Resailing ancient mariners' wake from Indonesia to Madagascar

Resailing ancient mariners' wake from Indonesia to Madagascar

Chisato Hara, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The Phantom Voyagers: Evidence of Indonesian Settlement in Africa
in Ancient Times

Robert Dick-Read

Thurlton Publishing, 2005

252 pp.

Many armchair historians may be familiar with the established
theory that mariners of ancient Indonesia -- or Austronesians --
were among the first settlers who arrived on the shores of
Madagascar, but even for the uninitiate (like this reviewer), The
Phantom Voyagers: Evidence of Indonesian Settlement in Africa in
Ancient Times is a fascinating, multifaceted illustration of this
thread that connects peoples across the Indian Ocean.

Its author, Robert Dick-Read, admits he is no professional
academic -- his brush with formal scholarship in this area
appears only to have been an extended seminar in 1959 at London
University's School of Oriental and African Studies -- but he is
no stranger to Africa.

Born in 1930, Dick-Read's first exposure to the African
continent came at the age of 21, when he traveled through South
Africa. Over the next two years, he worked in the tobacco
industry in Zimbabwe and founded African Art in Kenya, dealing in
local curios and art, and in 1959, established an ethnographic
museum for the colonial Nigerian government. In the early 1960s,
Dick-Read produced documentaries for the BBC on Ethiopia and for
Encyclopaedia Britannica Films on Sudan and Egypt.

It was on an art-collecting safari through the northern
regions of the continent, he relates in the Preface, that he
first heard of the outrigger seamen of Madagascar who spoke an
Austronesian language, which gave breath to his "life-long hobby"
-- as Dick-Read dubs his quest to uncover the Indonesian-
Madagascan connection.

The Phantom Voyagers may span a mere 209 pages in actual text,
but it is a dense volume that traverses the fields of marine
ethnography, maritime history, anthropomusicology, archeology,
etymology and toponymy, among other specializations. At the same
time, it travels across thousands of years through the
civilizations of Southeast Asia, China, South Asia, the Middle
East, the Mediterranean and South America, and back again.

Dick-Read's revelations of the "footprints and fingerprints"
these unknown mariners left behind are surprising in the variety
of tangible evidence unearthed, from cinnamon to plantains, from
xylophones to bronze ware, from glass beads to cowrie shells and
from phallic worship to divination systems -- even the trans-
oceanic transmission of elephantiasis.

Those familiar with Indonesian culture will take delight in
mention of congklak, the popular shell game, and its presence in
African culture. In addition, one of the keys to unlocking this
mystery is engraved at the Borobudur temple, in a bas-relief of a
ship -- a replica of which was built and sailed to Ghana in 2004.

Dick-Read thus maps a fine web of evidence that spreads out
from Indonesia, and he posits, through a comparative study of
double-outrigger designs on both sides of the Indian Ocean, that
this web was spun by the nomadic, ancient sea-faring tribes of
Sulawesi.

More astonishingly, Dick-Read suggests that, instead of the
commonly accepted estimation that the Austronesian influence
arrived in Africa in the first millennium A.D., this occurred in
the first millennium B.C.; furthermore, that this was not
restricted to Madagascar and the coastal settlements of eastern
Africa, and that these voyagers sailed around the Cape of Good
Hope to land in western Africa.

As to the quality of his research and analysis, while Stephen
Ellis, editor of African Affairs -- the journal of the London-
based Royal African Society -- notes some academic oversights and
omissions, he acknowledges unequivocally the necessity of
interdisciplinary study in this area. "A challenge has been
issued," Ellis concludes.

This self-published title could certainly be improved upon
with the assistance of a copyeditor and the inclusion of a
comprehensive bibliography, a more detailed index and a
comparative time line of civilizations it explores.

More than this, however, the lack of a separate concluding
chapter leaves an anticlimactic aftertaste that does not do
justice to Dick-Read's work, which not only addresses, but also
attempts to bridge, the "apparent ... gulf of understanding
between specialists on Africa ... and specialists on Southeast
Asia and Oceania," as implied by Ellis.

Even so, it is clear that The Phantom Voyagers is driven by a
passionate, intuitive and generous mind that can venture beyond
the bounds of "established" scholarship; and it is this that
lures readers to follow the ghostly trail, perhaps toward further
proof of our intersecting origins and thus, a reassurance that
"no man is an island".

The Phantom Voyagers is available exclusively at Limma
Bookshop & Library, Jl. Bangka XI-A, No. 1A, Kemang, South
Jakarta. Contact: Tel (021) 7193039; Fax (021) 7180388;
inquiry@limma.co.id; or www.limma.co.id. It is also available
through Limma in the museum shop at the Borobudur Temple, Central
Java.