[tum92]

>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.

[wahern]

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.

[tum92]

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...