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.