@The alchemist is Jorge de Torres Rodriguez, the guy you hated. Read what's below
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This is just another aspect of the general theme. He exposed his whole colonial, colonist, and colonialism ideology when it comes to archaeological emphasis of complexity in the Somali territory. For example, he wrote this:
"Colonies can therefore exist without colonialism and colonisation: trade diasporas (Curtin
Citation1984), for example, are colonies in the first meaning of the term mentioned above, but do not engage in colonial conquest nor are they guided by a colonial ideology."
Much of our early history advancements were furnished with colonies, making us an extension of others' expansion, not growth of our own making in the form of foreigners setting up trade outposts where peripheral Somalis benefited as backward outsiders. This is an imagined lie. The only limited example where a foreign presence can be implied, yet a very spatially limited presence, was with that temple in Puntland from the 8th century BCE. These can be attributed to Sabaeans, not "pre-Axumite" (as he wrongly termed). Those people merely externalized an extremely limited monumentalism akin to Abu Simbel in Nubian land without any economic or demographic emphasis. This is unlike the Sabaean presence in northern Horn of Africa, where real movement of people, establishment, and frankly expansion of economy and distinct civilizational gear that was an extension of the southern Arabian variation arose, but later, because of its own distinct function, a variation became "pre-Axumite."
With his most recent paper, the guy is coming more out with his agenda, whereas before the Spanish used to micro attribute things to foreign precence and establishment, either comprising broader material conditions to external pull factors, political structures that have an ethnic centers outside the Somali heartland but somehow push beyond even the most conservative core territorial Somali layers, down to the very management. The constant use of language of indirect or soft euphemistic attribution of non-Somali genetic presence was very much emphasized. I'm very familiar with these guys' work and know what they have been doing ever since they touched our historical heritage.
At the root of this lies notions of an inherent, primordial projected ascription of inferiority for Somalis to simply not be able to be the causes and drivers of their own history; otherwise, they would not assume a colonial logic, without any evidence, when no evidence points to that notion. The irony is, the text furthers colonialist historical theft using the utilized framing of such asymmetric assumptions by imposers and settling Somalis as eternal perpetual inferior losers pulled in by way of external influence by setting up what these Spanish define as institutions that establish legitimacy in an illegitimate "nomad" territory. That is the frank reading.
For this, they have camped the historical engagements, down to the very lives of Somalis, to mere primitives. They had to use false assumptions that distort the very collective being that defined our history so that nomadic primitives can stay in one camp, delineated by another, foreigners that, in the Carthaginian imagined sense, come to set shops in our lands, somehow doing grotesquely and artifically explaining grafted economic cutoffs without any true complex natural formations.
In reality, all of it was an internal complexification from the Somali economic subsistence pre-conditions, that on an in game-theory sense, scaled with the ancient established agro-pastoral-trader drivers, utilizing strategic spatial and relational settings, harboring a suite of complex organizational capacity through tribal, political, traditional, and institutional social construction, interwined through complex old pedigree baselines and adaptive instrumentalizations, able to integrate learned political vernacular (such as "sultanates"), witthin the complex, as a feature, not blank slate shifts as the underlying structural categories always existed with other endagamous institutional names. This is a unique civilizational hallmark that is above their heads and a little too amazing for their liking to credit. It's a mix of epistemological racism and disgusting, arrogant incompetence, the result of which is to code everything within a colonial ideology.
