Paper prepared for the conference on Sails of History: Citizens of the Sea?

, Zanzibar International Film

Festival (ZIFF), Zanzibar, 17-19 July 2006

Who Were the First Sailors in the Indian Ocean?1

Martin Walsh
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge

A good deal has been written about the origin of sailing, and about early seafaring
man. Some of it is nonsense, most of it is pure conjecture, and some of it makes queer
reading to a sailor. - Alan Villiers, The Indian Ocean 2

A lot of writing about the history of maritime activity in the Indian Ocean is imbued
with the assumptions of Orientalism, that “Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” described so beguilingly by
Edward Said in his well known book of the same title.3 Who else could have
designed the stone walls of Zimbabwe but visitors from the same ancient civilizations
that were also the fount of Occidental culture and languages? Zanzibar alone was
once reputed to have been on the itineraries of Sumerians, Assyrians, Chaldeans,
ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Jews, Sabaeans and Himyarites.4 Maybe, but
archaeologists no longer need to imagine the presence of peoples like these to explain
the development of settlement and trade on the East African coast.5 Needless to say,
Orientalism has not entirely gone away, but appears in a different guise in the
speculative literature about Indonesian influences on Africa.6

Recent research provides a refreshing perspective on these issues, one that celebrates
cultural innovation and diversity and deepens our understanding of past and present
relations across and around the Indian Ocean. Although we may be little nearer
knowing the origins of sailing technology than we were when Villiers committed his
scepticism to paper, new evidence is emerging that allows us to ask new questions
and suggest new answers to them. This evidence comes from a variety of disciplines
including archaeology, palaeobotany, ethnography, ethnobiology, comparative
linguistics, and human and plant genetics. Multidisciplinary research in Polynesia is
beginning to show impressive results in untangling the history of oceanic settlement
in that part of the Pacific.7 The greater time-depth of settlement around the Indian
Ocean poses a special challenge, as does the relative lack of integrated research.
Otherwise there is considerable potential for significantly advancing our knowledge
of the region’s history, sailing included. Conjecture will always be with us, but new
research should give us much better grounds for refuting the nonsense that so troubled
Villiers.

Out of Africa and across to the islands

The results of human genetic and archaeological research provide us with indirect
evidence for the early use of water transport around the Indian Ocean. It is now
widely accepted that modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved in Africa and began to
move out of Africa more than 100,000 years ago. In the long durée modern humans

1
displaced existing hominids (Homo erectus) in the Old World; the latter are thought to
have gone extinct by around 30,000 BP, without leaving any genetic trace in modern
populations. While modern humans appear to have struggled to replace Neanderthals
in the Near East and then Europe, a growing body of evidence supports the thesis that
a distinct stream of moderns crossed from the Horn of Africa to the Arabian peninsula
and then spread around the rim of the Indian Ocean, eventually reaching Australia.
Archaeological evidence from Australia suggests that modern humans had reached
there by at least 55,000 BP, some time before the settlement of Europe. Although we
lack earlier archaeological dates for the Arabian peninsula and the Indian sub-
continent, modern humans must have begun ‘coasting out of Africa’ well before they
reached the other side of the Indian Ocean, perhaps by 80,000 BP.8

As is well known, modern humans can only have reached Australia and New Guinea
by crossing the deep waters that separated the Sunda Shelf from the Sahul Shelf.
There is no evidence that Homo erectus populations ever made this journey; all the
indications are that modern humans were the first to develop simple water-craft, and
that by at least 55,000 BP some people possessed vessels capable of making oceanic
crossings. Proponents of the southern route have also suggested that modern humans
may have used simple craft at earlier stages of their migration out of Africa, possibly
even to cross the Bab-el-Mandeb which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and
the Indian Ocean and separates north-east Africa from the southern Arabian
peninsula. Supporters of the coastal migration hypothesis have also suggested that the
exploitation of littoral and marine resources was of particular importance to people
taking this route. It is easy to imagine water-craft gradually evolving in this context,
but without archaeological evidence it is difficult to say anything about the types of
vessels that might have been involved.9

What else do we know about these presumed early users of strait-crossing rafts or
other sea-craft? Observers have long suspected that the physical resemblance
between Africans, Australians, Papuans, and the so-called Negrito populations of
south-east Asia might reflect a common origin rather than the accident of living in
similar tropical environments. The southern route hypothesis has renewed interest in
the possibility that these different groups are relics of the original migration, and this
appears to be supported by at least some of the emerging genetic evidence.10 In a
recent paper, Roger Blench has picked up on Italian linguist Alfredo Trombetti’s
proposal that the world’s languages can be divided on structural grounds into two
major streams, Austral and Boreal.11 Blench argues that this linguistic split reflects
the two major routes out of Africa, with early migrants around the rim of the Indian
Ocean speaking languages belonging to the Austral macrophylum (which is
hypothesized to include modern-day Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, Dravidian,
Andamanese, Papuan, Australian, and the extinct Tasmanian languages). Blench
further suggests that the underlying unity of Austral might also be traced though
shared cultural practices.

