A whole society sails from Borneo to the East African coast

At the start of the first millennium CE an entire small society crossed the Indian Ocean and settled on the far side of it. They spoke a language of the Austronesian family, ancestral to the Malagasy spoken in Madagascar today, and they set out from the southern part of Kalimantan, in Borneo. The likeliest route followed the established sailing lanes to and from India, though a direct run across open water is possible. They came ashore in northern East Africa. The linguistic evidence places their first homes on the coasts of what is now Kenya and far northern Tanzania, among Bantu speaking communities that had reached the same stretch of country between the first century BCE and the second century CE. Only later did any of them go south to Madagascar. The distance is the point. A community from Borneo, in boats, reached a continent none of them had seen and stayed long enough to learn from the farmers they found. The ocean between was a road with traffic on it.

Textbooks teach a sequence for metals in which copper comes first and iron follows long after, because that is how it went in Europe and the Middle East. South of the Sahel the order runs the other way. Iron smelting was established across two thirds of Africa before copper was worked at all, and knowing how to hold a furnace at heat is what led people to recognise copper ores and smelt them. The clearest case is the belt of copper rich country running from central Zambia into the southern Congo. Bantu speakers of the Sabi group began working those ores no later than the fourth century CE, several centuries after iron reached them. Copper and copper goods then moved out along the Zambezi watershed and up the rivers into the Congo basin. From about the eighth century a further set of Bantu communities spread through the same region, their speech ancestral to the Luba dialects heard there now, and the older Sabi language fell out of use while the mines kept growing.

By around the third century CE the Malagasy speaking community on the East African coast had lived among Bantu speaking neighbours long enough to have married into them. Some of them then sailed south, crossed the Mozambique Channel, and settled Madagascar. What they carried was a working farm system assembled out of two hemispheres: African livestock and African grain beside rice, bananas and chickens from Island South Asia, together with the practices that belonged to each. Madagascar has been that combination ever since. Its people speak an Austronesian language whose nearest relatives are in Borneo. They raise cattle bred in Africa and poultry domesticated in Southeast Asia. They grow African sorghum in the same country as Asian rice. Their ancestry is Bantu and Austronesian together. The island is the clearest surviving record of how far the ancient Indian Ocean trade reached and what it did on arrival, which was to move people, crops, animals and languages until two ends of the world were permanently joined in one place.