Istwa Nou

On the coast of what is now Kenya and far northern Tanzania, a community that had sailed from Island South Asia settled among Bantu speaking farmers, and the two sides began trading. The newcomers, ancestors of the Malagasy, took up the keeping of sheep and cattle. In exchange they handed over two things carried across the Indian Ocean with them, the banana and the chicken. The banana went on to feed the rainforest belt, where grain and yams had never grown well, and it opened country that Bantu farmers had not been able to work. They also brought a xylophone. Over the next several hundred years that instrument travelled from society to society across the width of the continent and reached Mali. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries captives shipped to the Americas carried the Central African form of it, the marimba, into slavery with them. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the instrument that landed in the Caribbean had already crossed one ocean before it crossed the Atlantic.

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.