Blench’s list of possible direct descendants of the modern humans who spread around
the rim of the Indian Ocean and beyond includes the Vazimba (Mikea) of
Madagascar, the Vedda (Wanniya-laeto) of Sri Lanka, the Andamanese, the Shom
Pen of Great Nicobar, the Orang Asli of the Malay peninsula and southern Thailand,
the Negritos of the Philippines, the Papuans, and indigenous Australians and
Tasmanians. The precise historical status of these and other populations in the region

2
(such as the alleged pygmies of North Queensland12) remains to be determined
through genetic and archaeological research. At present, for example, we have scant
evidence for the pre-Austronesian settlement of Madagascar; indeed we lack early
dates for all of the deep-sea islands in the Indian Ocean between Africa, Asia and
Australia.13 More certain archaeological dates for the settlement of different oceanic
islands will also give us clues to the development of seafaring and sea-travel by both
men and women,14 whether or not direct evidence of maritime technology and long-
distance travel is found.

Figure 1: The Austral expansion and the location of residual populations

(after Blench15)

Back to Africa and the Austronesian problem

In his book Self-Made Man, Jonathan Kingdon argued in characteristically

entertaining style that modern humans might have become coastal specialists or
strandlopers in (what is now) island south-east Asia, subsequently spreading back to
eastern Africa from this area.16 This idea has received very little support, though
some reverse movement around the rim and even across the Indian Ocean lies within
the realm of possibility. Most debate, however, has focused on the question of later
Indonesian influence and possible settlement on the African mainland.17 It has long
been known that the Malagasy language and dialects of Madagascar are members of
the Austronesian family, closely related to Ma’anyan and the Barito languages of
Borneo. The ancestral speakers of Malagasy evidently sailed across or around the
Indian Ocean; though exactly how, when and why remain subjects of some
controversy. A particular problem has been the difficulty of reconciling scattered

3
(and often disputed) evidence for Austronesian influence on both sides of the African
continent with available dates for the arrival of Malagasy speakers on Madagascar and
the Comoro Islands but nowhere else. This problem has been highlighted by
disagreement over the antiquity and origin of bananas in Africa: some authorities
argue for the presence on the continent of Musa types originating from island south-
east Asia long before Madagascar was settled by people coming from the same
region.18

Roger Blench has recently proposed a solution to this problem.19 Instead of trying to
explain all of the evidence for Austronesian influence in terms of a single series of
historical contacts, Blench suggests that quite separate migratory events were
involved. The most recent of these was the settlement of Madagascar by Barito
speakers in the second half of the first millennium. Blench posits a connection
between the migration of the ancestors of the Malagasy and the dispersal of the
Barito-speaking Sama-Bajaw or ‘sea nomads’ of the south-west Philippines, which is
thought to have occurred in the 7th century or thereabouts in response to the
expansion of the commercial empire of the Srivijaya Malay. Linguistic evidence
indicates that the proto-Malagasy were likewise an expanding Barito group who
adopted maritime terminology (and presumably technology) from the seafaring
Malay. Their migration across the Indian Ocean probably began earlier, because
current archaeological dates suggest that Madagascar was settled in the 5th-7th
centuries AD. There is clearly more work to be done on the Sama-Bajaw connection
(were they originally a splinter from the same Barito sub-group?), but it does suggest
a specific historical context in which the Malagasy migration(s) took place.

Despite repeated attempts to find it, there is no evidence to show that the proto-
Malagasy settled on the coast of eastern Africa for any length of time before moving
to Madagascar.20 The early Malagasy did, however, pick up some vocabulary from
the ancestors of the Sabaki Bantu-speaking Swahili and/or Comorians, including
terms for some common domesticated animals.21 It is possible that the Malagasy in
turn played some part in the early maritime expansion of the Swahili and Comorians.
The introduction of double-outrigger canoes to the East African coast and islands is
sometimes ascribed to the Malagasy, though Blench argues otherwise.22 Clearly they
interacted with Sabaki-speakers sometime in the second half of the first millennium,
but exactly when and where and under what circumstances remains to be determined.

