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              “The Phantom Voyagers” – Summary and Contents

   My own researches date back to a brief period I spent at London University in 1959/60 when Professors Roland Oliver and John Fage conducted a prolonged seminar on ‘Indonesia and Africa’ at the School of Oriental and African Studies.


    But my interest in the subject goes back even earlier, to the months I spent in northern Moçambique in 1957 when I first heard how people from Madagascar, speaking a strange language, used to make frequent trips to Africa in their big outrigger canoes to raid the coastal shambas and villages for food and slaves.


   Like so many people living in Africa, I had never until then given a minute’s thought to Madagascar; but curiosity about these raiders - who apparently spoke an Austronesian language more like those of the Pacific Islands than to any African languages – aroused my interest in the Indonesian connection.
 

    Despite a ‘star cast’ at the S.O.A.S. seminar sessions, the results were inconclusive.  Yes, everyone agreed, Indonesians with yams, coconuts, and plantains, tinkling happily on their xylophones as they sailed their outriggers lazily across the ocean, must at some stage have come to Africa and Madagascar.   But anything more than that was hard to prove.   Thus Fage and Oliver and the rest of the ‘African’ fraternity – faced with the whole vast, virgin territory of African history to explore - thereafter seemed to let the subject lapse.
 

    I was in a different position.   I was not a professional.   I was therefore free to explore my own interests in whatever way I pleased; and as I always felt there was much more to the ‘Indonesian’ and ‘Madagascan Connection’ than was obvious, the subject became a life-long hobby.
 

    Part One of the book – roughly a third – barely touches on Africa.   I felt strongly that a grounding in what was going on in the Southeast Asian islands and the northern Indian Ocean from the earliest times to the end of the first millennium AD was essential.    So the book starts with a brief look at the maritime history of the islands; how the people must have had boats of some sort to cross the seventy kilometres of open water (as it was then) to reach Australia 50 or 60,000 years ago; the absolute necessity of a boating culture for survival in a region of 30,000 or  more islands; how subsequently they discovered virtually every spec of land in the Pacific; and the intriguing thought that mariners with much the same technology as the Pacific islanders seem to have come west into the Indian Ocean long before the region was explored by Egyptian, Indian, Greek and Roman sailors – even before the Dravidians migrated into southern India.
 

    Taking a leap forward, I then cast an eye over Rome’s trading relations with India and the far east, in particular the spice trade and the mysteries surrounding Indonesian cinnamon and cassia which seem to have bypassed the markets of India and Ceylon, yet found their way to Rome via the Horn of Africa; and how this may have been the catalyst for Indonesian settlement on the African coast.


   China obviously had a role to play in the Mediterranean trade; but was she ever a major maritime player?   Surprisingly, it seems, the Chinese relied largely on Indonesian ocean-going shipping until well into the first millennium AD.  Similarly, the Persians and Arabs were not going to be left out of the lucrative Indian Ocean bazaar; but relatively speaking they, also, were late-comers in the long-distance voyaging stakes.
 

    The opening up of sea-born trade between the West (Mediterranean) and the East (China) inevitably effected all those living in between, and apart from India and Sri Lanka, the greatest effect was around the coast of Southeast Asia, and in those islands that commanded the sea-lanes through which all shipping had eventually to pass.    And it was as a direct result of this that the trading states of Funan, Kan-to-li, Ho-ling and others came into being in mainland Southeast Asia and the Indonesian islands, and eventually the most powerful state of them all – Srivijaya.      
 

    From the 7th century onwards, Srivijaya ruled over much of Java, Sumatra and most of the Malay peninsular, maintaining its authority over this vital strategic area not only with strong land  armies, but more decisively, the first well organised navy the region had seen.     Part one ends with an excursion through the mangroves and islets of Indonesia seeking out the most likely ‘sea nomads’ to have made up the rank and file of the Srivijayan fleets, who, it later transpires, are also those most likely to have carried Indonesians to Africa and Madagascar.
 

     In the second (main) part of the book I switch to Africa where the people collectively called the Zanj dominated the east coast for much of the first millennium AD.    Who were these mysterious Zanj from whom Azania, Zanzibar and Tanzania take their names?    Not a lot is known about them; but numerous pointers – not least their relationship with the Zabag or Zanaj who were from Java or Sumatra – points to a close connection with Indonesia and the probability that the Zanj were nothing less than an Afro-Indonesian race entrenched in eastern Africa long before the genesis of the Arab influenced Swahili.  
 

