The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [47]
Many Indian scholars insist that St Thomas did reach South India, where he established Christianity and later was martyred. Certainly there is evidence of Christians in south India from at least 300 CE. Jews may have arrived in India even before this time. There was continuing contact with the Persian church, which was Nestorian. This contact was maintained in harmony with the existing extensive sea trade from the Gulf to Malabar. There are indications that in this period, before Islam reached India, the various Christian communities, while not extensive, were prosperous and well-regarded.
The greatest movement of people for other than economic purposes is the migration, if this be the right word, of Austronesian peoples both east and west, though the movement west to Madagascar is our main interest. Broadly speaking, we know that Austronesian people, originating in modern Indonesia, possibly Sumatra, arrived in then uninhabited Madagascar at least by the middle of the first millennium CE, or probably some centuries before this. This is confirmed by linguistic evidence, among other things. Proto Malagasy comes from Indonesia, possibly not from Sumatra but rather from Borneo, as its closest relative is the Barito languages of Borneo.51 The fact of a migration of Austronesian speakers to Madagascar is not in question. Apart from linguistic evidence, several food crops now found in Madagascar, which moved from there to the coast of East Africa, derive from Indonesia. These include banana, coconut and sugar cane. It is possible that the outrigger canoe also came from east to west across the Indian Ocean. As to bananas, there are two main kinds in Africa. The species found on the east coast is definitely Austronesian, that is it came with the migrants to Madagascar and on to the east coast, but so apparently is the plantain in West Africa.52 Another contribution seems to be the disease of elephantiasis, which it is claimed originated in southeast Asia, but is widespread in southwest India and East Africa.
This movement west across the Indian Ocean was only a part of a remarkable migration of these Austronesian speakers. They left from an original homeland in south China or Taiwan perhaps six thousand years ago, and moved to southeast Asia. From there Austronesian speakers, in ocean-going canoes, sailed and settled all over Remote Oceania, from Hawaii to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Aotearoa (New Zealand) between 300 and 1200 CE. When we add in their movement to Madagascar, these intrepid sailors spread over a total of 225° of longitude.53 Manguin stresses that these migrations, including that to Africa, were not chance affairs, but rather were organised, and were done not in primitive outrigger dugouts but in planked boats.54 He sees all this as further evidence of an initiative from the peoples of southeast Asia, in contrast to the older wisdom that the area was merely a passive recipient of high culture from China and India.
Three problems remain. First, the evidence of Austronesian contact and influence on continental East Africa is fragmentary and controversial, for even if there was a substantial Austronesian presence there at one time, this was submerged as Bantu people early in the Common Era spread south to the area and incorporated them. The evidence in Madagascar is much clearer, for