More Africa to Asia

Any discussion and information about migration from East Africa to India catches my ears, but when the destination stretches as far as Vietnam and the Philippines, even more so.

This video, featuring a speaker I've never heard of, is very interesting. It's the third part of a series.




So, that led me to do a quick search about blacks in Vietnam, and sure enough, some here is research by Runoko Rashidi: the black Vietnamese were known as the Champa, original conquerors of the region. They defeated the Chinese, who referred to them as k'un-lun (a phrase I've come across a few times online) and found their way to the Philippines later, theorizes H. Otley Beyer.


More of Rashidi's work reveals his conviction that the Agta of the Philippines — known more commonly as Negritos and Aeta — are descendants of those early seafarers from Africa by way of South India. (Note that the same South India/Andaman Islands connection is also theorized to be the connection point for the Ainu of Japan, according to DNA comparisons.)

"They were the aborigines of the Philippines, and for a long time had been master of Luzon.  At a time not very far distant, when the Spaniards conquered the country, the Aetas levied a kind of blackmail from the Tagalog villages situated on the banks of the lake of Bay (Laguna de Bay).  At a fixed period they quitted their forests, entered the village, and forced the inhabitants to give them a certain quantity of rice and maize....After the conquest of the Philippines by the Spaniards, the latter took upon themselves the defense of the Tagalogs, and the Aetas, terrified by their firearms, remained in the forests, and did not reappear among the Indians."

—Dr. Pedro A. Gagelonia, a Filipino scholar

Here's an interesting quote from the foreign minister of Papua New Guinea back in 1976: 

"Africa is our motherland.  All of the Black populations which settled in Asia over the hundreds of thousands of years, came undoubtedly from the African continent.  In fact, the entire world was populated from Africa.  Hence, we the Blacks in Asia and the Pacific today descend from proto-African peoples.  We were linked to Africa in the past. We are linked to Africa in the present.  We will be linked to Africa in the future."

—Ben Tanggahma 

Natural disasters and migration

Yet another typhoon is closing in on the Philippines.

I can't help wondering, with all the horrible typhoons and hurricanes that hit that region of the world -- an area that is widely believed to be launching pad for migration to the Pacific -- if natural disasters were a major reason for exploration.

Maybe the Pacific would've been explored no matter what. That's human nature. But if you're in a place, say 2,000 years ago, that gets hit by natural disasters five times in two years, wouldn't that be impetus to find a safe new home?

Factor in war, battle for fertile land, clean water ... and people would move further and further until they found someplace tolerable. Peaceful.

Tao tribesmen take back the ocean

I hear much about migration in Polynesia. But what about Southeast Asia? Even the general region of "Asia" conjures up images of Japan to most westerners. Even a good friend of mine refers to Japan as Asia, and I had to remind him that Asia covers the mass of land from west of India all the way to Nihon. Yes, it's easy to forget something like that here in Hawaii, where our main Asian influences come from Japan, China and Korea, and more so in recent decades, the Philippines.

Yes, the P.I. are part of Asia. (I know a lot of folks who refuse to see it that way, and most of those doubters have roots in East Asia.)

It's also important to remember that Austronesians, the predecessors of the Polynesians, set down their roots in places we don't think of as "native." Try Taiwan, where aborigines have lived for thousands of years. One tribe, the Tao, are trying to reconnect with their relatives in the northern part of the Philippines.

Ipanga na and tails and tales of Flying Fish

[Tao] tribesmen constructed a traditional boat (ipanga na; they haven’t built one in over 100 yrs) and made a voyage from Lanyu (Orchid Island) to [Taitung] … in preparation for their voyage back to Batanes [the northernmost and the smallest province of the Philippines] in order to keep [a] tradition from completely dying. … [No] one alive has ever made the trip, but some of the elders still have the oceanic knowledge of the “black current” that runs between Taiwan and [the Philippines] (which is how them used to travel between the 2 islands!) So this journey is very important for them in order to keep the connections alive!

Truly exciting stuff here. It appears, in my limited reading about the native people of Taiwan, that there is fairly good relationship between tribes and the recent invasion of mainland Chinese. How far did the Tao and their cousins in the Austronesean circle travel a thousand, 10,000 years ago? Did they travel further north?

There are some keen similarities in art and ceremonial clothing when you observe the natives of Southeast Asia and the native North Americans. It boggles the imagination.