Along the Indian Ocean Coast: Genomic Variation in Mozambique Provides New Insights into the Bantu Expansion

Abstract The Bantu expansion, which started in West Central Africa around 5,000 BP, constitutes a major migratory movement involving the joint spread of peoples and languages across sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the rich linguistic and archaeological evidence available, the genetic relationships between different Bantu-speaking populations and the migratory routes they followed during various phases of the expansion remain poorly understood. Here, we analyze the genetic profiles of southwestern and southeastern Bantu-speaking peoples located at the edges of the Bantu expansion by generating genome-wide data for 200 individuals from 12 Mozambican and 3 Angolan populations using ∼1.9 million autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms. Incorporating a wide range of available genetic data, our analyses confirm previous results favoring a “late split” between West and East Bantu speakers, following a joint passage through the rainforest. In addition, we find that Bantu speakers from eastern Africa display genetic substructure, with Mozambican populations forming a gradient of relatedness along a North–South cline stretching from the coastal border between Kenya and Tanzania to South Africa. This gradient is further associated with a southward increase in genetic homogeneity, and involved minimum admixture with resident populations. Together, our results provide the first genetic evidence in support of a rapid North–South dispersal of Bantu peoples along the Indian Ocean Coast, as inferred from the distribution and antiquity of Early Iron Age assemblages associated with the Kwale archaeological tradition.

Download Full-text

Mozambican genetic variation provides new insights into the Bantu expansion

10.1101/697474 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Armando Semo ◽

Magdalena Gayà-Vidal ◽

Cesar Fortes-Lima ◽

Bérénice Alard ◽

Sandra Oliveira ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Iron Age ◽

Genetic Relationships ◽

Central Africa ◽

Sub Saharan Africa ◽

Eastern Africa ◽

Nucleotide Polymorphisms ◽

Wide Range ◽

The Rich ◽

Sub Saharan ◽

Genetic Substructure

AbstractThe Bantu expansion, which started in West Central Africa around 5,000 BP, constitutes a major migratory movement involving the joint spread of peoples and languages across sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the rich linguistic and archaeological evidence available, the genetic relationships between different Bantu-speaking populations and the migratory routes they followed during various phases of the expansion remain poorly understood. Here, we analyze the genetic profiles of southwestern and southeastern Bantu-speaking peoples located at the edges of the Bantu expansion by generating genome-wide data for 200 individuals from 12 Mozambican and 3 Angolan populations using ∼1.9 million autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms. Incorporating a wide range of available genetic data, our analyses confirm previous results favoring a “late split” between West and East Bantu speakers, following a joint passage through the rainforest. In addition, we find that Bantu speakers from eastern Africa display genetic substructure, with Mozambican populations forming a gradient of relatedness along a North-South cline stretching from the coastal border between Kenya and Tanzania to South Africa. This gradient is further associated with a southward increase in genetic homogeneity, and involved minimum admixture with resident populations. Together, our results provide the first genetic evidence in support of a rapid North-South dispersal of Bantu peoples along the Indian Ocean Coast, as inferred from the distribution and antiquity of Early Iron Age assemblages associated with the Kwale archaeological tradition.

Download Full-text

Africa and the wider world: creole communities in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans

Tempo ◽

10.1590/tem-1980-542x2017v230303 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 23 (3) ◽

pp. 465-481

Author(s):

Malyn Newitt

Keyword(s):

Technology Transfer ◽

Indian Ocean ◽

World Economy ◽

Sub Saharan Africa ◽

Eastern Africa ◽

Cultural Appropriation ◽

The World ◽

African Slaves ◽

The Indian Ocean ◽

Sub Saharan

Abstract: Portuguese creoles were instrumental in bringing sub-Saharan Africa into the intercontinental systems of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. In the Atlantic Islands a distinctive creole culture emerged, made up of Christian emigrants from Portugal, Jewish exiles and African slaves. These creole polities offered a base for coastal traders and became politically influential in Africa - in Angola creating their own mainland state. Connecting the African interior with the world economy was largely on African terms and the lack of technology transfer meant that the economic gap between Africa and the rest of the world inexorably widened. African slaves in Latin America adapted to a society already creolised, often through adroit forms of cultural appropriation and synthesis. In eastern Africa Portuguese worked within existing creolised Islamic networks but the passage of their Indiamen through the Atlantic created close links between the Indian Ocean and Atlantic commercial systems.

