Indonesian Influence on East African Culture.

Comments by Peter R. Schmidt

“…In a similar vein, one of the most important books on interactions of the Asian world with Africa (Hornell 1934) has remained obscure and mostly unreferenced-much like the work of Joseph Needham that Kehoe discusses-remaining virtually ignored until recently. Though he provided convincing evidence for extensive interaction between Indonesia and Africa, Hornell's work was not rediscovered until recently when evidence for early bananas in West Africa came to light, showing that Africans from both East and West Africa were in contact with Southeast Asia.…”

Using Diverse Sources of Evidence for Reconstructing the Past History of Musical Exchanges in the Indian Ocean

“…By the tenth century, the maritime cultures of ISEA were able to mount a raiding expedition of a thousand ships on the East African Coast. In CE 945, "Waqwaq" raiders and traders from Sumatra attacked Qanbalu (an island on the coast as yet unidentified) (Hornell 1934). We can therefore assume that prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, there was a thriving slave traffic around the Indian Ocean, transporting slaves from East Africa and Madagascar to Arabia, modern Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and also to the islands of SE Asia and on to China and Japan.…”

“…One of the long-running controversies in the history of Indian Ocean transfers is the vexed question of xylophones and other musical influences as exemplars of Austronesian influence in Africa (Hornell 1934;Hutton 1946). Xylophones consist of wooden plaques of different lengths, arranged in order of size, and often supported in a frame and in some examples, resonators under individual keys.…”

Sewn Boats of Southeast Asia: the stitched‐plank and lashed‐lug tradition

“…One last point needs to be addressed to conclude this essay; it is a well-known fact, on the basis of linguistic, ethnographic, and genetic affinities, that Austronesian-speaking people from insular Southeast Asia sailed across the Indian Ocean and settled in Madagascar and kept sailing there until the 15th century. Structural similarities in small outrigger boats from Southeast Asia, India, and East Africa have long since been noticed (see, among others, Hornell, 1934Hornell, , 1944. More recently, authors have noticed how terms cognate to Austronesian words for boats or boat gear are common in a variety of non-Austronesian languages of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, also indicating cross-cultural fertilization (Fuller et al, 2011;Manguin, 2012: 609-610;Hoogervorst, 2013).…”

“…For a long time, however, once lip‐service was paid to the geographically determined maritime adaptations and sailing talents of Southeast Asian people, the issue attracted little additional attention. Excellent studies of the surviving small sailing boats of Oceania and Southeast Asia were carried out, and many pages devoted to the distribution of such features as outriggers (single or double) and sail types from Southeast Asia into Oceania and, via India or indirectly, to Eastern Africa and Madagascar (Hornell, , ; Bowen, ; Haddon and Hornell, ). Cultural diffusionists were content to discuss the origins of such features, without placing these issues in their historical context (Horridge, , for a recent iteration of such an approach), while mainstream historians of Southeast Asia were mainly preoccupied with monumental archaeology and art history (see, among many others, Cœdès, ).…”