Retracing ancient mariners' wake from Indonesia to Madagascar

Many armchair historians may be familiar with the established theory that mariners of ancient Indonesia -- or Austronesians -- were among the first settlers who arrived on the shores of Madagascar, but even for the uninitiate (like this reviewer), The Phantom Voyagers: Evidence of Indonesian Settlement in Africa in Ancient Times is a fascinating, multifaceted illustration of this thread that connects peoples across the Indian Ocean.

Its author, Robert Dick-Read, admits he is no professional academic -- his brush with formal scholarship in this area appears only to have been an extended seminar in 1959 at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies -- but he is no stranger to Africa.

Born in 1930, Dick-Read's first exposure to the African continent came at the age of 21, when he traveled through South Africa. Over the next two years, he worked in the tobacco industry in Zimbabwe and founded African Art in Kenya, dealing in local curios and art, and in 1959, established an ethnographic museum for the colonial Nigerian government. In the early 1960s, Dick-Read produced documentaries for the BBC on Ethiopia and for Encyclopaedia Britannica Films on Sudan and Egypt.

It was on an art-collecting safari through the northern regions of the continent, he relates in the Preface, that he first heard of the outrigger seamen of Madagascar who spoke an Austronesian language, which gave breath to his "life-long hobby" -- as Dick-Read dubs his quest to uncover the Indonesian-Madagascan connection.

The Phantom Voyagers may span a mere 209 pages in actual text, but it is a dense volume that traverses the fields of marine ethnography, maritime history, anthropomusicology, archeology, etymology and toponymy, among other specializations. At the same time, it travels across thousands of years through the civilizations of Southeast Asia, China, South Asia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and South America, and back again.

Dick-Read's revelations of the "footprints and fingerprints" these unknown mariners left behind are surprising in the variety of tangible evidence unearthed, from cinnamon to plantains, from xylophones to bronze ware, from glass beads to cowrie shells and from phallic worship to divination systems -- even the trans-oceanic transmission of elephantiasis.

Those familiar with Indonesian culture will take delight in mention of congklak, the popular shell game, and its presence in African culture. In addition, one of the keys to unlocking this mystery is engraved at the Borobudur temple, in a bas-relief of a ship -- a replica of which was built and sailed to Ghana in 2004.

Dick-Read thus maps a fine web of evidence that spreads out from Indonesia, and he posits, through a comparative study of double-outrigger designs on both sides of the Indian Ocean, that this web was spun by the nomadic, ancient sea-faring tribes of Sulawesi.

More astonishingly, Dick-Read suggests that, instead of the commonly accepted estimation that the Austronesian influence arrived in Africa in the first millennium A.D., this occurred in the first millennium B.C.; furthermore, that this was not restricted to Madagascar and the coastal settlements of eastern Africa, and that these voyagers sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to land in western Africa.

As to the quality of his research and analysis, while Stephen Ellis, editor of African Affairs -- the journal of the London-based Royal African Society -- notes some academic oversights and omissions, he acknowledges unequivocally the necessity of interdisciplinary study in this area. "A challenge has been issued," Ellis concludes.

This self-published title could certainly be improved upon with the assistance of a copyeditor and the inclusion of a comprehensive bibliography, a more detailed index and a comparative time line of civilizations it explores.

More than this, however, the lack of a separate concluding chapter leaves an anticlimactic aftertaste that does not do justice to Dick-Read's work, which not only addresses, but also attempts to bridge, the "apparent ... gulf of understanding between specialists on Africa ... and specialists on Southeast Asia and Oceania," as implied by Ellis.

Even so, it is clear that The Phantom Voyagers is driven by a passionate, intuitive and generous mind that can venture beyond the bounds of "established" scholarship; and it is this that lures readers to follow the ghostly trail, perhaps toward further proof of our intersecting origins and thus, a reassurance that "no man is an island".

The Phantom Voyagers is available exclusively at Limma Bookshop & Library, Jl. Bangka XI-A, No. 1A, Kemang, South Jakarta. Contact: Tel (021) 7193039; Fax (021) 7180388; inquiry@limma.co.id; or www.limma.co.id. It is also available through Limma in the museum shop at the Borobudur Temple, Central Java.


Chisato Hara, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta