended up getting mixed and merged into Sunni Islam due to political influence. (If interested in sources please reply to this thread because I'm lazy and don't feel like doing extra work unless there is actual interest)
Wasn't the Persianization of Sunni Islam due to the Delhi Sultanate and Mughals who had Persian cultural links?
And do we know which Sunni Muslims mostly spread Islam to SEA? From what I understand Gujarati Muslims were heavily involved but with no reference to the specifics of the communities. My DNA also surprisingly showed substantial persian-like ancestry.
On the religious side, a number of Babas and Gurus revered by Punjabi+Pakhtun+Koshur Hindus and Sikhs were Persian Sunni refugees or emigrants. For example, Lakhdata/Sakai Sarwar/Syed Ahmad Sultan and Mohiuddin Chishti/Khwaja Gharib Nawaz/Khwaja Baba are from Abbasid/Persianate Baghdad and Sistan respectively, though there are tombs for hundreds of Pirs littered all over Northern India. In fact, in Iran there are Fakirs/Darvishs as well in the same manner and motif as you'd find among the Hindu and Sikh community in South Asia.
And ethnicity wise, I'd honestly not be surprised. Gujarat/Sindh/Punjab/Pakhtunkhwa/Balochistan/Kashmir all literally neighbored ethnically Persian regions like Sistan and Khorasan.
Modern Shia and Sunni Islam is heavily modernized/reformed in the 19th century due to the impact Imperialism had on the Ottoman, Iranian, Bukharan and Mughal spheres. The same thing happened to modern Hinduism with the influence of revivalist and reformist movements like Arya Samaj and Sarvarkar and modern Sikhism with the Akali Dal. While the older traditions still persist in smaller towns due to the time capsule effect, those traditions and folklore are slowly dying away. Such is society I guess.
For the SEA standpoint, it was a mix of Gujarati, Marathi, and Tamil Muslims. I don't have names off the top of my head (largely due to my linguistic and cultural ignorance of those regions). If you're still interested reply to this thread and I can spend some time digging into it. It's somewhere in my notes from when I was attempting to write a thesis on Subaltern Religious Traditons before I pivoted to Tech Policy and Econometrics.
From the DNA results I've seen, I believe most of the Iranic like ancestry in these regions is older and from the BMAC / Oxus civilization. Some Syed groups have some recent middle eastern ancestry but substantial amounts are absent from most communities. Coastal South Gujarat seems to be an exception with some Sunni Muslims farmers having substantial foreign ancestry.
> Modern Shia and Sunni Islam is heavily modernized/reformed in the 19th century due to the impact Imperialism had on the Ottoman, Iranian, Bukharan and Mughal spheres. The same thing happened to modern Hinduism with the influence of revivalist and reformist movements like Arya Samaj and Sarvarkar and modern Sikhism with the Akali Dal. While the older traditions still persist in smaller towns due to the time capsule effect, those traditions and folklore are slowly dying away. Such is society I guess.
Our Islam changed quite a bit during this time due to Wahabbi/Deobandi preachers coming to Gujarat. Hindu practices and consumption of alcohol were heavily frowned upon afterwards.
I'd definitely like to read more about the topic, but no big deal if it's hard to find the sources.
The BMAC/Oxus region is modern day Khorasan, Fergana Valley, Sugdh, and Badhkashan/Pamir Corridor.
Since time immemorial, there always was active trade, travel, and contact between those Iranic regions and Punjab/Kashmir/Pakhtunkwa. Ranging from the Kushans to the Bactrians to the Sakas to the Perso-Turkic Muslim Dynasties to the Indian+Pakistani military and economic presense in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and the Pamir Corridor.
> Some Syed groups have some recent middle eastern ancestry but substantial amounts are absent from most communities. Coastal South Gujarat seems to be an exception with some Sunni Muslims farmers having substantial foreign ancestry
I think coastal Gujju Muslims had more connection with Gulf Arab communities due to trade relations (there's an Arabic TV show on Netflix about that called Mohammed Ali Road).
For farming groups that had substantial foreign ancestry, was it more Iranic in style. If so, that wouldn't be surprising. A lot of nomadic groups in the badlands of Sistan, Balochistan, and Saraikistan would immigrate between the Indo-Iranian heartlands and the badlands. Jats and Jadejas are two examples of formerly nomadic border groups that emigrated deeper into South Asia, as did Baloch into Sindh.
>Our Islam changed quite a bit during this time due to Wahabbi/Deobandi preachers coming to Gujarat.
And yeah, not surprised by the changes in traditional Gujju Muslim practices due to reformist Sunni practices.
The big 3 indigenous movements - Deobandi, Ahl-i Hadith, and Barelvi - were all a reaction to the subjugation of the Muslim elite in Awadh and Rohilkhand to British Colonial authorities in 1857 (Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar, and Lucknow were completely razed and depopulated for example).
The same thing happened in Punjab with the Akali (reaction to the British subjugation of the Sikh Empire and Christian conversions), Arya Samaj (popular in Punjab+Kashmir in reaction to British subjugation of the Sikh Empire and Christian conversions), and the Ahmadhiya Movement (Punjabi Muslim reaction to the collapse of the Sikh Empire and Christian conversions).
Basically, all these reform movements argued that adopting and modernizing Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism would be the only solution to push back against the British and prevent conversions to Christianity.
And yea, I'll get book recs for ya shortly!
Our foreign ancestry is more Northern Middle Eastern but is probably not East Iranian due to the elevated Levant, and relative lack of J1/E Y-haplogroups compared to J2. The history books claimed we were "unquestionably of Hindu descent" based on our social practices, but the genetics disagreed. It was a shocking surprise.
If you're interested in our (coastal Sunni Vohra) ancestry, I'm pretty sure I solved it, check out these posts on Anthrogenica: https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?27145-Created-Harapp... https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?15471-South-Asian-Ha... https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?20965-(GUJARAT)-sout...
A good introductory book might be "Al-Hind, the Making of the Indo-Islamic World: Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam 7Th-11th Centuries" by Andre Wink. He has a strong reputation in the Indologist world, so that might be a good starting position. That said, ethnographic research in most South Asian communities is kind of weak due to lack of funding and the disjointed mess of the social sciences academic world between South Asia and the US+Western Europe. That said, I'm sure there are some solid PhD theses or research papers published by academics at JNU or Jamia Millia - those two are the ones of the handful institutions in India I'd trust for anything social sciences related.
>The history books claimed we were "unquestionably of Hindu descent" based on our social practices, but the genetics disagreed. It was a shocking surprise
Oof yea I'm not surprised by that. That wording sounds like something sourced from early-to-mid 20th century British Academica. While a plurality of Muslims in South Asia are of indigenous descent, I wouldn't interpret that as being "Hindu" persay (also begets the larger question of who is a "Hindu" or indigenous - eg. should Pakhtun Hindus from Tirah be treated the same as Hindus from Bhojpur? And what even defines "Hinduism". Are indigenous pagan beliefs like Devta worship in Himachal and Chitral "Hindu" in the modern terminology or an indigenous belief system). Like I said above, Anthropological and Ethnic research within South Asian ethnic groups is severely lacking - let alone for those from regions that saw significant cross-cultural relations with Western and Central Asia. On a separate note, generally most South Asian ethnographic research has been devoted to those in Central India due to the larger British academic/political needs to understand communities there in the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion.