a FOOD WORD weblog

How did Southeast Asian food plants reach West Africa?

The theory that mariners from insular south east Asia rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached tropical west Africa by sea in early medieval times was argued by the ethnomusicologist A. M. Jones in the 1960s. It is now championed in Robert Dick-Read's new book The phantom voyagers: evidence of Indonesian settlement (Winchester: Thurlton, 2005) ...

As Roland Oliver points out in his review in the Times literary supplement (9 December 2005) the theory can explain how 'the coconut, the banana plantain, the taro and other Asian yams considered by botanists to have originated in South-East Asia' reached west Africa. It could also explain a fact that puzzled European mariners when they reached Benin in the early 16th century, as I mentioned in Dangerous Tastes -- the fact that they found pepper on sale there. The pepper is, however, now said to be a different species from any of those of southern Asia. As for the other food plants, it seems at least equally likely that these were brought to the east African coast by 'Indonesian' mariners (there can be no doubt that they crossed the Indian Ocean, since they settled Madagascar). If so, the plants might have gradually spread westwards from there in cultivation.