Download Full-text

Afrikai citerák

Afrika Tanulmányok / Hungarian Journal of African Studies ◽

10.15170/at.2020.14.3-4.3 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 14 (3-4.) ◽

pp. 47-73

Author(s):

József Brauer-Benke

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

West Africa ◽

Atlantic Coast ◽

Central Africa ◽

Sub Saharan Africa ◽

East African ◽

Population Movements ◽

Instrument Type ◽

The Indian Ocean ◽

Sub Saharan

A general historical survey of African zither types cannot fail to highlight the disproportionalities brought about in the study of Africa by the essentialistic ideology of Afrocentrism. Thus the widely known videoclip of the 1987 hit Yé-ké-yé-ké by the late Mory Kante (d. 22nd May 2020), musician and composer of Guinean Mandinka origin has allowed millions to experience the kora harp lute with which he accompanied his song and popularized this instrument as well as the musical tradition of the West African griots, while the obviously related mvet harp zither is scarcely known today. This despite the fact that both the latter instrument type and its specialists, the mbomo mvet master singers, played a very similar role in the cultures of the Central African chiefdoms, as did the nanga bards playing the enanga trough zither in the East African kingdoms. Another important and interesting historical insight provided by a careful morphological and etymological analysis of African zither types and their terminology that takes comparative account of South and Southeast Asian data and ethnographic parallels concerns the possibility of borrowings. Thus stick and raft zither types may well have reached the eastern half of West Africa and the northeastern part of Central Africa – several centuries prior to the era of European geographical explorations – owing to population movements over the Red Sea. It seems therefore probable that the African stick bridges harp zithers (in fact a sui generis instrument type rather than a subtype of zithers) developed from South Asian stick zither types. On the other hand, tube zithers and box zithers – fretted-enhanced versions of the stick zither – certainly reached Africa because of the migration of Austronesian-speaking groups over the Indian Ocean, since their recent ethnographic analogies have survived in Southeast Asia as well. By contrast types of trough zither, confined to East Africa, must have developed in Africa from box zither types, which are based on similar techniques of making the strings tense. The hypothesis of African zither types having originated from beyond the Indian Ocean is further strengthened by the absence of these instruments in such regions of Sub-Saharan Africa as the Atlantic coast of West Africa as well as in Northeast, Southwest and South Africa. Thus the historical overview of African zither types also helps refute the erroneous idea that prior to the arrival of European explorers and colonizers the continent was isolated from the rest of the world. In fact seafaring peoples such as the Austronesians, Chinese, Indians, Arabs and Persians did continually reach it, bringing with them cultural artifacts, production techniques and agricultural products among other things, which would then spread over large distances along the trade routes over Africa.

Download Full-text

Climate of Eastern Africa

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.512 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Pierre Camberlin

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

Large Scale ◽

Eastern Africa ◽

Boreal Summer ◽

Nile Valley ◽

The West ◽

Summer Peak ◽

Decadal Scale ◽

Wide Range ◽

The Indian Ocean

Eastern Africa, classically presented as a major dry climate anomaly region in the otherwise wet equatorial belt, is a transition zone between the monsoon domains of West Africa and the Indian Ocean. Its complex terrain, unequaled in the rest of Africa, results in a huge diversity of climatic conditions that steer a wide range of vegetation landscapes, biodiversity and human occupations. Meridional rainfall gradients dominate in the west along the Nile valley and its surroundings, where a single boreal summer peak is mostly observed. Bimodal regimes (generally peaking in April and November) prevail in the east, gradually shifting to a single austral summer peak to the south. The swift seasonal shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone and its replacement in January–February and June–September by strong meridional, generally diverging low-level winds (e.g., the Somali Jet), account for the low rainfall. These large-scale flows interact with topography and lakes, which have their own local circulation in the form of mountain and lake breezes. This results in complex rainfall patterns, with a strong diurnal component, and a frequent asymmetry in the rainfall distribution with respect to the major relief features. Whereas highly organized rain-producing systems are uncommon, convection is partly modulated at intra-seasonal (about 30–60-day) timescales. Interannual variability shows a fair level of spatial coherence in the region, at least in July–September in the west (Ethiopia and Nile Valley) and October–December in the east along the Indian Ocean. This is associated with a strong forcing from sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and to a lesser extent the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, Eastern Africa shows some of the largest interannual rainfall variations in the world. Some decadal-scale variations are also found, including a drying trend of the March–May rainy season since the 1980s in the eastern part of the region. Eastern Africa overall mean temperature increased by 0.7 to 1 °C from 1973 to 2013, depending on the season. The strong, sometimes non-linear altitudinal gradients of temperature and moisture regimes, also contribute to the climate diversity of Eastern Africa.

