African Asians, Asian Africans: Comparisons
Sometime in the late first millennium, a group of intrepid Malay people got into some boats and sailed all the way to Africa. We do not know how long this journey took, nor are we absolutely sure what it was for, whether commerce, exploration or some other venture, but what is certain is that they crossed the Indian Ocean, a distance of thousands of miles, landed in eastern Africa, set up small colonies on the mainland then colonized the entire island of Madagascar (Diamond 1999, 381). Today, at a glance, the people of that large African island could easily pass for people of Melanesia or other Pacific Islanders of the South Seas. They could easily be transplanted to locations in northern Luzon or Palawan and Pilipinos would call them Aeta or Agta thinking them mixed members of the local Negroid population.
The case of the seafaring Southeast Asians who settled into African citizenry raises several very interesting issues. The fact that they crossed a hemisphere by sea long before European explorers not only testifies to the specific genius of the Malay people (of whom the Indonesians, Malaysians and Pilipinos are constituents) but boldly points to the possibility that any number of non-European peoples could have crossed entire seas and oceans long before Columbus, including Polynesians, Chinese, Arabs, West Africans, Egyptians and perhaps even Native Americans themselves (click here 1). Another fascination of the Malagasy, as these African Malays are called today, is that they left the shores of Borneo (click here 2) an island they already shared with Negroid peoples, only to collide and cohabitate with very similar peoples on the opposite side of the world.
Equally intriguing is that up until the European explorations, this "Malagasy journey" and the persisting existence of blacks in Southeast Asia made Negroids and Malays the two most widely distributed people on earth: Austronesian-speaking peoples (Malays) could be found from Africa to the Philippines and beyond to the isolated archipelagos in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean; and black peoples could be found from the western tip of Senegal to some of those same Pacific islands. Ironically, at both ends of the spectrum, Blacks and Malays seem to run into each other. One might argue that there are no Malays in West Africa but upon a visit to the Museum of Natural History in New York, one might be shocked to read in C.M. Turnbull's museum labels for the Benin and Ife exhibits that "contact with Indonesians" may have influenced the material production and/or the style of the Dahomean and Nigerian bronzes. Dr. Turnbull's allegations provoke some skepticism, however.
Finally, it is a noteworthy contrast that while these two prodigious branches of the human race have collided so often on their journeys, the means by which they make this rendezvous are quite different: The Austronesians often travel by sea, perhaps navigating as Polynesians do, by the stars and marking the proximity of land by cloud formations and varieties of fish in the water and the other, the Negroids, have migrated much earlier in human history mostly on foot, even to parts of the world now separated by wide expanses of water.
What light does this fascinating migration story shed on the prehistory of the Philippines? For one, the Philippines are precisely one of these places where Austronesian-Malays have collided with Negroid people and have cohabitated with them. Also worth considering is that Borneo seems to be the key starting point for the migrations of both Malagasy and Pilipino Malays. While the Negroids of Asia are a quite different group than the Malays would have encountered in Madagascar , the Malays themselves tend to be, more or less of the same Borneo stock.
With the inevitable interactions between these two distinctive racial groups, many solutions and conflicts have arisen in much the same way, and from the same causes, on completely opposite sides of the world. With the inevitable miscegenation between the two groups, buffer zones of mixed peoples have sprung up much in the same way in say Madagascar as in the Philippines, playing some of the same roles in both countries, that of intermediary, but also suffering a both-and-neither syndrome typical of the Creole or Mestizo. Thus, many of the dynamics in play on one side of the world where Austronesians and Negroids coexist can be found on the other. Research, therefore, into one group might conceivably shed light on the shortfalls of research in the other. This far-reaching and exhaustive comparison, however, is beyond the scope of this document.
This comparison is an important pursuit. For in the search for reliable information on the Black people of the Philippines, one encounters a disquieting dearth of information, isolated paragraphs here and there, even in books that claim to be definitive sources on Philippine history. The information one encounters is often highly pejorative, written in dismissive or condescending prose, not only by Spaniard colonists but by their faithful minions among the Mestizo literati and even by later American colonists whose schooling was steeped in 19th century racism.
These 'scholars', some of them missionaries were often aghast at the "primitive" ungodly Negroes in the jungles of the Asia.
Thus, we might supplement our researches in sources like Scott, Keesing and Kroeber with potentially treacherous comparisons to similar Negroid groups in nearby Indonesia, India and Africa. I openly acknowledge that learning about one of these isolated Negroid groups is not really learning about the others, and that there are many distinguishing characteristics to each of these situations. And in this document, I will always point out to the reader when I am drawing such a dangerous comparison so that she might regard or disregard at her leisure what she finds difficult to accept on inference. As we shall see, there is no shortage of Black Asians, but the focus here is the history and culture of the so-called Negrito of the Philippines.
1) Jades of possibly Maya origin have been found in Puerto Rico which would indicate that seafaring Maya (the Putún of Chichen Itza and thereabouts are favored Maya candidates for this feat of sailing) crossed the Caribbean Sea by daring the empty expanse between Yucatan and Boriquen (Puerto Rico).
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2) Jared Diamond cites linguistic evidence that the Malagasy language is closest to an Austronesian tongue, Ma'anyan, spoken on Borneo today.
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