Kingdoms of Africa - Bantu Speakers

The pre-history of Africa contains a far longer period of human habitation than any other area on Earth, thanks to it being the cradle of humankind's evolution. Much of this pre-history involves a great deal of uncertainty in which small windows of opportunity to view events can be gained through archaeology (and see feature link for more on human origins).

Even more recent prehistory is shrouded in uncertainty, requiring analysis and archaeology to help define it. However, DNA archaeology is providing at least some answers when it comes to better understanding major human migration patterns, adaptations, and population mixing throughout prehistoric and more recent eras.

People who are of Bantu-speaking descent currently number some hundred million individuals. Bantu-speaking people are a sub-grouping of the Niger-Congo language group, and today they occupy almost the entire African continent to the south of the Equator (aside from small groups such as the Khoekhoe and San who have a much more varied ancient origin, and not including a large part of Namibia, Angola, or eastern South Africa). Over five hundred distinct languages are spoken by the Bantu subgroup.

Beyond its linguistic connections however, very little can be concluded about the group as a whole, due to its cultural and political practices being so diverse following around three millennia of expansion and migration. The term Bantu is in fact no longer used except for the purpose of identifying languages. Its adoption by apartheid South Africa has rendered it distasteful except to describe language groups.

It was Europeans of the nineteenth century who coined the term as an anthropologic reference to the speakers of such languages. It is derived from the Zulu word abantu, meaning 'people'. The word abantu itself is the plural form of umantu, which means 'person'. The first use of the term was by Wilhelm Bleek in his Comparative Grammar of South African Languages (1862).

A proto-Bantu-speaking people originated around 3000 BC in a small homeland in what are now south-eastern Nigeria in West Africa and south-western Cameroon in Central Africa. They began a gradual expansion over the next five thousand years in small family groups which moved either into virgin territory or areas which were inhabited by other groups, either intermixing with them or generally overwriting them in terms of genetic inheritance.

There never was a single mass movement or invasion force of Bantu-speakers, and migrations only stopped when finally they were blocked by encounters with nineteenth century European imperialists. By then Bantu-speaking groups had already provided dominant population influxes as far as East Africa and the Great Lakes areas which include Uganda and Rwanda, and South Africa, the modern nation state as well as the general region which also includes eSwatini and Lesotho.

They first expanded south and eastwards into towards Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and the eastern part of Democratic Republic of Congo (abbreviated as DRC), intermixing with Cushitic-speakers and Sudanic-speakers from the east as they helped to spread the African Neolithic.

They brought with them knowledge of agriculture, better expertise in fishing, and the hitherto unknown use of iron. These groups were speaking similar Bantu languages and using iron and stone tools even as recently as about AD 500. They tended to heard cattle, sheep, and goats, and to grow sorghum, millet, and yams.

Then they reached northern Angola, southern DRC, northern Zambia, and Malawi and Mozambique. Western Bantu-speakers settled in what is now northern Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), between the Sangha and Ubangi rivers. From here they entered into south-western DRC and then into the grasslands of modern Angola and Namibia.

Eastern Bantu-speakers spread slowly and cautiously into the equatorial rainforest and from there to the River Zambezi. They mined gold, copper, and iron, and traded with people along the Indian Ocean coastline. Organised states eventually emerged out of tribal or clan beginnings.

Bantu-speakers also penetrated as far south as eastern South Africa and eastern Botswana by about AD 1000. All along their migration routes they introduced agriculture and formed tribes, chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires. They settled in uninhabited areas or intermixed with local populations which already were long-established. It was Bantu-speaking groups which produced great societies between the tenth and fifteenth centuries AD such as the Kalanga, Karanga, and Venda.

African Kingdoms

Central Africa

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