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• A Touch of Zimbabwe In The United Kingdom
• Institute Launched to Influence Political Change in Zimbabwe
• Woza Moya 8 March
• JAG Open Letter Forum No 240
• Troubled banks face closure
• Six forced confessions thrown out
• Book Summary. “The Phantom Voyagers”.

Summary.  “The Phantom Voyagers”.

by Robert Dick-Read

    From all that has gone before we can build a historical scenario that must have been something along these lines:

    When the ‘Lapita’ people set off on their first tentative voyages of discovery in the Pacific about three and a half thousand years ago, some of them also sailed west, carrying their Austronesian language through the populated islands of the Indonesian archipelago, and across the open ocean to Sri Lanka and Southern India.   Though their language was later replaced by that of Dravidian people who migrated overland into the peninsular, these ‘Polynesian’ mariners maintained their dominance on the coasts of both India and Sri Lanka  where their ancient boat designs can still be seen.   

     From the early days of the Roman Empire substantial trade developed between the Mediterranean, India and the Far East.     Particularly valued in Rome were items such as Chinese silks, Indian muslins, and oriental spices of many sorts.   Fleets of Greek and Roman ships conveyed these goods from Indian ports to the Mediterranean; but as, at that time, neither the Indians nor the Chinese had ocean-going vessels of their own, transport between China and India was dependant upon Indonesian vessels – the famous kun-lun-po as the Chinese called them, known to Greeks as kolandiaphonta.

     One or two popular spices then obtainable only in the islands of Indonesia – notably cinnamon and some types of cassia – did not pass through India, but seem to have been shipped direct from the Indonesian islands to ports on the Horn of Africa, from where they were carried on up the Red Sea by Arabs.    The only mariners then capable of this trans-Indian Ocean traffic were Indonesians; and it was probably as a direct result of this trade that many of them began to settle on the African coast before people speaking the Bantu languages had migrated across Africa in any strength, and long before Arabs put down permanent roots.

     Did women travel along with these Indonesian sailors?     One suspects that they did not, and that from the earliest days, maybe from the second or third century BC, there developed a mixed population of Cushites and San, some already mixed-blood Hottentots, and eventually early Bantu–speaking migrants.     It was these who formed the basis of an ‘Afronesian’ population which spread rapidly – by sea, and overland - down the coast almost as far as Durban, with a material culture that was essentially ‘African’, but which is almost universally, and probably mistakenly, regarded as having been ‘Bantu’.  (How archaeologists feel they can tell from shards of pottery what language the people spoke is a mystery!)     In actuality, for hundreds of years the lingua-franca of the coast is more likely to have been built around an Austronesian framework, for it was from amongst these ‘Afronesians’ that the first, Austronesian speaking, inhabitants of Madagascar came.      But we are leaping ahead.

     Back home in Southeast Asia, still in Roman times, with the Cambodian state, Funan, in full flower as the intermediary between the Mediterranean and China, a growing demand for African goods – ivory, ebony, skins, ambergris, incense, and minerals – added impetus to the Indonesia/African ‘cinnamon’ connection.  When the axis shifted from Funan to Kan-to-li, and eventually to the tremendously powerful state of Srivijaya based on Palembang in Sumatra, interest in Africa grew even greater.

     In the early centuries of the 1^st millennium Srivijayans discovered gold in Sumatra’s western mountains, possibly with the help of southern Indians whose mines were nearly worked out by the 5^th century.    Subsequently gold became of fundamental importance to the Srivijayan political system, fully justifying the name by which Sumatra  was known, Suvarnadvipa, the ‘Island of Gold’.   Thus, when their prospectors found gold  in Central Africa, a new era of trading activity was immediately opened up.   What is now Zimbabwe became the centre of focus for Indonesian activities.     With destinations at Sayuna (on the Zambezi), Chibuene (in Moçambique), and other ports in the Ard as-Sufalah … as chronicled by El-Edrisi, “the people of the Zabaj islands travel[led] to the Zanj … and engage[d] in trafficking in their goods because they understand each others language”.           

