IT would be surprising to realise that black people lived in Far East Asia before the current inhabitants of those lands. 

They continued to do so until relatively recent times and they still survive as pure or mixed race descendants in places like Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.

This article will look at how these blacks arrived in Far East Asia in antiquity. 

We shall also present anthropological, genetic and even scriptural evidence that supports the notion that there were black people present in East Asia.

When one arrives at a rural setting in any of the nations of East Asia, one will find remnants of an African civilisation which is associated with straw and mud huts, grass woven mats (bonde), mortars and pestles (duri nemutswi), cow skin drums (ngoma), clay pots (hari), winnowing baskets (rusero), grinding stone kits (guyo nehuyo) and so on. 

This alone is evidence of a common origin of civilisation between Africans and Asians. 

In the jungles of Asia, we find animals that are in existent in Africa yet they greatly resemble their African cousins. These include the Asian elephant, which is smaller and hairier than the African elephant. 

The tiger, basically an Asian lion, is adopted to the wet and cold environment of the north-east. 

There are also crocodiles with thin mouths that can only consume fish. 

All these creatures, though unavailable in Africa, have ancestry in their African predecessors.

The climate in East Asia is different from that of Africa. If an organism moves from Africa to Asia and spends thousands upon thousands of years there, climatic adaptation will take place. 

Because there is less sun, there will be less Vitamin D and, thus, less pigmentation. 

This is also true for humans who may have been blacks before, but through merely living in East Asia for too long, eventually assumed a race distinct from their prototype.

In the case of the Asian animals stated earlier, one will find that they are reproductively compatible to their African counterparts and this is affirmation that they have common origins. 

It is also not surprising that where one finds the Asian elephant, tiger and sword mouthed crocodile, one will not find the African elephant, lion and crocodile living there naturally. 

Meaning that what we see in Asia is a transformed version of the African type, largely owing to climatic and other environmental factors that cause the organism to adapt.

In the case of humans, Mongols who are the fathers of the light-skinned, short, black and round follicle-haired and squint-eyed race have direct origins in the short statured Africans who founded the human family afore time. 

The Bushmen who are now found among the Khoi and San people, among other groups, are distinctly shorter, lighter-skinned, higher cheek-boned and squint-eyed than the contemporary Bantu. 

According to genetics, their racial type was the nearest to modern humans and after them came the Pygmy type which though still short, more resembled the Bantu in terms of skin colour and facial features. 

The Bushmen’s paternal genes were called ‘Y haplogroup A’ by geneticists and that of the Pygmy B. 

But one will be surprised to find out that ‘C’ belongs not to a people in Africa but Far East Asia and also the lands encompassing Australia. 

‘C’ belongs to the Mongol and also the blackfellaz that are often called aborigines. 

‘D’ originated in Tibet and travelled to lands as far east as Japan. 

Only after these do we have ‘E’ which is the contemporary Bantu, Berber, Cushitic and so-called negro race’s marker.

It was in this branch of the human family that a growth in physical stature was experienced. But what can explain the sudden jump from Africa to Asia that took place with the early humans and how did the Bushmen and/or Pygmy of old travel to Asia? 

The Bible offers a very credible hypothesis that may answer this question. 

It says that Noah and his children sailed east in a vessel which also carried animals, seeds and technology from Eden. 

This vessel landed in the high mountains of a place they called Ararat and, since this place was located east of Africa, it is safe to assume that it was around the area of the Himalayas Mountains for it took time for the waters to recede once they had settled on those high mountains.

This hypothesis explains how all things African entered Asia and later succumbed to transformations associated with adaptation and also mutations such as depigmentation. 

The early Asians brought millet which they planted and used to make millet wine, porridge and so on. 

Rice was eventually engineered from millet in East Asia. They brought the watermelon, peanuts and cannabis (hemp) which were indigenous to Africa. 

We shall now look at how later African groups entered Asia and identify some of the names they were known by. The earliest group of Africans to enter Asia is remembered as the Mon Dynasty. 

They are also known as Mon Khmer and this name is associated with the words munhu and khem which mean human in Shona and Ham respectively.

They came to Asia by way of sailing. 

They made use of the Monsoon winds which blow seasonally from south-east Africa to north-east Asia from April to October and then back the other way from October to April. 

South-east Asia is riddled with figurines, sculptors and statues of these blacks who were inarguably African. From the Mons came words like monastery, monsoon and so on. 

The name ‘mon’ when expressed as ‘munhu’ is pluralised as ‘bantu’ which is a name that still means black African people in their own tongue. 

Other groups that followed included the Naga race which has linguistic associations to Southern Africa and also Ethiopia. 

They had a renowned priesthood and were thus called genies which, in the Indian tongue, is ‘naga’ and in Zimbabwe, ‘n’anga’. 

They also used the serpent as their symbol and called it ‘naga’ which is similar to ‘nyoka’, the Shona word for snake. 

In Ethiopia ‘nagast’ mean kings. 

There is no doubt that the Nagas were East African blacks and the very word nigger or negro which is used at times derogatorily to describe blacks was derived from ‘naga’. Names like Nagasaki, Nagarjuna-konda are also found in Asia.  

The Siddhi community of Pakistan and India comprises Muslim blacks whose ancestors arrived in those lands as lords. 

The term siddhi literally means lord. 

Kings, warriors, tradesmen and sailors from Africa often entered Asia during the Moorish period (700-1492 CE). After the demise of the Moors, the blacks in Asia began facing enslavement and those in India succumbed to the Hindu cast system which regards them as undesirables. Though they now speak Hindi languages, they call the drum ‘ngoma’ and dance like Africans.

There are also the Anu in Japan and purely black island people around Indonesia called Korowai. 

The Korowai speak a language with a strong Bantu derivative.