From Somalia to northern Mozambique, The Comores and Madagascar. Swahili culture spans the east coast of Africa, where it has consolidated around cosmopolitan and wealthy city-states that for centuries have aroused great interest among Arab and Persian traders.
The Swahili word is a good example of this commercial connection. Because it comes from the English word Swahili, which in turn comes from the Arabic sawāḥil, plural of sāḥil ("shore"), which designated the inhabitants of the coastal areas with whom Arab sailors traded.
Covering such a vast territory (about 3,000 kilometers), the identity of this people is diverse, although it maintains common elements such as religion, language, architecture, and social organization. Now, the work of a lifetime of an anthropology professor has allowed us to travel back to the origins of this civilization.
Chapurukha Kusimba of the University of South Florida has discovered the first ancient DNA of the Swahili ethnic group, a task to which he has devoted the past 40 years delving into the history of these prosperous trading states throughout the East African coast whose roots can be found in the 7th century.
"This trip has served to recover the past of the Swahili and restore them to legitimate citizenship," says Kusimba. “The findings highlight the African contributions and, indeed, the Africanness of Swahili, without marginalizing the connection to Persia and India,” she adds.
His research, published in the journal Nature, has allowed him to examine the DNA of 80 individuals from 800 years ago, making it the first ancient DNA discovered from this ethnic group. Kusimba, born in Kenya, had to spend a lot of time with the people of this village to gain their trust before receiving their approval to complete excavations in a cemetery on the east African coast.
The anthropologist discovered, with the help of various geneticists, that the ancestry of the people tested was both African and Asian. The genome revealed a pattern: the vast majority of the ancestors of the male line came from Asia, while the ancestors of the female line came from Africa.
Despite their intermarriage, the descendants spoke an African language, not an Asian one. This led the researchers to conclude that African women had a great influence on the formation of Swahili culture. So much so, that the villages were established before Asian colonialism, making women the main holders of economic and social power.
The findings challenge centuries-old narratives, constructed by other native Africans, that suggest the wealthiest Swahilis had no real ancestral connections to Asia and only claimed they did to downplay their African heritage for higher social status and cultural affinities. .
Despite the vital role the people played in trade between Africa and the rest of the Indian Ocean for more than 2,500 years, Kusimba's earlier work from the 1990s documented the mistreatment of communities of Swahili descent as a result of tradition. narrative.
“This work is not only significant for its scientific achievement, but it tells us that we should take non-Western oral histories into consideration, because our ancestral research tends to support such stories, even if generations of scholars have largely seen them. with skepticism," he says.
The study results show that Asian and African ancestors began intermarrying at least 1,000 years ago, but long after Africans had already established their villages, "challenging and overturning externally imposed narratives for political and economic purposes." ”, he concludes.
