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.
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...
Swahilis don't live in the Horn (outside of a few cities) .You are thinking about Eastern Africa.
It's not necessary to go back particularly far. The Bantu Expansion took place within the historical period. The ancient Egyptians wrote about (and painted) the African peoples of Kush to their south; those peoples are now extinct.
The Bantu reached South Africa at roughly the same time the Dutch did.
That's a common misconception because the Bantu expansion didn't reach the Cape. But we have iron artefacts from Natal dating from the 400s.
I'm open to learning more, but that doesn't seem like very strong evidence. Iron artifacts reached e.g. Mongolia long before anyone there was capable of making iron. Iron is very durable and very useful; it is one of two materials that is, as far as I know, universally traded for in every known culture that might conceivably have had access to a trade network featuring the object(s), the other being salt.
It's well known Persians had been trading along the Horn of African for millennia. What makes the perfunctory woke preamble in TFA even more insufferable than usual is that a significant aspect of this trade was in slaves. Peoples along the Horn of Africa trafficked slaves from Central Africa, constituting what's known as the Indian Ocean Slave Trade, which IIRC even preexisted the Arab Slave Trade. Moreover, the Persians had been sailing between the Horn of Africa and India for perhaps nearly as long as they had been sailing to East Africa, so there are traces of Persian trade and cultural links all along the coastline from Africa to as far away as Indonesia and perhaps even the Philippines, and long before the NW Europeans took to sail.
And if you go back far enough, it's also well known that the Bantu peoples were colonizers in their own right, and there still exist tensions between ethnic Bantus and indigenous peoples--e.g. pygmies.