Book Review: The Phantom Voyagers [Archives:2005/894/Reportage]
BY IRENA KNEHTL
[email protected]
FOR YEMEN TIMES
The Phantom Voyagers is about Indonesian marines who came and to Madagascar and Africa and whose legacy on the mainland of Africa is far less well known and explored. Beneath the surface of the Africa we know today, the Phantom Voyagers explores footprints and fingerprints they left behind.
Early Cultural Exchange In The Indian Ocean
Human activity along the shores of the Indian Ocean can be seen as operating along a curve from southern Africa to Yemen and from Southern Arabia to South western Australia. Along this curve, by land and by sea, people have moved eastwards and westwards for at least fifty thousand years leading to a constant intermingling of cultures, race, languages, religions, and trading goods. The Indian Ocean itself has been an important avenue for this complex pattern of human activity and movement. But people have also moved into the littoral lands from the interior of the bordering continents of Africa and Asia. Sometimes these folk movements have ended at specific points on the Oceans shore, but sometimes the migrating people have taken to the sea and traveled to more distant parts of the littoral or to the islands of the Ocean.
Details of the earliest human activity on the Indian Ocean region are obscure, but some general points can be made. Some five thousand to six thousand years ago distinctive core areas of cultural expression had evolved on the shores of the Indian Ocean, East Africa, the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, Southeast Asia, the Malay World and Australia. Each of these areas formed links in the giant chain of human activity which stretched along the littoral of the Indian Ocean. At best the areas are crudely defined, but the concept is valid and provides a working model with which it is possible to examine the processes of cultural evolution and interchange. Many migrating people followed the land route but the Ocean was the route of Austronesians, the Malays, who settled in Madagascar, the single most astonishing fact of human geography.
The process gained momentum with the discovery of the secrets of the ocean, particularly the monsoon winds, and refined shipbuilding techniques. A settled civilization developed and prompted the growth of trade within the Indian Ocean region. The process of human maritime expansion constantly intertwined with land-based migration of people on the littoral and both processes added to the growing complexity of the core culture. Too little is known of this early trade to accurately assess its importance as a factor in cultural interchange, but tantalizing hints indicate some exchange of idea and concrete form of cultural expression. The spread of Middle Eastern and Indian mercantile activity eastwards confirm the role of pre-Islamic Arab and Iranian merchants as the major participants in the maritime trade of the western Indian Ocean.
We also know that the ancient Egyptians, Sumarians and Sabeans/ancient Yemenis visited the East African coast for international trade. The Sabeans took control of the passage from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, then formally called the Zanzibar Ocean, around the first of Millenium BC and regulated the Indian Ocean from Sindh (present Pakistan) and possibly further, and the Persian Gulf. Extensive trade between East Africa and the kingdoms of the ancient civilizations of the world continued to and by 500 BC the East African coastal islands, had become part of a vast commercial empire, extending from Yemen, Egypt, Greece and Rome across the Indian Ocean to India. The single unifying factor used to be the monsoon, blowing from the southwest in summer and from the northeast in winter. It is the monsoon that was also responsible for the agricultural prosperity and made the ancient cultures of India, Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Yemen possible.
The Sabeans, also known as Sheba, were a maritime people, with a large kingdom in Yemen (1115 BC – 525 CE) and used the seasonal monsoon winds to travel regularly to and from East Africa. They sailed south between November to February, during the Northeast Monsoon, carrying beads, the Chinese porcelain and clothes. Between March and September, they returned to north on the Southwest Monsoon, carrying food grains, mangroves poles for timber, spices, gold from Sofala, ivory and ebony. Since remote antiquity, southern Arabia, with its maritime links to India and Ethiopia, had been the corridor for plant introductions from both East and West. Durum, wheat, sorghum, cotton, sugarcane, taro, indigo, oranges, lemons and many other plants and traveled this way. Some like wheat and sorghum, returned from India in improved varieties and were diffused in Africa or Europe.
The Afro Indonesian Contact
Today we are almost unimaginably more distant from the men who first sailed these waters, the speaker of Austroneasian languages, who beginning around 5000 years ago, populated the area of present day Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, the Indonesian islands, Madagascar and the islands of the remote Pacific. Their past seems to recede over the horizon and it has by now acquired a mythic dimension that makes their true character and achievements hard to assess. We know even less about alliances they formed, a possible division of territories, conditions laid down, and how they responded to opportunities and challenges. Yet this extraordinary process of development is but poorly documented, it was the work of generations all of whom were governed by the iron regime of the monsoon, synchronized by the clock – like regularity of the monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean.
