05/23/2023
Fairly recently I signed up for the (free) articles emailed from Grey Goose Chronicles, a Substack written by “Stone Age Herbalist” [Follow him on Twitter]. This heroic gentleman, describing himself as “an independent scholar,” is busy becoming unemployable in university faculties by highlighting the destruction inflicted on Politically Correct academic dogma by recent advances in genetic analysis:
The general pattern goes something like “original claim to origins, claim dismissed by 20th century academics, original claim validated by genetics.”
A recent round-up, Bronze Age Drugs, Swahili Genetics, Viking America, Natives Horses, Benin Bronzes & Mongolian Yak Dairy, has a segment discussing Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast (by Esther S. Brielle et al., Nature, March 29, 2023).
Swahili is a language widely spoken in East Africa, being something of a lingua franca there. Four countries in the area recognize it as an Official Language.
The ticklish question: Which people originated the language? Equally ticklish: the origin of the Shirazi people, for whom it is their tribal language.
The current Wikipedia article on the Shirazi sneers:
One thesis based on oral tradition states that immigrants from the Shiraz region in southwestern Iran directly settled various mainland ports and islands on the eastern Africa seaboard beginning in the 10th Century… The vast majority of modern scholars agree that there is little to no evidence of substantive Asian migration to East Africa in the medieval period.
The issue here: Who gets the credit for building what Stone Age Herbalist describes as
…that coastal and maritime set of empires running roughly from Somalia down to Mozambique, linking native African cultures with Islamic, Persian, Austronesian, Portuguese and British influence.
These states, some of which survived into the 19th entury, developed large scale maritime trading businesses in gold, ivory, spices and, of course, slaves.
Colonial-era historians largely accepted the Shirazi account of themselves, partly because of the cultures they could actually see.
Stone Age Herbalist goes on:
One of the founding ‘myths’ of this civilization-zone is the descent
of the Shirazi people from Persian traders… This oral history was written down in the Kilwa Chronicle, in both Arabic and Portuguese. However, post-war academics have long disputed the claim that this settlement and intermixing ever took place. A quick quote from researcher [James de Vere] Allen’s 1982 work The Shirazi Problem in East African Coastal History should suffice to give a flavor:
What I hope has been achieved in this essay is to bury once and for all that East African Shirazis must be ultimately descended from immigrants from the Persian Gulf. It is clear that… the Shirazi phenomenon itself is a purely African one which could have arisen without them.
Allen, a white Kenyan and enthusiast for African culture, wrote a whole book on the same lines, published posthumously, called Swahili Origins.
Stone Age Herbalist gleefully concludes:
You can probably guess what is coming. Ancient DNA was extracted from 80 individuals from a number of coastal towns and settlements dated to between 1250 and 1800 AD. The genomes generated showed conclusively that immigration and intermixing with migrants from Persia had most certainly taken place… the paternal DNA was a mixture of J2, G2 and a few R1a — a combination which points to the Persian Gulf…
…the main takeaway should really be that decades of linguistic, architectural, archaeological and historical theory has been largely destroyed overnight by these findings. Once again, careful houses of cards were built to dismiss “colonial” era interpretations and even local oral history, and have been shown up to be a farce.
The takeaway for VDARE.com readers: Academe, even in the late 20th century, let alone now, has become heavily politicized. And academics have the ability to repress dissent. They love deviating from common sense and imposing current fads.
This is particularly true in matters of race and IQ as poor Bryan J. Pesta recently discovered: Tenured Professor Fired For His Breakthrough Race-IQ Study. (Pesta is quite rightly suing the people who fired him.)
Universities nowadays are bastions of dogma, not truth.
The engaging webzine Ancient Origins, which I also recommend, has a more readable version of the Nature article: Ancient DNA is Restoring the Origin Story of the Swahili People of the East African Coast (by Chapurukha Kusimba, March, 2023).
Contradicting what we had expected… our genetic analysis identified… that the overwhelming majority of male-line ancestors came from Asia, while female-line ancestors came from Africa. This finding must reflect a history of Persian males traveling to the coast and having children with local women.
The Ancient Origins article reasonably proposes, because so much of the folk habits, including the status of Shirazi women, resemble East Africa generally, that this intermarriage was peaceful. In societies built on slave raiding, like Iceland, the women are more likely to submit to the culture of the capturers.
But the Politically Incorrect point: Black Africa cannot claim credit for the remarkable commercial activity that the Persians (and later Indians) established on the East African coast before the Europeans came.
Email Patrick Cleburne.
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