With No Bantu Migration - A Malagasy Southern Africa?

The Bantu Migrations are some of the most well-known demographic shifts in late prehistory. Prior to around 1000 BC, all of Africa roughly south of the Camaroon seems to have been occupied only by hunter-gatherer peoples. The Bantu expanded rapidly to fill this void, bringing along goats, cattle, grain from the sahel, and various root crops. Within 2,000 years, the hunter-gatherer populations had been wiped out, with the exception of a few groups in the Congo which lost their original languages (pygmies), a two isolated ethnic groups in Tanzania, and the Khoisan peoples in the far south, which lived in a climate that African crops could not grow in (but which, it turned out later, were perfect for European crops). Recent genetic studies have suggested, that outside of a few groups in the far south like the Xhosa which took in Khoisan people, it was not merely cultural but total ethnic replacement, with no genetic remnants remaining of the extinct pre-agricultural populations.

What if they sputtered out, however? Most likely, another Niger-Congo group would have expanded instead, or perhaps a Nilotic group from East Africa.

Still, what if it stalled out for a bit longer? By around 500 BC, Austronesian peoples from Borneo discovered Madagascar and settled there. After around 1,000 years, they migrated inland to the highlands and began heavy levels of cultivation, culminating in extensive rice paddies not usually seen outside of Asia. Some time in the interim, Bantu groups also came to Madagascar, bringing Zebu by 1000 AD. In OTL, while all of Madagascar speaks Austronesian languages, people along all the coasts now look predominantly African, while those in the highlands look predominantly Southeast Asian.

But what if Southern Africa was empty as well? A lot depends upon how large the original settlement group was, and if they indeed made landfall in Africa before deciding to choose the virgin territory in Madagascar. If they make first landfall in Mozambique, and find it nearly empty and to their liking, they could expand relatively freely, both there and in Madagascar.

It is inevitable that black African groups from the north will begin expanding to the South, bringing along cereal crops and livestock. But when they do, they would discover an existing, growing, agricultural civilization. The two would surely blend to some degree, so that people in Southern Africa would appear to have a spectrum of features, from Black African to Asian to Khoisan, depending upon their exact geographic location.

The most interesting thing about this scenario is, aside from the typical butterfly effect issues, far Southern Africa had no effect on Eurasian history until around 1400 AD or so, as the Portuguese began their explorations of Africa. Therefore you could end up with Eurasia which looked pretty similar to our own, at least up until the era of exploration getting into full swing, but with a very different Africa.

Thoughts?
 
I doubt (and correct me if I'm wrong) that the Austronesian peoples migrated in quite the same large numbers over sea that the Africans did over land. Even if the Malagasy assembled a mighty fleet, only those brave enough to make the voyage to a new land would make the trip-a small number compared to the population they leave. With the Bantu, Nilots, and Cushitic people, on the other hand, every single farmer or herder that moved south, no matter how timid or small their journey might be, pushed forward the frontier. Preventing all these people from moving south, and emptying Southern Africa so that the Malagasy can have any more than negligible cultural/genetic impacts would be nigh-ASB.
 
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