Download Full-text

Coffee: An Indian Ocean Perspective

International Journal of Area Studies ◽

10.1515/ijas-2016-0005 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 11 (2) ◽

pp. 61-81

Author(s):

Shane J. Barter

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

South Asia ◽

Latin American ◽

Eastern Africa ◽

Coffee Production ◽

Production And Consumption ◽

History Of ◽

Coffee Farmers ◽

The Indian Ocean ◽

Indian Ocean World

Abstract Studies of coffee production and consumption are dominated by emphases on Latin American production and American consumption. This paper challenges the Atlantic perspective, demanding an equal emphasis on the Indian Ocean world of Eastern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. A geographical approach to historical as well as contemporary patterns of coffee production and consumption provides an opportunity to rethink the nature of coffee as a global commodity. The Indian Ocean world has a much deeper history of coffee, and in recent decades, has witnessed a resurgence in production. The nature of this production is distinct, providing an opportunity to rethink dependency theories. Coffee in the Indian Ocean world is more likely to be produced by smallholders, countries are less likely to be economically dependent on coffee, farmers are more likely to harvest polycultures, and countries represent both consumers and producers. A balanced emphasis of Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds allows us to better understand coffee production and consumption, together telling a more balanced, global story of this important commodity.

Download Full-text

Archaeology of Botswana

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.792 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Carla Klehm

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

Iron Age ◽

Middle Stone Age ◽

Stone Age ◽

Social Dimensions ◽

Late Stone Age ◽

The Social ◽

Economic Strategies ◽

Fish Exploitation ◽

The Indian Ocean

The prehistory of Botswana concerns the sophisticated environmental knowledge, economic strategies, and social networks of the hunter-gatherer, pastoralists, and agropastoralist communities that have called Botswana home. Diverse subsistence strategies and societal structures ranging from heterarchical to hierarchical have coincided and responded flexibly to climate and environmental variables. Botswana has also played a central, but often overlooked, role in precolonial trade within the interior of Africa and across the Indian Ocean. Botswana contains well-preserved archaeological records for the Middle Stone Age, Late Stone Age, and Iron Age periods, including one of the highest concentrations of rock art in the world at Tsodilo Hills. The prehistory of Botswana extends over 100,000 years and includes successful, innovative, and adaptive occupations in a wide variety of environmental zones, from the Okavango Delta to the Kalahari sandveld, and better-watered hardveld areas in the east. Stone Age peoples adapted to both arid and wet lands, and the archaeological record includes early evidence for freshwater fish exploitation. Hunting with bone points dates to 35,000 years ago, with additional evidence for poisonous, reversible arrowheads between 21,000 and 30,000 years ago. Evidence for ritualized behavior through rock paintings, rock carvings, and the intentional destruction and abandonment of stone tools at Tsodilo Hills provides further insights to the social dimensions of early peoples. In the Iron Age, hunter-gatherer communities and agropastoralists participated in a regional and later protoglobal trade across the Indian Ocean for a thousand years before European involvement; as the regional economy intensified, large polities such as Bosutswe and even kingdoms such as the Butua state emerged, controlling access to resources such as game, ivory, salt, specularite, and gold. In the modern era, the historical archaeology of sites such as Old Palapye (Phalatswe) provide additional insight to historical documents that can contradict Eurocentric understandings of Botswana’s past.

Download Full-text

Forty Years On

Transregional Trade and Traders ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199490684.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 17-51

Author(s):

Edward A. Alpers

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

East Africa ◽

African Diaspora ◽

Eastern Africa ◽

Modern Period ◽

The Indian Ocean ◽

Indian Ocean World

Almost forty years ago, the author published an article on Gujarat and East Africa from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Although several other scholars had written serious historical works either about or including Indian traders in eastern Africa in the modern period, at the time it was a pioneering piece for historians of East Africa. While the author has written and continues to write about the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean world and, more recently, the islands of this vast oceanic space now referred to as Indian Ocean Africa, he has not again written anything specifically about Gujarat and the Indian Ocean, nor about Gujarati traders in East Africa. This chapter attempts to review the last forty years of scholarship written in English on Gujarat and the Indian Ocean with a focus on transregional trade and traders. What is hoped from this overview is a sense of how current debates have developed over these decades and where further research is called for.