     But why should the Zanj have been there at all?    What was the main attraction?  It is noteworthy that Zimbabwe’s ancient gold mining era was contemporaneous with the flowering of Srivijaya, based in Sumatra (Suvarnadvipa, ‘the Island of Gold’) whose political need for gold was huge.  So in this section I look also at what is known about Zimbabwe’s ancient gold mines and the part they may have played in the Indonesian saga.
 

    The strength of African genetic and cultural elements in Madagascar being so strong, and the number of African words in their vocabulary so numerous, together favour the notion that the island was first peopled - not by pure-blood Indonesians sailing directly across the ocean - but by Afro-Indonesians (i.e. Zanj?) after a lengthy gestation period on mainland Africa.    Two chapters are devoted to an attempt to fathom out just who the Malagasy are.   And this culminates in some detective work that points to the origins of the Indonesian element being originally from south-western  Sulawezi – a link that ties in with conclusions hinted at in Part One.
 

     If Madagascar’s first inhabitants were Afro-Indonesians, was there a continuing relationship between the island and the mainland in later years?  What did Africa give to Madagascar, and did Malagasy culture give anything back to Africa?   Can we learn anything from this today?  The answer to all these is: Yes. And the strongest links seem, not surprisingly, to have been with the area that must have been the most important to the Srivijayans, the gold-producing regions of Zimbabwe.  
   

    First I compare the nature of Africa’s fifty or sixty Zimbabwes with the many  Zomba-bé of Madagascar which housed the ancestral relics, and the many similarities of beliefs and customs of the Venda and Shona and large numbers of Malagasy.  I point out striking similarities in the designs of the famous Zimbabwe monoliths and many funerary monuments of southern Madagascar.     I note how phallism and phallic cults of Madagascar may throw light on unexplained aspects of the Great Zimbabwe such as the great Conical Tower.   And in the misty mountains of Nyanga I draw conclusions on the true purpose of the mysterious ‘pits’ by comparison with the tombs of the Betsileo, Tanala and Merina of Madagascar.   These are controversial features; but the arguments are strong.
 

    This leads us on to music – perhaps the field in which there has been the widest acceptance of Indonesian influence in Africa.    The core of this acceptance lies with Africa’s pre-eminent xylophone players, the Chopi.  But other instruments are brought into the equation, too, including the African panpipes that bear such striking resemblances to those once played in some Southeast Asian islands.
 

    Did the Indonesians round the Cape of Good Hope and sail up to West Africa?
They certainly seemed to have sailed down the East African coast beyond the limits of the Arab dhows; and after the epic journey of the reproduction ‘Borobodur boat’ in 2004, there can be no doubt whatsoever they had the capability to do so.    What’s more, there is plenty of evidence that they left substantial and important imprints on West African culture, especially in the region of the lower Niger, where - far removed from the trans-Saharan trade routes - some of Africa’s highest cultures developed.   More than a third of the book is devoted to West Africa.
 

    Chapter 14 recaps mainly on evidence presented years ago by Professor Hutton linking Southeast Asia (mainly Assam) with West Africa through the darker aspects of cannibalism; added to which there are Southeast Asian diseases that appear in West Africa millennia ago that cannot easily have spread across the continent.      Plantains and Yam, the staple foods of West Africa, both originally came from Indonesia – the evidence suggesting, again, that they were introduced centuries ago directly on the west coast.     There are important questions regarding the introduction of bronze technology to West Africa that led eventually to the creation of the famous Benin Bronzes.   Was it introduced from the Mediterranean world?   I give reasons why I believe it cannot have been … that it came, like yams and bananas, from the far east.      Similarly, maize – a Central American plant – which was grown in Yorubaland long before Europeans sailed to the Americas.     There is evidence that Polynesians must have brought it back to Southeast Asia together with other plants, and that it, too, could have come with yams and bananas to the Niger region.     Glass bead-making, and money cowries from the Maldive islands – they join the list of items that are not indigenous to the region and that were almost certainly not introduced by Arabs as is often assumed.     And finally, perhaps the most fascinating of them all, the origins of the all-important Ifa cult of the Yoruba the mathematics of which are based on an oriental system.     How is it that its highly complex structure is so astonishingly similar, not just to divination systems of south/central Africa and Madagascar – but even more so to that of the Carolinas far away in the islands of Micronesia?   
    

     The conclusion I come to is unequivocal … at some time, many centuries ago, people from the far east must not only have settled in Madagascar and East Africa, but sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to leave their mark permanently on the people of West Africa.