They were Africa's Vikings. Tough, daring voyagers who traveled thousands of kilometers to pluck riches from unmapped lands known today as Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa and Nigeria.
Centuries before a European presence, mariners from Indonesia raided and traded across the continent, filling their vessels with gold and silver for the princes of Java and Sumatra.
In return they gave Africa the secrets of iron and bronze, exotic plants such as banana and yams, and a new culture enriched with music, architecture and spirituality.
And then the seafarers vanished. Some died, some returned home, others married with the locals. So absorbed was the Asian influence that, by the time the white man came, he never noticed it.
So says a controversial new theory about Africa's development more than 2,000 years ago, which could revive a racially tinged debate about whether outsiders fathered certain advances in technology, agriculture and art.
The researcher making these claims is no professional historian. Robert Dick-Read never finished university and has no academic qualifications.
But his self-confessed "obsession" with Indonesia's influence has fueled more than 50 years of lonely slog collecting evidence which has been turned into a manuscript. He hopes it will prove his case.
Some experts have rubbished Dick-Read as misguided, but others say the "Indonesia Jones" thesis is plausible.
An unrelated attempt to demonstrate that mariners from southern Asia could have reached western Africa is halfway to success: an expedition which reconstructed a ship illustrated in the reliefs of an 8th century Buddhist temple in Java has crossed the Indian Ocean and reached South Africa, destination Ghana.
After stopping in Cape Town last week, the 15-strong crew will resume the voyage today, said Mujoko, an Indonesian crew member.
"We believe our ancestors came here. When we finish I think historians will appreciate that this voyage would have been possible," he said.
It is generally agreed that approximately 1,500 years ago sailors from Indonesia and Malaysia, famed navigators who roved the Pacific, also sailed 6,000km west and settled Madagascar, a vast island off Mozambique.
It might be expected that they also explored the African mainland, just 240km further away, but unlike Madagascar there is little evidence: people there resemble or talk like Indonesians.
Historians have noted fragments of Asian influence across Africa -- plants, craftwork, instruments -- but largely rejected the notion that it came via fleets of Indonesian double-outrigger canoes.
Inspired by a 1959 seminar at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, Dick-Read, 73, has spent decades traveling the continent bolting those fragments into a radical theory of "Africa's vikings" which he hopes to publish this year.
Indonesian spices such as cassia and cinnamon which ancient Rome imported came not via India but east Africa after an epic sea voyage, he says, which would also explain how early iron-age pottery spread so quickly in the 1st and 2nd centuries down the coast from Kenya all the way to South Africa.
Plants such as banana, plantain and yam are widely believed to have originated in Indonesia, and Dick-Read cites oral and written accounts of rituals related to the food which suggest they reached western Africa too early for overland travelers.
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