    Who were the Indonesians who came to Africa?     A cursory study of the vast number of ‘sea-nomad’ tribes who, for thousands of years, have roamed the Indonesian islands, reduces the number most likely to have undertaken responsible long-distance trading, to a small handful.    Most prominent among these are the Bajau or Bajo, who had settlements from one end of the Indonesian archipelago to the other; and the Bugi, who are still the most prominent among Indonesian merchant seamen.   It is more likely to have been people such as these to whom the rulers of Srivijaya would have looked for their ‘navies’ than people of the smaller, piratical, less reliable sukus off the Sumatran and Bornean coasts.   From Indonesia there is linguistic evidence to support the Bajo/Bugi contention.     And from the African side, they offer a tentative solution to two ‘mysteries’ – the origins of the ‘Bajun’ people in the islands between Lamu and Kisimayu; and the otherwise inexplicable reason why the Swahili call Madagascar and its people ‘Buki’ or ‘Bukini’.      Indeed a major suku related to the Buginese, the ‘Makassar’, or ‘Mankassar’, may have a better claim to providing the origin of the name ‘Madagascar’ than Marco Polo’s suggestion that it was from the arid coastal town of ‘Mogadishu’ that his huge ‘green and fertile’ island took its name.

     Sailing from Indonesia via the Maldives to East Africa presents no problems.    There is a theory that with winds and currents in their favour, Indonesians used to sail direct to Madagascar from Sumatra or Java.    But had they done so they would have found and settled the Seychelles, Amirantes, and other islands on the Mascarene ridge.   That these fertile and well watered islands remained unoccupied until modern times amounts to a near-certainty that the route they took was to the Horn, and from their, down the coast. 

    With the Agulhas Current driving down the Natal coast to the Cape, and the Benguela current flowing northward once round it, there is no reason why adventurous seamen should not have gone on to explore the West African coast; and there are plenty of reasons to suspect that that is precisely what they did.    These reasons can be listed as follows:

·                          It is likely that the common West African plantain, Musa AAB, that is a staple food from the Congo to the Gambia, together with cultivated yams, and cocoyams, were all introduced to Africa from their original Southeast Asian homeland directly on the west coast, conditions being largely unsuitable in East and Central Africa.   

·                          The entomologist, Dr Laurence, has remained unchallenged in his belief that elephantiasis – a disease of the swampy Southeast Asian coast that has been portrayed in Nok and Ife sculptures – must have been introduced directly into West Africa, and that it could not have spread overland from the East coast.   

·                          The intricate, quasi-religious Ifa divination of the Yoruba has fundamental  similarities with the Bwe divination of Micronesians that go beyond the possibility of ‘coincidence’ or ‘independent invention’.    The basis of both, and other Central African and Malagasy systems, have a mathematical basis that is oriental, not Arabic, and to say, as many do, that Ifa was introduced by Arabs from the north is an over-simplification.    There is no record of Arabs  penetrating Yorubaland until the fifteenth or sixteenth century, by which time Europeans were present on the coast.     But Arabs did introduce a simplified version based on their al-raml sand divination, called atimi in Yorubaland, at a later date than Ifa.

·                          Many West African ‘box’ xylophones, strikingly similar in tuning, and other ways, to those of Southeast Asia, differ from Central African xylophones in ways that suggest an independent introduction.      Other musical instruments, and their tuning, share the same features as those of Southeast Asia.

·                          Professor Hutton’s evidence on many headhunting and cannibalism traits common to both regions, but not elsewhere, cannot easily be dismissed.

·                          The introduction of maize to Yorubaland (evidenced in impressed corn-cob designs in paved floors at Old Oyo) several centuries before Europeans ‘discovered’ the region can best be explained as having come from South America via Southeast Asia.

·                          At 9^th century Igbo Ukwu …  Prospecting for tin and copper; mining and smelting them in correct proportions for true bronze; preparing cire-perdue moulds; casting objects of extraordinary fineness; ‘inventing’ repousse techniques; creating sophisticated designs such as the Igbo bells that are a-typical of the region, must have involved an introduction of technology from outside that may have come with the thousands of foreign glass and carnelian beads that were buried with them.     Reasons were given at length in the text why it is unlikely that theses came across the deserts or over the Sudan from the north, and why it is far more likely that they came to the Niger Delta from the sea … i.e. from Southeast Asia.

·                          Some stylistic similarities were pointed out between some of the bronzes and terracottas of the ‘high art’ of Ife, and Southeast Asian bronzes of approximately the same period which, taken as a corpus with other evidence, cannot be overlooked.

     Obviously there is an element of speculation in all this.   How we might wish that some chronicler had been at hand to write down all the details at the time!     But winkling out the traces that the phantom voyagers left in their wake, clearly some scenario such as I have sketched must have unfolded over the centuries between Roman times and the voyages of Diego Cao and de Gama.