Malagasy is the language of Madagascar, the large island just off the east coast of southern Africa. It is an Austronesian language most closely related
to the one spoken in South Borneo. Madagascar also shares such Indonesian cultural traits as outrigger canoes, blowpipes, wet and dry rice cultivation, house built on stilts and the use of domesticated cattle for plowing. The “discovery” of Madagascar, like the “discovery” of the Pacific islands, went unchronicled, yet both rank as extraordinary human achievements.
The Phanthom Voyagers
Indian Ocean studies have progressed rapidly and partly this has been the result of a broader acceptance of the region as a suitable and coherent geographical framework for the discussion of supra-national themes. Partly also because an increasing number of such studies have been able to give concrete substance to what otherwise might have remained an empty concept. Soon also economic, social and cultural themes were taken up and used to provide new approaches to an understanding of the Indian Ocean, with all its diversity, through the mutual relations of its constituent parts.
In recent years the movement of people across the Indian Ocean has become a powerful theme to demonstrate such regional cohesion amongst these people. The author defines the “Indonesian Problem”, closely associated with the divergence in current opinion about the Indonesian maritime trading cultures. Opinions vary between a “restricted” contacts limited to East African coast and an “extensive” penetration into the African interior.
The book explores how during the second half of the first millennium Indonesian expeditionary fleets, a highly mobile maritime culture, explored to the limits of the monsoons and contacted ports and coast across the Indian Ocean to reach the Mozambique channel, among others used the Yemeni port of Aden as a regular port of call, penetrated the African interior, and left substantial and important imprints on West African culture, especially in the region of the lower Niger. Large fleets from Indonesia, associated with Srivijaya, had established coastal colonies across the Indian Ocean, possibly rounded the Cape of Storms, and spread significant elements of their culture throughout a very large part of sub-Saharan Africa. Historical accounts indicate that they had traversed the East African coastal region, engaged in trading activities with Africans and thereby were in position to command the important Zimbabwe – Zambezi hinterland.
The enquiry indicates that the prospects of an extended and extensive development of the African trade outweighs the “restricted view of Indonesian contacts. An “Indonesian” period is proposed and patterns of Indonesian influence are traced widely over sub-Saharan Africa. The banana-plantain, the xylophone, beads and art suggest that an Afro-Indonesian development occurred in Africa rather than the Madagascar.
The Indonesian trace patterns are found across sub-Saharan Africa, and the Indonesians appear as the preferred candidates for the initiation and development of the interior linked to the East African coast and Indian Ocean ports. Major factors which contribute to the synthesis are the nature of the early Indonesian maritime cultures with their orientation to waterborne trade, the primacy of the commercial potential and population of the African interior along the major rivers. The presence of maritime subsistence trading cultures over the entire East African coast and finds of sea-shells in the far interior are also significant.
The Phantom Voyagers will be of interest to students, researchers, scholars but also as general reading and to all those interested in the early history of the Indian Ocean
Other Comments And Reviews
A fascinating read and a most impressive work of scholarship, bade on wide range of sources and a lifetime of travel and study of the art and culture.
Thank you for letting me see this fascinating work
Sir Mervyn Brown, former British Ambassador to Madagascar and High Commissioner to Niger, author of “Madagascar Rediscovered” and “A History of Madagascar”
Your fascinating book defeated my best intentions! . It opens up a new historical vista.
Michael Holman, is for 25 years the Africa Editor of the Financial Times
About the author
Robert Dick-Read interest in the subject goes back to the months spent in northern Mozambique in 1957 upon hearing how people from Madagascar, speaking a strange language, used to make frequent trips to Africa. He felt there was much more to the “Indonesian” and “Madagascan” connection than was obvious. Exploring the subject became a life-long hobby.
The author Mr. Robert Dick-Read will give a presentaton about The Phantom Voyagers inSanaa in early 2006.
Website: www.phantomvoyagers.com
Yemen Times wishes to thank the author for forwarding his book for review.
——
[archive-e:894-v:14-y:2005-d:2005-11-14-p:report]
