That is all you took from the lengthy paragraph ?
Somali twitter vs Spanish archaeologist
- Thread starter Chaseyourdreamzz
- Start date
I would say Somalis are straight shooters they are dacaad they’ll quickly call you out we don’t pretend and stab you in the back when you turn.
We were the front liners for other Africans, have you seen Kenyan and Rwandan twitter, they discuss genetics and history deeply
What the hell am i reading.
Anti -infrastructural? is that the reason why there was already 3 other towers built in Berbera and that clan was building a 4th one.
These were structures that could go toe to toe with forts and castles of Europe in terms of scale might i add. Here is a an illustration of the Castle Towers.
Berbera Castles 1844
Where these castles and manaarh now . they appear to have been destroyed at some point
www.somalispot.com
The dispute was between trade access and it just ended up with the creation Bullaxaar as a sister port of Berbera being established. There was no savagery involved or subversiveness to permenant architecture because what they did was just expand the trade to accommodate it. Competition over trade routes and resources is a normal part of history worldwide—framing it as some nomadic rejection of structure is misleading.
There is nothing anti-infrastructural about these ports. They had watch towers(ilalos), storage facilities/warehouses, market place, harbour/docking areas for ships/boats, Mosques, forts and Quranic schools.
Bandar Qasim(Bosaso)
Whilst other minor settlements were actually coastal villages. Might i add wether people lived in houses that were wooden like cariishes or "stone houses" called Baraako/Dar that stood side by side had to do with wealth and status differences.
You guys can check the post i made about the types of homes:
Ancient Somali Homes
Hello everyone. I was wondering if anyone had any knowledge of how Somali homes used to look like. I’m talking pre-colonialism. Specifically what kinda floors they had, (was it tiled and if so, what kind of designs), if they had beds or sofas, or maybe just mattresses? What kind of decor and...
www.somalispot.com
Flat roofs suggest adaptation to a hot climate, allowing people to use the roof for cooling, sleeping, or storage. They also would create hole pipes for ventilation, so you see it stick out.
Multi-room(Cariishes), multi-story buildings (Baraako), indicate dense permanent urban centers rather than just temporary trading posts or seasonal settlements. Coastal towns using coral stone and wooden structures means seafarers and merchants built long-term settlements, not just seasonal ports.
The stone architecture is unique to the region as well. Use of coral stone & lime whitewashing shows technological advancement in construction, similar in ways to Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cities. Lime whitewashing not only strengthened buildings but also created aesthetic uniformity, making cities look more refined and organized.
Now imagine the British and Italians who bombed every coastal settlement and raized our Castles, Forts, Towers and Villas to the ground. Bulldozed entire districts, never built any useful public infrastructure, not even a road. Who's sole goal was to disrupt the trade and economy of Somalis as the British layed out. Treated the place like an extraction site. Were not the anti-infrastructural and logistic subversives?
But it was Somalis who had normal political and economic competition with eachother, that you see anywhere else in the world. . Waa yab wallahi. I have told @Shimbiris before waa dad walaan.
The same guy tried to attribute the network of citadels and forts that the Darawish built all over Somalia as Italian infrastructure when in actuality the Italians just appropriated it.
I also noticed that he mentioned pirates in the text you shared., this of course s completely false , i've seen even Puntlandvault posts these qoutes from some of these colonal explorers and orientalists , where they would characterize salvaged shipwrecks off the Somali coast as piracy, when it was not. They even framed majerteen smuggling guns and weapons to bypass the trade blockage by the British as ''pirates'' , despite the fact they purchased them and relied on a network of legal international suppliers controlled by Somalis abroad. Through that they funded and armed resistance across Somalia and East Africa, including the Darawish and Ogaden. They even manufactured amunition locally as well.
You can read more about how the rely on improper definitions for this in this study.
Piracy in the Horn of Africa Waters: Definitions, History, and Modern Causes
They need stop and think logically, there wouldn't be this massive trade volume and visits/activity on the Somali coast if the locals engaged in piracy or logistic subversives or whatever.
The commercial activity in the past was significant this is documented. You can take Majerteen coast for example. They owned a dozen large merchant fleets called ''Dooni'' in Somali that was capable of carrying large cargo spread out across different ports and earned lot of revenue from seaborn trade.