Download Full-text

Ancient DNA reveals a multistep spread of the first herders into sub-Saharan Africa

Science ◽

10.1126/science.aaw6275 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 365 (6448) ◽

pp. eaaw6275 ◽

Cited By ~ 24

Author(s):

Mary E. Prendergast ◽

Mark Lipson ◽

Elizabeth A. Sawchuk ◽

Iñigo Olalde ◽

Christine A. Ogola ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Iron Age ◽

Food Production ◽

Sub Saharan Africa ◽

Eastern Africa ◽

Multiphase Model ◽

Later Stone Age ◽

Genome Wide ◽

Genome Wide Data ◽

Sub Saharan ◽

Pastoral Neolithic

How food production first entered eastern Africa ~5000 years ago and the extent to which people moved with livestock is unclear. We present genome-wide data from 41 individuals associated with Later Stone Age, Pastoral Neolithic (PN), and Iron Age contexts in what are now Kenya and Tanzania to examine the genetic impacts of the spreads of herding and farming. Our results support a multiphase model in which admixture between northeastern African–related peoples and eastern African foragers formed multiple pastoralist groups, including a genetically homogeneous PN cluster. Additional admixture with northeastern and western African–related groups occurred by the Iron Age. These findings support several movements of food producers while rejecting models of minimal admixture with foragers and of genetic differentiation between makers of distinct PN artifacts.

Download Full-text

Realism of the Indian Ocean Dipole in CMIP5 Models: The Implications for Climate Projections

Journal of Climate ◽

10.1175/jcli-d-12-00807.1 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 26 (17) ◽

pp. 6649-6659 ◽

Cited By ~ 45

Author(s):

Evan Weller ◽

Wenju Cai

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

Indian Ocean Dipole ◽

Climate Models ◽

Tropical Indian Ocean ◽

Cmip5 Models ◽

Climate Projections ◽

Coupled Models ◽

Austral Spring ◽

Wide Range ◽

The Indian Ocean

Abstract An assessment of how well climate models simulate the Indian Ocean dipole (IOD) is undertaken using 20 coupled models that have partaken in phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). Compared with models in phase 3 (CMIP3), no substantial improvement is evident in the simulation of the IOD pattern and/or amplitude during austral spring [September–November (SON)]. The majority of models in CMIP5 generate a larger variance of sea surface temperature (SST) in the Sumatra–Java upwelling region and an IOD amplitude that is far greater than is observed. Although the relationship between precipitation and tropical Indian Ocean SSTs is well simulated, future projections of SON rainfall changes over IOD-influenced regions are intrinsically linked to the IOD amplitude and its rainfall teleconnection in the model present-day climate. The diversity of the simulated IOD amplitudes in models in CMIP5 (and CMIP3), which tend to be overly large, results in a wide range of future modeled SON rainfall trends over IOD-influenced regions. The results herein highlight the importance of realistically simulating the present-day IOD properties and suggest that caution should be exercised in interpreting climate projections in the IOD-affected regions.

Download Full-text

The Ends of the Indian Ocean: Tracing Coastlines in the Tanzanian “Hinterland”

History in Africa ◽

10.1017/hia.2019.11 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 46 ◽

pp. 359-383

Author(s):

Julia Verne

Keyword(s):

Indian Ocean ◽

Central Africa ◽

East African ◽

Relational Thinking ◽

East African Coast ◽

East Central ◽

Trade Routes ◽

Empirical Ground ◽

The Indian Ocean ◽

Spatial Entity

Abstract:In recent years, several attempts to revitalize Area Studies have concentrated on oceans as the unifying force to create regions. In this respect, the Indian Ocean has become a prime example to show how economic as well as cultural flows across the sea have contributed to close connections between its shores. However, by doing so, they not only seem to create a certain, rather homogeneous, Indian Ocean space, they often also lead to a conceptual separation between “coast” and “hinterland,” similar to earlier distinctions between “African/Arab” or “East/Central Africa.” In this contribution, so-called “Arab” traders who settled along trade routes connecting the East African coast to its hinterland will serve as an empirical ground to explore and challenge these boundaries. Tracing maritime imaginaries and related materialities in the Tanzanian interior, it will reflect on the ends of the Indian Ocean and the nature of such maritime conceptualizations of space more generally. By taking the relational thinking that lies at the ground of maritimity inland, it wishes to encourage a re-conceptualization of areas that not only replaces a terrestrial spatial entity with a maritime one, but that genuinely breaks with such “container-thinking” and, instead, foregrounds the meandering, fluid character of regions and their complex and highly dynamic entanglements.

Download Full-text