Conquest of Madagascar

Edited by pinguin - 09-Sep-2007 at 13:11

You bet!

Arabian dhow? I won't bet on that at all. Indonesian ships had the system of ballancing and a different technique of building.

By the way, Astronesians, a term that group together both Indonesian and Polynesians, besides other related people, had very advanced nautical techniques, and the catamaran, far from being just a "canoe" it was a sort of Formula one race car of the pacific. Those people were the best sailors up to the Age of Discovery, far better sailors that the Arabs, I am afraid. You can see that catamarans are not just simple canoes at all:

Edited by pinguin - 15-Sep-2007 at 17:12

Edited by Sander - 03-Oct-2007 at 23:52

^ Very funny

Edited by Sander - 08-Oct-2007 at 22:49

Yes.

Edited by pinguin - 09-Oct-2007 at 01:45

I read a book, called Phantom Voyagers, where the author claims a lot of African cultural patterns were brought by Indonesian/Javanese sailors. I don't know how reliable the book is, but the guy knows a lot about the topic. I was e-mailing him after I bouugh the book, and he really got something.

 

Originally posted by jdalton ... And the Bantu already had ironworking technology long before the Javanese arrived.

Originally posted by pinguin Originally posted by jdalton ... And the Bantu already had ironworking technology long before the Javanese arrived.   Do you have evidence of this? That would be interesting to check out

That the Bantu spread across the southern half of Africa because of their superior technology (specifically ironworking and farming) and pushed out or assimilated the hunter-gatherers previously living there is one of the most basic assumptions of pre-colonial African history. I've never seen it once questioned. There is ample archaeological and cultural evidence but I'm more familiar with the linguistic evidence. The Bantu languages are all very much related, and moreover the languages get more similar and less diverse as you move further from Nigeria. There are hundreds of languages (Bantu and non-Bantu) in Nigeria and only about 30 in Mozambique (all Bantu and all the same family within that heading). Google the words Bantu and history and you will no doubt find the Bantu expansion front and centre. There is still some uncertainty about who first started using iron south of the Sahara and why, but everyone agrees it happened in either West Africa or just south of Nubia and that it happened before the year 1. I'll start a thread on African iron some day.

I'm not saying that the Indonesians of Madagascar had no impact on the African mainland. I seem to remember reading somewhere about Asian crops spreading across Africa and adding to the diet of the entire continent? I'll see if I can find where I read that. In the meantime I'm only trying to defend the innovations that were clearly African. You might as well claim that the Mayans learned to write from the Spanish as say that the Bantu leaned to smelt iron from Indonesians.

Sander, I continue to doubt your Arabian source. It claims, for example, that African slaves were brought to China because they were "needed." But China hasn't had slavery as an institution since before Confucius, and he died in 479 BCE.


Edited by jdalton - 16-Oct-2007 at 04:14