Fishing via for example beden which means fishing-boat in Somali was particularly lucrative
Bebera for example in a trade journal from 1856 was described to be the freest port in the world and had trade volume twice that of Massawa and the most important trading place on the whole Arabian Gulf. This alone disproves any notion of a chaotic, "logistics-subversive" society.
The port of Berbera was a larger exporter to Jeddah than the closer Massawa port. Just highlighting the significance of the Berbera port.
No one would come to our waters, if we stole and hijacked their ships, it's completely ludicrous.
The Abaan system and concepts such as aman was utilized to ensure protection for visiting foreign traders and also safeguard local agency. It's a longstanding tradition that Somalis used for centuries and made our coast not only into trading hubs but safe havens.
This abaan system even existed in the interior, as well ensuring protection to traders and security to caravan's passing through. There was no subversive nomadic routes, instead what you saw was a highly organized system to facilitate trade and economic growth
This is very important to point out many colonial sources mislabeled wreck salvaging, arms smuggling, and independent trade as "piracy" to justify European intervention and economic control.
The British and Italians were the true disruptors, as seen in their destruction of Somali ports and infrastructure. Somali merchants were active participants in global trade, not anarchic sea raiders.
I have also covered in a different thread that "Piracy" is 100% their history and Europeans were big time pirates on the Indian Occean, reaching its peak between 1650s and the 1730s and it coincided with the trade decline along the indian occean and the red sea before the brief revival during the 1800s.
https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/d...0277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-679
Whats strange about it , is that they glorify it and celebrate it in their popular culture.
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I take back what i said before about them not having any malicious intent, i had no idea before @The alchemist showed me that, i am baffled.
The claim of an "anti-infrastructural ethos" among Somalis is not just incorrect but a gross misrepresentation of historical facts. It's just provably, demonstrably and observably false.
The fact he relies on outdated orientalist sources , who had an openly racist bias, exposes a lack of critical scholarship in these academic papers.
It’s clear that some of these researchers come in with preconceived notions, fitting evidence into their framework rather than objectively analyzing Somali history.
The alchemist
VIP
It depends. He has two functions. One is that the Spanish team relies on him (he is formally part of it now, it seems) to write the narrative on the formal work (that has elements of absurd racism in them which I will highlight later) and the other are his work that are written in journals. Not only can he latch himself to formal work (that got funding) that gives valuable raw information, but he also gets sweet spots in prestigious journals because the dearth of knowledge, so they give him that to fill the scanty area because Somali archeology is underrepresented.
The thing is, the guy is on one hand, competent but on the other, he is a fool that tries to be unorthodox but ends up just being an obscene hate child of all the ugly writings we've seen.
You can't say they ain't on some bullshit. Of all the pictures of a pastoralist available, they picked the one who was in tatters for their blogs. These guys think the most simple and poor conditioned picture approximates their image of the Somali:
This goes into the post I was going to post but partly deleted. You think this is funny, but it is even worse. Cause you might think I am reaching, maybe thinking this picture being just a coincidence, that there is no such intent behind it. But not really, and I will show you why later.
By the way, I checked again. Now he formally presents himself as part of the Spanish National Research Council researcher -- this is a very big learning institution in Europe. The bio, where he wrote he did not get funding, is gone.
Remember, these people have monopolized 40 sites in Somaliland. That means, primary data is theirs to manipulate. They never involved any formally educated Somalis and there are no Somali regulations that can filter their work. This is technically the biggest monopolization of archeological work seen by one team in a region. These people are not hobbyists, my friend. They are very much in the same line of business as the early American/Anglo-Saxon archeologists in the Nile Valley, very colonialist audacity. And the weird thing is, EU funded some of it.
I thought the Spanish were a bit better, but after this and the comments made by European imperialist high EU member, Josep Borell, I'm starting to think that people working in professional institutions in that country, are the very worst types of liberals. I should drop what I wrote a while back about how liberalism and the concept of Westernism is the continuation of the old imperialism and it is interwined with racial concepts.
