Istwa Nou

Buddhism, Christianity and later Islam became world religions by travelling the trade routes. Buddhism spread across southern and eastern Asia along the paths of expanding commerce. Manicheism, proclaimed by Mani in Sassanian Persia in the middle of the third century, went west to the Roman empire and east through interior Asia as far as China. Judaism took hold in southern Arabia in the early first millennium CE along the land and sea routes of the peninsula. Christianity was in the Horn of Africa and in India before the fourth century CE, usually brought by merchants. Hinduism travelled the Indian Ocean links into what is now Indonesia. Islam later crossed the Sahara to West Africa and sailed to Indonesia, again mostly through trading believers. Aksum is the case worth naming. King Ezana converted in the fourth century CE, and Coptic Christianity is still the faith of millions of Ethiopians and Eritreans. Augustine of Canterbury landed in Kent in 597 to begin converting the Anglo-Saxons.

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.

At the start of the first millennium a small society picked itself up in southern Kalimantan, in what is now Indonesian Borneo, and moved across the Indian Ocean. They spoke an Austronesian language that became modern Malagasy. They probably went by way of the India trade routes, though a direct crossing is possible. They landed in Madagascar and they stayed. I put this on a Haitian timeline on purpose. We talk about the Atlantic as if it were the only ocean that ever carried a people away from itself, and about forced migration as if it were the only kind. It was not. The technical capacity to move a society across open water on trade winds existed in the Indian Ocean world for well over a thousand years before Columbus talked Spain into funding a westward guess.