The second and perhaps more controversial part of Blench’s proposal is that most of
the evidence for Austronesian contacts with the African continent has to be explained
with reference to much earlier trans-oceanic crossings. The evidence cited in support
of this includes plant and animals transfers in both directions. Taro (Colocasia
esculenta), water-yams (Dioscorea esculenta), and certain types of banana (Musa
spp., including the wild bananas of Pemba Island) come from south-east Asia, as do
the breed of fighting cocks found on the East African coast. Winged beans
(Psophocarpus sp.) are among the plants that appear to have travelled in the opposite
direction. Diseases have also crossed the Indian Ocean in both directions:
elephantiasis from east to west, and African malaria from west to east.23 Cultural
items that appear to have originated in south-east Asia include the stick-zither and
leaf-funnel clarinet. Blench also argues that outrigger canoes and possibly sewn boats
(Swahili mtepe) were part of this earlier movement. None of this evidence requires a
specifically Indonesian origin: Blench suggests that Austronesian navigators prior to

4
the current era may have come from anywhere in insular south-east Asia, perhaps the
Philippines, one of the first groups of islands to be colonised by members of this
language family when they began to expand southwards from Taiwan more than
4,000 years ago.24

Figure 2: The wild banana of Pemba Island25

5
Austronesian expansion across the Pacific began more than 3,000 years ago,26 and it
is possible that the trading and other voyages of Austronesian-speakers in the Indian
Ocean date from the same period. If bananas of insular south-east Asian origin had
indeed reached West Africa by 2,500 BP,27 then dates of this order for early trans-
oceanic sailing in outriggers and/or other technologically-advanced vessels have to be
considered a possibility. There are, of course, other possibilities, and some scholars
find it hard to contemplate early seafaring like this, especially when journeys by land
and/or relatively short coast-hugging trips can also be envisaged.28 Proposals like
Blench’s are also bound to meet resistance because they bear a superficial
resemblance to the discredited diffusionist hypotheses of old and the wild
speculations of contemporary neo-orientalists. But they do provide conjectures that
can be tested, using evidence of the kinds that have inspired their formulation in the
first place.

Where next?

The multidisciplinary research summarized in this paper does not and perhaps cannot
give a definitive answer to the question that I posed in my title, whatever criteria we
use to define its basic terms. I hope, however, that it provides something more than
the “queer reading” that Alan Villiers so disparaged in his own survey of the literature
on the origins and early history of sailing in the Indian Ocean. It goes without saying
that there are many gaps in our knowledge of ancient water-transport, trade, and
settlement in this region, and that early modern humans and Austronesians are only a
part of the story. The kinds of research sketched here, which employ evidence from
different sources in order to reconstruct the past, promise to help fill those gaps. The
challenge is to collect and integrate the information required to critically evaluate
these and similar ideas and to generate improvements upon them. There are surely
many discoveries to be made about the history of maritime activity in the Indian
Ocean and many surprises waiting for us along the way.

Notes
1
I would like to thank Roger Blench for his contributions to this article. I have made
liberal use of his recent conference papers (cited in the notes below) and our many
conversations on these and related subjects.
2
Alan Villiers, The Indian Ocean (London, 1952), 49.
3
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London & Henley, 1978), 3.
4
This list is from W.H. Ingrams, Zanzibar: Its History and Its People (London,
1931), 43-58.
5
See, for example, Felix Chami, The Tanzanian Coast in the First Millennium AD:
An Archaeology of the Iron-working, Farming Communities (Uppsala, 1994); Mark
Horton, Shanga: The Archaeology of a Muslim Trading Community on the Coast of
East Africa (Nairobi, 1996); Abdurahman Juma, Unguja Ukuu on Zanzibar: An
Archaeological Study of Early Urbanism. (Uppsala, 2004).
6
See Robert Dick-Read, The Phantom Voyagers: Evidence of Indonesian Settlement
in Africa in Ancient Times (Winchester, 2005), and the review of this book by Roland
Oliver, ‘On Xylophone’, The Times Literary Supplement, 9 December 2005, 25. I am
grateful to Robert Dick-Read for sending me a copy of his unpublished paper

