In 2005, an independent scholar and African art connoisseur and trader privately published a book called Phantom Voyagers: Evidence of Indonesian Settlement in Ancient Times. I read the book one year later after having met Mr. Dick-Read in the African Art section of the British Museum, where they keep the infamous Benin Bronzes looted by the British during a colonial war of conquest in West Africa. After I met him, I read it one more time.
In this clear, well researched and easy-to-read book, Dick-Read sets out all the evidence that suggests that sometime before and after the Common Era, it is most likely that there were visitors and even immigrants from Indonesia across Sub-Saharan Africa who settled in Africa and what is more important, brought food plants, technology, and even musical instruments that had originated in Indonesia over the centuries, became so much part and parcel of African daily life that later scholars automatically assumed they were indigenous to the sub-Continent.
If you go to any truly good and extensive bookstore in the English-speaking world, you will find a row of books that are often called “Alternative Histories,” that is, books that stray a little or a lot from the consensus of full-time, professional, and usually academic writers who have mastered the primary and secondary sources of their chosen specialty.
For example, you will find books claiming that the Knights Templer found refuge in Canada during the Middle Ages, long before Columbus and John Cabot, and that their missing treasure can be found buried somewhere in the Maritime provinces of Canada. It may be true, but the evidence is scarce.
But Dick-Read’s book is an exception. Dick-Read shared his manuscript with the late great British historian Roland Oliver, who many say was the dean of modern historical writing on Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Oliver was a traditional evidence-based historian who was averse to wild speculation.
However, in this case, Oliver thought that Dick-Read was on the right track, and he implies that scholars of African history and culture need to reexamine the Indonesian connection. Since the publication of Phantom Voyagers, Dick-Read’s book some twenty years ago, this has not happened in any meaningful way.
Dick-Read was not the first private scholar to suggest a profound Indonesian influence on pre-colonial and pre-Islamic sub-Saharan Africa. In 1964, a British missionary and ethnomusicologist named A.M. Jones, who had spent much time in what is now Zimbabwe, published a book called Africa and Indonesia: The Evidence of the Xylophone and Other Musical and Cultural Factors.
Jones argued that the musicological evidence suggested that there had been a strong Indonesian influence on the music of the area that 19th century British explorers believed was the home of “King Solomon’s Mines.” At the time, ethnomusicologists argued that no nonmusicological evidence supported Jones’ thesis. But for the last twenty years, since Dick-Read published his book, there is now much evidence in support of this idea. Why have scholars ignored Dick-Read, and why do ethnomusicologists ignore his work?
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the human sciences have been overtaken by obscure currents in German philosophy, which have had massive effects on academic scholarship in America and Britain.
In academia, facts are no longer important. In contemporary discourse, they are thought of as “ideological constructs” of “power relations.” The immediate source of this worldview comes from postmodernist scholars like Michel Foucault, but he merely brought in the Germans via Paris.
Then there is the predicament of the legitimate independent scholar, who, in this case, had the blessing and endorsement of a scholar like Roland Oliver. As we live in an overspecialized world, it is difficult for any specialist to respect the expertise of a nonspecialist, even if he has dedicated a lifetime to the project.
I am reminded of an early book by the great scholar and political pandit Victor Davis Hanson. In Who Killed Homer?, which he wrote more than twenty years ago, he showed how classical studies have declined in the last thirty years and why.
This resonates with another academic storm called Black Athena and the so-called African origins of Western civilization. If it is hard to get Africanists to accept the fact of Indonesian influence on Africa, one must remember that Africanists argue that Africa was the source of Greek and Roman civilization. And so the waters are muddied.
The next and related book is the Closing of the American Mind, which shows in a lively, polemical way how German philosophy—Hegel and Heidegger—have destroyed good old empirical Anglo-American thought. It gives the background to Hanson’s book and will get you into the mind of contemporary academics—the ones who, out of clientitis, might find Dick-Read’s research a blow to African pride.
Jones and Dick-Read’s work flies in the face of post-independence or “post-colonial historiography,” as it implies that Africa did not “rise to civilization” without help from the outside. This goes back to the old pre–WWII Africanist hypothesis called the Hamitic Hypothesis, which in colonial days suggested that any evidence of advanced civilization or architecture in sub–Saharan Africa came from “Cushites” in the north—Egyptians or even Israelite or Phoenician traders.
Unfortunately, in its day, the Hamitic Hypothesis was fused with false racial science, German anthropology, and social Darwinism, which were used to justify colonialism, Eugenics in Germany, England, and America, and the Holocaust.
The Hamitic Hypothesis has been the topic of a fine book by historian Michael F. Robinson, whose work published in 2016, the Lost White Tribe-Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent, goes a long way to explaining the negative aspects of this controversial idea.
Fortunatley, the other side of British colonialism had its blessings, such as the founding of independent research universities across Sub-Saharan Africa, which is something to consider.
For non-Africanists, there is the unspoken assumption, “So, the legacy of Africa is not great after all” and this leads us to various political conclusions with serious implications, such as the World Bank’s tendency to characterize sub–Saharan Africa as a series of failed states to which the West and now the OECD owes nothing and only out of altruism and self-interest. This is hinted at in John Reader’s massive book Africa, where he points out that the continent was great at producing hunter-gatherers but that they had to leave it to get anywhere.
Despite Africa’s economic and political failures, ethnomusicologists are of one voice. They and I, too, believe the African musical genius has influenced the West through Picasso and Jazz and continues to do so, as almost all popular music is African-inspired.
Father Jones and Dick-Read’s analysis suggests that this genius has been tempered with Indonesian sophistication, and once again, that is a psychological blow to the knee-jerk Pan-African sympathizer.
So, the contemporary attitude to Africa through international development becomes a displaced version of “la mission civilatrice” in modern, politically correct clothing that ignores the arts.
Acceptance of Dick-Read’s paradigm could also fuel nefarious, pre-WWII Japanese-like ideas of the “superiority of Asian civilization.” Given the economic rise of Indonesia and China these days, that is a scary thought given the human rights abuses of Japan in the past and China in the present.
Notwithstanding, I would argue that from the point of view of the history of ideas, Read’s approach needs to be presented to a younger generation of scholars as “a new paradigm” for the study of the Indian Ocean, as I believe that Dick-Read has reopened a mine of evidence that has been denied to a young generation of scholars, historians, musicologists, and others.
These younger scholars who have grown up with the mantra of “globalization” could use Read’s argument about prehistory to show that this is not the first time it has happened.
I am writing this article at a beach hotel in Watamu, Kenya, on the Indian Ocean Coast. On the horizon, I can see the ocean-going Dhows with their lateen sails, whose construction may have had an Indonesian base, and the small “Ngulua” fishing boats, dug-out canoes with clearly Indonesian-inspired pontoons that keep them afloat and allow the men who run them to fish easily.
Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science, once elegantly wrote about changes in paradigms in the history of science. Dick-Read’s book suggests that adopting a new paradigm for exploring the rich traditional culture and history of Sub-Saharan Africa is long overdue.
Africa is one of the most enigmatic continents and the undisputed source of most of our popular music such as blues, jazz, and now hip hop. Dick-Read’s paradigm is worth implementing. Young historians, take note!
Image of Benin Bronzes 3 by Son of Groucho on Flickr