The reason why I emphesize the negatives, which are damning, is that for years I have given these people an overdone level of props for giving us data where there was none before. We had to be grateful to some extent, but now when they constantly undermine us in our history, fabricate narratives, outwardly disrespect us, it gets too much for comfort. One expects a great deal of ignorance by callous Westerners whenever they approach Africa, more often than not, but this is over the top and is no different than writings you had 10 centuries back. The complicated parts is that, for us, the people who can parse out their bullshit, we can make work of their information to add new evidence, so we benenefit from this regardless. However, for most people, they will take those words uncritically and most citations will treat these as fundational sources going forward.
The alchemist
VIP
That is something that occurred within the last 5 years. You'd be pressed to find any Somali that deeply talked about genetics before 2018. Europeans don't need to talk about genetics and their origins because they get constant articles that talk about culture, ancestry, history in their news feed every day (and almost all of it is incremental things so they read and consume that, knowing a lot about their anthropology directly, or indirectly). We have no such thing. And as people want to consume such content, they have to find spaces and engage. This is something we had to carve out ourselves for years. So please don't make it seem as if we're unique in this or that it is a strange engagement.
The amount of insight we have on this forum alone is way deeper than anywhere else. That is cultural capital that is beneficial. I see people talking about things in random places, I know for a fact we're only conveyed here first by how unique it was and the way it was said. Don't underestimate the second and third order effect of this.
And I know many ajnabi read the History and Culture section in silence. Well, I speculate.
It's always funny when they do that with the photos. It's like me finding this unflattering pic of a Maghrebi Bedouin family and using it to represent all Bedouin Arabs:
Or a pic I remember from ages back where there were some Shammaris deep in the desert in tatters, seated around a fresh hunting catch. Or sharing this as a representation of Mehris:
Sneaky rats...
Wallahi, when I finally go back and move some lacag and influence around, if I live long enough, I'll legit push the odays to ban western researchers for good. Anyone not of a Somali background carrying a western passport will be forced to either simply be a tourist in the magalaad or leave. Time to bring back the Abanship system our ancestors maintained:
Somalis literally always had a system of sponsorship and monitoring with ajanabis. If you came onto a coastal town from both Woqooyi to Koonfur you had to be given a local Somali "Abaan" which people like Burton and Speke describe and even Ibn Battuta basically describes. Your abaan keeps an eye on you, takes a certain cut of all your business transactions and is usually also tasked with making sure you do not go into the interior of the country without express permission from someone like a local Suldaan and even after that the Abaans were always very suspicious of ajanabis and watched them closely. Our ancestors were very suspicious of letting ajanabis onto their lands. I've seen accounts that show Indians who settled in places like Xamar basically would spend their entire lifetime in the magaalad inside its walls. Never venturing into even Afgooye.
This is probably a big reason why we weren't really enslaved historically. Not just a matter of being Muslims but also being very cautious with foreigners and not letting them wander the interior where they can kidnap rural women and kids.
- Source
@The alchemist Spaniards seem particularly problematic. I remember it was a Spanish archaeologist in Ethiopia whom some silly Xabashis on Wikipedia were using as a source to claim Somalis were "peripheral" and merely "mercenaries" in the Adal army. Where he got this impression, if the moron had ever even skimmed the Futuh, I don't know.
TheLand
VIP
No reason why we can’t do this work ourselves. If they ever find something very significant you just know we’ll never see it again and it’ll end up in their museums just like they do with certain Greek and Egyptian artifacts that they refuse to return on the basis of ‘western’ or ‘world’ heritage
I dont think this is a bad thing at all. I actually find it fascinating and it makes me hopeful. It's definitely recent though that's for sure. I couldn't find anything online befofe a couple years ago. It's also not just a diaspora thing either if you look at tiktok or better yet youtube. The amount of videos people make on topics like culture,history,literature,etc has skyrocketed over the last 5 or 6 years. While most of these videos aren't of very high quality they're light years better than what used to be available on YouTube.
I'm honestly curious what's causing this trend ?
I think what makes this worse is that it's not blatantly obvious. The wording is vague enough that if you don't have that much context or background knowledge it won't ring any alarm bells at all. But the damage done will be tremendous since you'll always see everything that goes against this narrative as an exception and not realize that It was in actuality the narrative that was flawed.
What needs to be studied is why Oromos love being in Somali spaces. Following us around like a shadow everywhere we go.
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