Chapurukha Kusimba was a young boy in Kenya in the 1960s just as many African nations were attaining independence from western European countries. The power and success of African nationalists impressed him. So did the archaeological discoveries of ancient humans by the Leakey family showing, as he saw it, that "to be human is to be African."
But he was confused by what he was learning in school. "There seemed to be very few incidences in history where African or Black people had actually attained anything or contributed much to global civilization," he says. "Something wasn't quite right."
Kusimba grew up in western Kenya and is not Swahili, but he became fascinated by the thousand-year-old culture of the Swahili people, who live along the coast of eastern Africa and early on built cosmopolitan city-states. Through his 40-year career as an archaeological anthropologist, including stints at museums in the U.S. and Kenya, professorships at several U.S. universities (he is now with the University of South Florida) and authorship of a book, The Rise and Fall of Swahili States, the question dogged him: Were the earliest Swahili from the African continent, or did they migrate from somewhere else?