6
‘Indonesia and Africa: Questioning the Origin of Some of Africa’s Most Famous
Icons’ (personal communication, 8 June 2006).
7
Matthew E. Hurles, Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, Russel D. Gray & David Penny,
‘Untangling Oceanic Settlement: The Edge of the Knowable’, Trends in Ecology and
Evolution, 18 (2003), 531-540.
8
This paragraph and others in this section draw heavily on Roger M. Blench, ‘The
Pleistocene Settlement of the Rim of the Indian Ocean’, revised version of a paper
presented to the 18th Congress of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, University
of the Philippines, Manila, 20-26 March 2006. Full references are provided therein.
For a popular account of the genetic and other evidence for the coastal route out of
Africa see Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (London, 2002),
61-80.
9
Wells (The Journey of Man, 78) blames the lack of archaeological evidence for the
southern route on the supposition that many early coastal sites are now underwater.
Even if sites are found, it may be difficult to recognise or recover the remains of
simple water-craft. For the different kinds of vessels that might have been used by
early modern humans see James Hornell, Water Transport: Origins and Early
Evolution (Cambridge, 1946).
10
See, for example, Phillip Endicott et al., ‘The Genetic Origins of the Andaman
Islanders’, American Journal of Human Genetics, 72 (2003), 178-184; Kumarasamy
Thangaraj et al., ‘Genetic Affinities of the Andaman Islanders’, Current Biology, 13
(2003), 86-93; Peter Forster & Shuichi Matsumura, ‘Did Early Humans Go North or
South?’, Science, 308 (2005), 965-966; Vincent Macaulay et al., ‘Single, Rapid
Coastal Settlement of Asia Revealed by Analysis of Complete Mitochondrial
Genomes’, Science, 308 (2005), 1034-1036.
11
Alfredo Trombetti, Elementi di Glottologia (Bologna, 1923); Roger Blench, ‘The
Pleistocene Settlement of the Rim of the Indian Ocean’ (2006).
12
See Keith Windschuttle & Tim Gillin, ‘The Extinction of the Australian Pygmies’,
Quadrant (June 2002), http://www.sydneyline.com/Pygmies%20Extinction.htm.
13
Ongoing excavations at Ukuumbi cave in the south-east of Unguja Island,
Zanzibar, illustrate how dramatically early dates for settlement can be pushed back by
targeted archaeological research (Paul Sinclair, personal communication, 14 March
2006). Unguja is, of course, a continental island, and at least some early settlement
appears to date from periods when it was part of the African mainland and host to a
savannah fauna. The discovery of early sites on Pemba Island, which is separated
from Unguja and the mainland by deep sea channels, would have very different
implications.
14
The long-term settlement of islands obviously implies a population of both male
and female founders; minimally a vessel carrying one or more pregnant women (!). I
mention this to counter the narrow interpretation of Villiers’ reference to “early
seafaring man”.
15
Roger Blench, ‘The Pleistocene Settlement of the Rim of the Indian Ocean’ (2006),
17, Figure 11.
16
Jonathan Kingdon, Self-Made Man and his Undoing (London, 1993), 106-123.
17
See, for example, Roger Blench, ‘The Ethnographic Evidence for Long-distance
Contacts between Oceania and East Africa’, in J. Reade (ed.) The Indian Ocean in
Antiquity (London & New York, 1994), 461-470; idem., ‘The Austronesians in
Madagascar and their Interaction with the Bantu of the East African Coast: Surveying
the Linguistic Evidence for Domestic and Translocated Animals’, revised version of a

7
paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (10-
ICAL), Linguistic Society of the Philippines & SIL International, Puerto Princesa
City, Palawan, 17-20 January 2006.
18
See C. Mbida et al., ‘Evidence for Banana Cultivation and Animal Husbandry
During the First Millennium BC in the Forest of Southern Cameroon’, Journal of
Archaeological Science, 27 (2000), 151-162; idem., ‘First Archaeological Evidence of
Banana Cultivation in Central Africa during the Third Millennium Before Present’,
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 10 (2001), 1-6; idem., ‘The Initial History of
Bananas in Africa. A Reply to Jan Vansina (Azania, 2003)’, Azania, 40 (2005), 128-
135; Jan Vansina, ‘Bananas in Cameroun c.500 BCE? Not Proven’, Azania, 38
(2003), 174-176.
19
Roger Blench, ‘New Data on the Austronesian Settlement of the East African
Coast and Madagascar’, presentation to the conference on The Maritime Heritage and
Cultures of the Western Indian Ocean in Comparative Perspective, British Institute in
Eastern Africa, British Museum & Zanzibar Department of Archives, Museums and
Antiquities, Zanzibar, 11-13 July 2006.
20
This statement is based in part on our ongoing examination of the linguistic
evidence.
21
See Blench, ‘The Austronesians in Madagascar and their Interaction with the Bantu
of the East African Coast’ (2006).
22
Blench, ‘New Data on the Austronesian Settlement of the East African Coast and
Madagascar’ (2006).
23
There is no evidence at present for the transfer of human genetic material and
therefore of long-term settlement and intermarriage between African and
Austronesian-speaking populations.
24
For details of his argument, see again Blench’s ‘New Data on the Austronesian
Settlement of the East African Coast and Madagascar’ (2006).
25
Reproduced from R.O. Williams, The Useful and Ornamental Plants in Zanzibar
and Pemba (Zanzibar, 1949), plate facing p.359.
26
Hurles et al., ‘Untangling Oceanic Settlement’ (2003).
27
Mbida et al., ‘First Archaeological Evidence of Banana Cultivation in Central
Africa’ (2001); idem., ‘The Initial History of Bananas in Africa’ (2005).
28
See, for example, Vansina, ‘Bananas in Cameroun c.500 BCE?’ (2003).