Cyclones, Globalism Folklore and the Indian Ocean

Have you noticed the number of strong cyclones which have visited us recently., not to speak of the torrential rains and the flooding. 'Batsirai' and 'Emani' were the latest two cyclones which have left the Western Indian Ocean islands reeling from their strength as well as the sheer expanse of their size. Frankly, sometimes you would look at these cyclone maps and it did seem as though they covered virtually the whole Indian ocean.

Brace yourselves, we have been warned that there are more cyclones on their way before the end of the cyclone season.

It is a cause for wonder why we have had so many intense cyclones following so swiftly upon each other, with the wave of devastation in their wake, especially on the island of Madagascar, but also with major impact points on Reunion island and Mauritius.

In May 2021, The Guardian ran an article which said it was the rapid heating of the Indian ocean which are impacting the intensity of the cyclones. According to scientists the whole Indian Ocean, specially its western area is warming up much more than any other ocean in the world.

But hang on, you have also heard of the bush fires in Australia, as well as flooding in both Africa and Australia, and to crown it all the invasion of the desert locusts in many African countries.

Well, more than ever the region will have to come together to make sense of how to cope with the new ecology of Climate Change beyond the official poses.

As it is, other major man-made ecological disasters compounded the stress already impacting this region. The Wakashio disaster off the South East coast of Mauritius made international headlines because of the threat to the biodiversity in this region of the Southern Oceans and international outrage followed. However, there was another similar man-made disaster, less publicized internationally but still very relevant to the people whose habitat are impacted by it.

In early June 2021 the X-Press Pearl caught fire while anchored off the port of Columbo in Sri Lanka. The boat burnt for two weeks with it cargo of 1,489 containers, contaminating the surrounding lagoon with chemicals and plastic. The region is still reeling from the impact of this disaster. The Wakashio and the X-Press Pearl are a minimal fragment of the many shipments crisscrossing the Indian Ocean for international trade. A few years back the world was all ears for the ravaging impact Somali pirates were having on world trade as they attacked container ships near the Gulf of Aden and on the East coast of Somalia. This lead to the re-routing of ships across the Cape of Good Hope. The smaller latitude lines towards the Southern part of the globe have been used to surprising effect by maritime companies to shorten the sea journey between the Indian Ocean and Latin America. It seems that ships find it less length to rally the South Pole and follow the shorter meridian to reach South America than they would were they to follow the central meridian of the Globe.

Many were surprised to discover post-Wakashio that the Southern Indian Ocean was being used as a major sea route for trade between Asia and the Western world. But the Indian Ocean has always been at the centre of considerable Maritime activities before the advent of Western explorers. A few books by major historians testify to the complex routes this trade took for many centuries such as The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History by Sanjeev Sanyal, The Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean by Pedro Machado, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empires by Sugata Bose. As fascinating as are the complex sea routes evoked in these rich studies, it might be in the literary annals that we find an echo of the long standing beliefs circulating around the Indian ocean. Equivalent to the Greek legend of Scylla and Charybdis, the Javanese have the legend of a Queen of the Indian Ocean called Nyai Roro Kidul. Javanese fishermen pray to her before taking their boat to sea.

On the other side of the Indian Ocean, mythologies of another kind abound, Some of these have been fictionalized in The Dragonfly Sea, a novel where the Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor uses the oral folkore of East Africa around the sea as a basis for her novel or in Sea Loves Me in which the Mozambican novelist Mia Couto mixes popular folklore with a deep sense of the profound multicultural heritage of the region.

There is a lot more which could be said about the complex history of this fascinating region but for the time being we will end with the sense that, in a strange turn of events, the written word is preserving what popular memory seems to have lost or allowed to fade into oblivion about the fate of the Ocean surrounding them

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