Credit: Sungai Batu 788 BC : The Great Kingdom of Kedah Tua
Excerpt from : Evidence for the Austronesian Voyages in the Indian Ocean by Roger Blench
Textual evidence
Although Malagasy is accepted as a member of Austronesian, its precise genesis has been much debated. It belongs genetically to the Barito languages, today spoken in southeast Kalimantan (Dahl 1951; 1991; Hudson 1967; Simon 1988) but has undergone considerable influence from Malay (Adelaar 1995; 1996; 2006; in press). One aspect of transformation of Barito into present-day Malagasy is the presence of Malay terms for cardinal directions and other nautical terms (Adelaar 1996). This suggests either that the Barito travelled in Malay ships as crew or a separate migration of a Malay-speaking population (Beaujard 2003). Whether the Barito were crew by their own choice or were pressed remains to be determined. However, their previously non-sea-going culture suggests the latter, as does the presence of various socially sensitive Malay loanwords in Malagasy, arguing that the Barito were not in control of the migration process (Adelaar pers. comm.)
Malay ships may not have been simply sailing to Madagascar but participated in an active ‘raiding and trading’ culture along the East African coast. Medieval Arab sources point to possible semi-permanent Indonesian trading outposts. Ferrand (1907) was the first writer to propose southeast Asian identities for the islands mentioned in the Arab geographers. The East African coast was considered important enough for the ‘Waqwaq’ raiders and traders from Sumatra to mount a raid on Qanbalu (an East African island as yet unidentified) in ad 945, according to Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, Book of the Wonders of India (FreemanGrenville 1981). The Waqwaq seem also to have settled on the Sofala coast in the early tenth century (al-Mas’udi, in Freeman-Grenville 1962, 14). Al-Idrisi, writing in ad 1154 suggests that the coastal Bantu did not develop seagoing vessels for long-distance trade until quite late:
" The Zenjs [the people of the East African coast south of Cape Guardafui] have no ships for voyaging ... The people of the isles of Ziibag [here Ziibag = Western Indonesia] come to the country of the Zenjs in large and in small ships. They trade with them and export the Zenj merchandise, for they understand each other’s language. (Al-Idrisi, in Ferrand 1907)".
As Hornell (1936) observed, the statement that the Indonesians understood the language of Zenj only makes sense if we assume there were Austronesian speaking settlements on the East African coast, not merely on Madagascar.
Another piece of evidence comes from an unlikely source; the large canoes of Lake Victoria. Hornell (1928) undertook a detailed description of these canoes and showed that in a number of details of construction they closely resemble the ‘small coasting vessels’ of Java and Madura. His conclusions are worth quoting in detail.
" In view of these facts and of a number of other considerations, prominent among which is the fact that the common fishing canoe of the east coast of Africa, from Mozambique to Somaliland, though differing in details, is unquestionably derived from the same type as the outriggers of Madagascar, and that this type is known nowhere else than in Java, I can come to no other conclusion than that Indonesian settlements at one time existed upon the east coast of Africa at the time of the Indonesian colonization of Madagascar; further that the origin of the canoes, equally with the double outriggers of the coast, is to be traced to Indonesian culture exercised upon the Bantu tribes of this region by Javanese settlements along the coast-settlements subsequently obliterated in the same way as was that of the Portuguese at Mombasa in the seventeenth century. (Hornell 1928, 3)"
Swahili oral traditions recorded early in the twentieth century by Gray (1954) talk of a ‘cruel’ people, the Wadiba, who built quadrilateral houses and were associated with the introduction of the coconut palm. They are later supplanted by the Wadebuli, whose identification is not clear but may well be pre-Omani traders. The Wadiba could have been the Indonesians responsible for the introduction of the coconut and its distinctive methods of processing characteristic of coast today.
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