Bantu

Bantu is a general term for over 400 different ethnic groups in Africa, from Cameroon to South Africa, united by a common language family, the Bantu languages, and in many cases common customs.

Definition

"Bantu" simply means "people" in many Bantu languages. Dr. Wilhelm Bleek defined "Bantu" in his 1862 book A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages, in which he proposed a hypothesis that a vast number of languages spread across central, southern, eastern, and even western Africa shared so many characteristics that they must be part of a single language group. This basic thesis is still accepted today, although there have been many modifications to the details of the theory since 1862.

The Bantu languages are very closely related considering the vast territory they cover, leading historians to believe the Bantu came to dominate sub-equatorial Africa relatively recently and quickly. This is borne out by early North African and Middle Eastern sources that do not report Bantus north of Mozambique before the year 1000.

Origins

Before the Bantu, the southern half of Africa is believed to have been populated by Khoisan speaking people, today relegated largely to the arid regions around the Kalahari and a few isolated pockets in Tanzania. Pygmies inhabited central Africa, whereas Cushites and other people speaking Afro-Asiatic languages inhabited north-eastern and northern Africa.

There are two basic theories of Bantu origins. The first was advanced by Joseph Greenberg in 1963. He had analyzed and compared several hundred African languages and found that a group of languages spoken in Southeastern Nigeria were the most closely related to Bantu. He theorized that Bantu was one of these languages that spread south and east over hundreds of years.

This was quickly challenged by Malcolm Guthrie who analyzed each Bantu language and found that the most stereotypical were those spoken in Zambia and in the southern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This provided the alternate theory that Bantu speakers had spread from this location in all directions.

It could be that the southward expansion of the Bantu into tsetse fly country had to wait until their cattle evolved to be resistant to the nagana disease.

Bantu expansion

Today the accepted truth is a synthesis of the above named theories. The Bantu first originated around the Benue-Cross rivers area in southeastern Nigeria and spread over Africa to the Zambia area. Sometime in the second millennium BC, perhaps triggered by the drying of the Sahara and pressure from the migration of people from the Sahara into the region, they were forced to expand into the rainforests of central Africa (phase I). About 1000 years later they began a more rapid second phase of expansion beyond the forests into southern and eastern Africa. Then sometime in the first millennium new agricultural techniques and plants were developed in Zambia, likely imported from South East Asia via Malay speaking Madagascar. With these techniques another Bantu expansion occurred centered on this new location (phase III).

By about AD 1000 it had reached modern day Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Zimbabwe the first major southern hemisphere empire was established, with its capital at Great Zimbabwe. It controlled trading routes from South Africa to north of the Zambezi, trading gold, copper, precious stones, animal hides, ivory and metal goods with the Arab traders of the Swahili coast. By the 14th or 15th centuries the Empire had surpassed its resources and had collapsed, with the city of Great Zimbabwe being abandoned.

Bantu in South Africa

Black South Africans were at times officially called "Bantus" by the apartheid regime. The term "Bantu" is considered pejorative in South Africa.

Bantu | Ethnic groups in Africa

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Definition

Origins

Bantu expansion

Bantu in South Africa